The World More Full of Weeping, by Robert J. Wiersema

The World More Full of WeepingSo here we have another gorgeous book. This is a thing that CZP does, create beautiful books that is, a logical consequence of hiring Erik Mohr to design covers, and the picture that I have posted here does not do it justice (it includes spot varnish!). Creepy in an awesome kind of way, yeah? Anyway.

The World More Full of Weeping is only about eighty pages, so I don’t know whether to call it a novella or a short novel, but I don’t care, because it’s really good. There’s also a short essay on the psychogeography of his work in the back that actually stands on its own, so, you know, bit of a bonus there.

I loved Bedtime Story, and really enjoyed Before I Wake, but I think The World More Full of Weeping is my favourite of his books. The central concern of Wiersema’s work is families in crisis while children are in jeopardy, and this is no exception. Brian Page goes wandering in the woods behind his father’s house with a young girl named Carly, and together they explore the Forest. I put this in capital letters because it’s not the just forests of rural British Columbia, but all forests, a kind of Platonic ideal of what a forest should be, a never ending green, lush and misty and dappled and with birds and flowers and streams. One day Brian just doesn’t come home, and while they search for him, his father learns that he too disappeared into the Forest when he was young, and has blocked the memory.

When I was a young boy, a very young boy (we’re talking maybe five years old at the most), I had a recurring dream. Sometimes it comes back to me when the sleep is deep enough and my life is in turmoil. In this dream I’m running through the aisles of the old IGA in my hometown, the one that burned when I was still in grade school. I was pursuing—and being pursued by, in a kind of game—a young woman whose face I never quite saw. I loved this girl like a mad person, and to this day I still do, and I feel it down in my bones, like an echo reverberating through my life and relationships. The iconography of my dreams made her out to be a kind of Fae woman, and here’s where we get to the part that’s actually applicable to The World More Full of Weeping: Brian’s relationship with Carly reminded me so much of the way this dream infiltrated my life over the years it was more than a little… I don’t even know what it was. Just kind of unsettling, but in a really good way.

The World More Full of Weeping was my twelfth selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

August

Writer. Editor. Critic.

2 Comments

  1. nice. I liked this one too, maybe best, as you say. But I also like the one he wrote for Torontoist: Just Like the Ones He Used to Know. Which should be a book too.

  2. I haven’t read that one. To be honest I have a hard time reading fiction on a screen; for some reason I find it almost impossible to concentrate.

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