I love this book. Let’s get that right out of the way. I first encountered Mr. Alexis’ work a few years back in a collection called And Other Stories… edited by George Bowering. It claimed to be a collection of cutting edge postmodern Canadian short fiction, and by and large it was (there were a few dogs; Atwood’s contribution, taken from Good Bones, was probably the most glaring example), but it was Mr. Alexis’ piece that impressed me the most. It was a remarkable piece about a strange, strange narrator called André Alexis (every male character in the story is named André Alexis, and every female character is Andrée) who is investigating the origins of mysterious love letter, addressed to a woman with the same name as his wife but intended for a woman in Ottawa, New York rather than Ottawa, Ontario. There was even a very clever bit in which a novel within the story begins (in different words) with a scene from the story itself. The story is called “My Anabasis” (an “anabasis” is a military expedition or advance, and is sort of obliquely appropriate as a title, although I won’t explain why, as the mystery of the piece is part of its strangeness and its fun), and it’s my favourite in this collection.
Coming a close second as far as favourites go is “The Road to Santiago de Compostela”, which is about a group of Canadians from Ottawa traveling together on a train through Europe and exchanging stories to while away the time, having not yet adjusted to the time change. The piece reminds me of Chaucer (of course) but also of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. The tone is very similar, both supple and straightforward, and the stories told by the travelers have many of the same fantastic elements. I did have trouble following some of the French bits, as Ontario’s system of educating Anglophones in that language is rather lax, but I really only mention it as a caveat for those who are turned off by such things.
The other stories in Despair (the full title being: Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa) aren’t quite up to the quality of those last two, but they are still quite good, and I look forward to reading Childhood, his first novel and only other book as far as I know. It sits on my shelf, waiting.
This evening I began reading For Your Eyes Only, by Ian Fleming (and my eighth Bond novel).
