The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

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phant that drowned in a ship fire off the coast of New Brunswick in 1836; the sequence as a whole is a Noah's Ark critique, a tale of death and remembrance, cruelty and revelation. Anne Chislett's play Yankee Notions again reconstructs Susanna Moodie's relation to the war of 1837. J ane Urquhart's earnest Away and Graeme Gibson's inventive Gentleman Death both dip enterprisingly into the past to illuminate the present, the one as immigrant saga, the other as psychological metaphor; David Adams Richards' For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down tells quietly and inexorably of the violence that swings back from the past to disrupt the present (though it also records the persistence of love); and in Christopher Columbus Answers All Charges, Mark Giacomelli and Yuri Rabinsky construct a reply to current history by assembling the ostensible diary fragments and reflections of the now-much-maligned "discoverer" of the Americas: "I have brought you a New World," Columbus muses finally, "and I forgive you all." He forgives, perhaps as much as anything else, the modern fondness for exclusive binaries and the modern eagerness to appear politically correct. "Fictions" that are cast as personal memoir offer a variant form of this will to find meaning in the passing of time. These are epistemological claims, literary works that use the past as a trope to shape the acceptability of knowledge. George McWhirter's lyric sequence A Staircase For All Souls: The British Columbia Suite displays a wonderful eye for images in the wet west coast woods, the whole poem crafted to suggest the cadences of creativity, in poetry and in life. Harold Rhenisch's Out of the Interior: The Lost Country crafts evocatively a set of glimpses of an immigrant Okanagan boyhood, claiming adult space as it reshapes boyhood time. Also set in British Columbia, Peter Trower's Grogans Cafe recreates the life of a 19-year-old awkwardly discovering sex and independence in a logging camp (the vocabulary of the logging industry is accurate and apt). Evelyn Lau's Fresh Girls and Other Stories details a less enfranchising sexual past, in laconic tales of massage parlours and hypodermic needles. Gavin Scott's Memory Trace, Hugh Hood's Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, Dennis Lee's sexually-charged Riffs, Richard Teleky's Goodnight, Sweetheart, Karen Connelly's This Brighter Prison: memory is the structuring device in all of these books, resulting in varying degrees of guilt, consternation, illumination, and freedom. Farther afield, Ven Begamudré's Van de GraafDays tells of a boy educated in India as well as in Canada. Bill Schermbrucker's Motortherapy uses the automobile as a unifying image in a linked series of stories about Kenya, Canada,
youth, and coming to terms with the world. Margaret Gibson's Sweet Poison presents a woman at a critical point in her life, as she faces up to her own psyche, coping elliptically with guilt, bewilderment, betrayal, and madness as parts of a recuperating self. Audrey Thomas's rich prose in Graven Images, one of the most effectively crafted novels of the year, is both funny and desolating as it details a woman writer's encounter with her past, her ambitions, and her aged mother. And Carole Shields, in The Stone Diaries, tells a more linear family saga involving the USA and Canada; mixing conventional and fragmentary forms, the novel hinges on one woman's memories, and on the failure of anyone else ever understanding the implications of that woman's cosseted images and casual phrases, souvenirs as they must be of privately understood relationships rather than of publicly verifiable phenomena. The desire to remember how other people or another time saw the world and said their say about it also underlies the industry of reprints, collections, travel narratives, and academic handbooks; this industry allows people in the present both to praise and to criticize, to take from the past what seems valuable in the present and to understand why other perspectives seem alien, unacceptable, unproductive, or counter-creative. Take travel books, for example. David Solway's The Anatomy of Arcadia hints by its title at what the modern traveller hopes to find in Greece. The reprint of George Woodcock's Ravens and Prophets (a now-historical discovery of Native B.C. history) reveals how recently middleclassness became a social norm. Karen Connelly's Touch the Dragon (an apprentice work, for all the critical praise it attracted) is a teenager's discovery of Thailand and time—perhaps a recognition of the power of difference if not quite yet a recognition of the limits of independence. Autobiographies fall into a similar stance, with style sometimes at war with self-indulgence: Farley Mowat's Born Naked claims to reclaim a Saskatchewan childhood, Al Purdy's Reaching for the Beaufort Sea traces the emergence of a vernacular voice, Clark Blaise's "postmodern autobiography" I Had a Father reflects on himself by reconstructing the paradigms of quest and loss in his restless father's life, and John Mills's splendidly unconventional account of an often deeply unhappy life—Thank Your Mother for the Rabbits—reclaims an earlier wartime, often with humour, often edging memoir with social critique. Sometimes picture books are also records of the past, as in Algonquin: The Park and Its People, by Donald Standfield and Liz Lundell, which con-
Page 1 and 2: 171
Page 3 and 4: Books in Review Dieter Riemenschnei
Page 5 and 6: Remembering 1993 I forgot Amnesia.
