excerpt:
Flawless, it cast no shadow. Fascinated by the glass ball's rock-like weight yet near invisibility, Josef experimented. He left it for three weeks in the marble font of holy water in the Church of the Silent Virgin, and it was still there on the fourth when he reached in. He set it with a handful of barley in the yard to observe the reaction of the crows. But the goat swallowed it. Josef chased the animal all day. The ball found its way through the labyrinth of the goat's intestines and plopped out unharmed. Josef wondered if perhaps it was some kind of egg. He placed it in the forest, then hid and watched. But no creature emerged from the trees to claim it. Finally Josef realized it might be a crystal ball. He set it in the middle of a ring of candles, but he did not see the future, only his own face reflected in the glassy flames.
Grant Buday's second novel is entitled Under Glass partly because the protagonist is obsessed with glass objects -- an obsession that begins as an up-lifting devotion but soon transforms into a crushing paranoia -- and partly because the narrator examines the vagaries of this obsession so minutely that the protagonist sometimes seems a fascinating specimen caught beneath the lens of a scientist's probing microscope. Near the beginning of the novel, this protagonist -- Josef Bodner -- demonstrates a similar desire to probe the secret of a mystery when he is given a ball of glass, the object described in the excerpt above, an object that in many ways represents Josef himself.
Mark Morton teaches in the English Department and Centre for Academic Writing at the University of Winnipeg. Last year he implemented a writing course at Balmoral Hall High School, joined the board of the Manitoba Writer's Guild, and began writing an etymological dictionary of cooking words to be published by Blizzard Publishing.
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The Manitoba Library Association
ISSN 1201-9364
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