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`[Buying on Time]
Fiction (Short Stories)
Spring 1997
240 pages
ISBN 0-88984-186-1
$16.95
is charming and funny
and Antanas Sileika
is a wonderful observer.'
- Shelagh Rogers,
CBC Radio One.
Buying on Time
Antanas Sileika
Take a step back into the dawn of suburban life.
Revisit the era when mothers in print dresses performed the arcane ritual of mixing the colour dot
into the margarine, fathers filled every room of the house in Weston with tobacco smoke, and all the riches
of America were to be had by buying on time.
Nothing you ever saw on `Ozzie and Harriet' ever looked anything like this. East European
immigrants to Toronto in the early fifties dreamed of the good life in the suburbs. But they
did not have any money, so they put up an outhouse, dug a pit in a new subdivision,
threw a roof over the hole, and lived there among the lawns and gardens of their neighbours
whose imaginations were largely limited to asphalt driveways. Their neighbours were not amused.
Buying on Time is a very funny and occasionally poignant look at growing up in the suburbs
in the 1950s and '60s. This collection of linked stories follows an immigrant family as it
fights to build a house and find a new life in Canada after World War II. At the heart
of the stories is the Old Man, the irascible, insanely self-confident,
pipe-smoking father who studies what he calls `the English'
with an incredulity that is wildly comic,
and who marches into Eatons trailing sawdust in order to buy his depressed wife a new fur coat.
His English is bad, and his religion is almost mediaeval, yet he has cunning
and a zest for life, as well as a taste for Five Star Whisky.
Antanas Sileika writes of this collection: `I took various fragments as seeds for the
stories here. These were anecdotes I heard over the dinner table, at the homes of others in
our ethnic tribe, and in the church basements after those impossibly long Latin high masses
of the fifties. Our ethnic tribe was as varied as any other, but it seemed to take a special joy
in the adventures in a new land.
In a smoky church basement I first heard of the lumberjack who wrestled with bears,
of a woman who married a legionnaire,
and of the secret delights of Voltaire. If there was a collective vision
among the DPs, it was to learn
the rules of the game in North America, and then beat the locals at their own game.
The ethnics won, only to discover that
they have become the new establishment; now it is they who will be bested by the newer immigrants still.'
The lead story in Buying on Time was published in The Antigonish Review
and chosen as one of the nine best stories published in Canada in 1995 by McClelland and Stewart's
Journey Prize Anthology. Shortlisted for both the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and
for the City of Toronto Book Award, Buying on Time has also
found its way into the hearts of many listeners of CBC Radio's
`Between the Covers'.
`The stories are funny, discerning, sharply observed, and
unobtrusively well written. Reading them is as easy as
breathing.' `The anecdotes, extended scenes and burgeoning imagination that make up these stories
are tightly composed and sharply focused. The book manages to be both harsh and sympathetic.
It welds humour, tragedy and the personal embarrassments we all live through in a colourful
and memorable way.' `... a significant contribution
- spare, lively prose rich in
observed detail.'
- The Montreal Gazette
- Globe and Mail
- Philip Marchand, The Toronto Star
Photo by Snaige Sileika