Best Canadian
Stories 06
Douglas Glover, ed.
Oberon Press, 2006
Reviewed by B.J. Epstein
Rightly or not, Canada often gets left
off the list of English-speaking countries and literatures. The US and
the UK tend to take over, and the huge country of Canada is forgotten,
along with smaller places like New Zealand or South Africa. If those of
us outside Canada, however, made an effort to read anthologies like Best
Canadian Stories 06, we would not be likely to forget the nation or
its writing again.
There are 10 stories in this
collection. Before I opened the book, I asked myself what authors I
thought were likely to be included. The only one I could guess at was
Alice Munro, who, of course, is one of the top two literary Canadian
exports, with the other being Margaret Atwood, and is therefore one of
the few Canadian authors familiar to us non-Canadians. I was not wrong;
Munro was duly included, with "The View from Castle Rock,"
which was originally published in The New Yorker and which was
about a Scottish family immigrating to Canada in the early 19th
century. I felt that the novella/story was too long and was not one of
her best.
Since it was so long (around 50 pages, while the
second-longest piece in the collection was just above 30 pages, and most
were between 10 and 20), I couldn’t help but think that it might have
been more interesting to either include something else by her that was
shorter or else nothing at all, so other Canadian writers could have
been featured.
The editor, Douglas Glover, has been editing this
anthology for ten years and he wrote in his introduction that he
"would have put Alice Munro in the book every year if her editors
had let me." While I can understand his admiration for her skills,
perhaps this book could be seen, as I already implied, as a sort of
marketing tool for Canadian writers, and thus some variety would be
welcome.
Moving on from Munro, I found it
interesting that only two of the ten authors were female (Munro and P.K.
Page), that none had an ethnic-sounding name, and that not a single one
of these stories was in French or at least translated from French. The
last time I checked, Canada was a bilingual nation. So I was surprised
and disappointed by the lack of French-language writers. Perhaps the
editors purposely focus on works written in English; in that case, Best
Canadian Stories in English is a more appropriate title.
Alternatively, maybe there were no good French-language stories in 2006,
although that seems hard to believe.
My favorite stories in the anthology
were Dave Margoshes’ "Bix’s Trumpet", Bill Gaston’s
"The Night Window", and David Helwig’s
"Wakefulness". Margoshes, whose story is described in the
introduction as being about "the sad, downward spiral of a
brilliant, promising drunk whose father once won Bix Beiderbecke’s
trumpet in a crap game," apparently has published five collections
of stories, a novel, a biography, and poetry. Gaston is the author of
five novels, six collections of short stories, plays, and poetry, and
his story is about a boy who is on a camping trip with his mother and
her boyfriend and who ends up discovering where two musicians grow
marijuana. The boy seems to get along better with those musicians than
he does with his mother and her boyfriend. And Helwig, whose story
focuses on a blind war veteran and the woman who tries to help him by
taking him on a trip to Venice, founded the Best Canadian Stories
series 36 years ago and has published 13 volumes of poetry, 19 works of
fiction, and other texts.
Other works in this anthology included
"Wasps" by Patrick Lane, which was just one (four-page)
sentence long, and "Men of Salt, Men of Earth" by first-time
author Matt Lennox.
It was nice to be exposed to these
stories and to see what kind of contemporary writing is going on in
Canada. I certainly hope to read more work by some of the authors I
discovered here and I look forward to learning more about Canadian
literature in the future. I recommend that other people outside of
Canada look into this series of anthologies so that we no longer forget
our fellow English-speaking nation.
B.J. Epstein is a Swedish to English
translator, copy editor, and writer. She has a BA in English and
creative writing from Bryn Mawr College and an MFA in fiction from
Queens University, both in the U.S, and is currently a Ph.D. student in
translation studies at Swansea University in Wales. Please visit her
website http://www.awaywithwords.se/
or her blog on translation http://brave-new-words.blogspot.com/
for more information or to contact her. |