Page 7: This is one of the questions Cooper
Page 11 and 12: Nichol's "The Martyrology" is anoth
Page 13 and 14: told in muted tones, as is, for exa
Page 15 and 16: A n n e Le D r e s s a y In my next
Page 17 and 18: multiple challenges to eurocentric
Page 19 and 20: One function of traditional myth, t
Page 21 and 22: learn their language. The first ind
Page 23 and 24: demonstrates an openness toward cul
Page 25 and 26: world views of white twentieth-cent
Page 27 and 28: alone reveals a willingness to expl
Page 29 and 30: ing "world" of l'Amérique—repres
Page 31 and 32: an extended parody of the Christ-my
Page 33 and 34: Gould, Eric. Mythical Intentions in
Page 35 and 36: C a n d a s J a n e D o r s e y Unf
Page 37 and 38: I could think it the mind's warm mi
Page 39 and 40: J o h n C l e m e n t B a l l Frami
Page 41 and 42: The town's names, Notikeewin and Pu
Page 43 and 44: I had tried [speaking], it would ha
Page 45 and 46: European dualism that preserves "th
Page 47 and 48: memories are being lost rapidly and
Page 49 and 50: framer, Madham or John Henry — re
Page 51 and 52: S h a r i A n d r e w s Instruction
Page 53 and 54: S t e p h a n i e B o l s t e r Thr
Page 55 and 56: the wind as fishes stir water. Voic
Page 57 and 58: 4. this delta could be your hair ta
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If, as is arguably the case, the mo
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possession they assume for the bene
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languages with which he is conversa
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evinced by the other, to representa
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this novel, the possibility of mutu
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him to the only reality with which
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Cam M c A l p i n e near Brandon, M
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Tom W a y m a n Eye Mountains The d
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And signs it with the only immortal
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Just to come once alone to these wi
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Months of Fire, taken from Celine's
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Kid shooting a barn-full of drunken
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make the public understand that he
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George W o o d c o c k The Cherry T
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K I a y D y e r Passing Time and Pr
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the year and source of original pub
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It was too true that the city was g
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flashed like a naked poniard in the
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./Vlthough the absence of a spiritu
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themselves with surrogates or sibli
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story defines the village as place,
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Farlotte's sense of self and of com
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Unable to reach into the future of
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In the Village ofViger shows that t
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New, W.H. Dreams of Speech and Viol
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an India at once familiar and unkno
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to transgress demarcated lines of t
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The appellation fits the smudged im
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Pennington and Duncan display in th
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and class, already mixed, are mixed
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Home Fires Kevin Irie Burning The D
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A Dance of All the isms Barry Calla
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Margaret Atwood, respected author a
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niques borrowed from, or inspired b
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around your house." Thus, Standjofs
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observable patterns in nature and i
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kind of book one can write after a
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tion of the cosmogony behind The Ma
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also a comprehensive index that is
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similar themes but in a much more g
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with equal equanimity and wit. The
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into Amy's point of view to spell i
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ground, and will no doubt re-offend
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tural anthropophagy of the West —
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gender formation, gender roles and
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himself travelled in Central and So
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tout récemment traduits en anglais
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the relevant footnote refers only t
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Mennonite background will find this
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very least have expected her to be
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Eco-Criticism D.M.R. Bentley The Ga
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us up daily at the point of your pr
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nation state," national and post-co
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Canadian artists to comply with a s
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And then there is Shielder's Mark.
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was the silence of the angels who s
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Nature Notes The nature essay has t
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(north, wilderness) as one of the r
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mon murre still entangled in shards
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Simone Vautier and Evelyn Cobley te
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