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If you are interested
Fiction
May 2002
320 pages
ISBN 0-88984-234-5
$24.95
in Atlantic writers
published by
The Porcupine's Quill,
you may also be interested
in Libby Creelman's
Walking in Paradise
which was short-listed
for the first annual
Winterset award.
Seasoning Fever
Susan Kerslake
Hannah and Matthew eyed each other as children, fell in love
as young adults, quit the deadened East and headed West to homestead on
the prairie. There is a sod house. Crops, cows, children. A berdache (a North American
Aboriginal male, either celibate or homosexual, who assumes an
intermediate social role between that of men and women in Aboriginal society). Passion
in furrows. Women in daylight and in the dark of night. There are three men
and one woman. A man who loves Hannah and the Horizon. A man who loves
horses and pregnant women. A young man who loves and hates in the same person.
Seasoning Fever is Little House on the Prairie had it been
written by Annie Proulx, Wallace Stegner or Cormac McCarthy. In limpid,
dreamlike prose, Susan Kerslake serves up an epic myth of the West
with perceptiveness both wise and innocent. All of life's elemental
zest is here: deprivation and survival, love and lust, the magical
and the mundane and the sometimes unbridgeable distance between
male and female. No simple tale of prairie homesteading, this
long-awaited novel imposes the ingenuous resource of a soaring
poetic mind upon the grass ocean of an inscrutable land. If the
measure of such fusion is an assessment of spirit, then the spirit
of Seasoning Fever is original and triumphant. - Richard Cumyn
`No doubt Susan Kerslake will be fielding endless questions as to why
it took 12 years to write Seasoning Fever, her third novel: She might
do worse than to quote Margaret Laurence, who once remarked that writing
a novel isn't the same kind of process as making a cup of instant
coffee. Especially when the result is a novel as magnificent as
Seasoning Fever, the account of a young couple's first three years of
homesteading in the American Midwest, shortly after the Civil War.
Though to call it an `account' is like describing an orgasm as
`something like a sneeze,' as sex manuals of a former era were apt to do.
`Kerslake's novel is a feast of sensuous imagination, a vivid
exploration not just of late 19th-century pioneering (though we learn of
the varied and fascinating procedures involved in that daunting task),
but also of human ambition, dream and desire. Her evocations of the way
the body and mind live through such fundamental, if flyblown,
experiences as marriage and maternity are nothing short of miraculous,
and this is partly due to her poet's gift for precise and surprising
images, and her passion for language. A girl's voice is described as
being `white and thin, poised in the air like the tail of an antelope.'
Memory, or the process of looking backward into the mind, becomes `that
pure place furnished by the structural logic of desire.'
`Seasoning Fever is not a lullaby or a post-colonial primer, but a
novel that enchants, alarms, vexes and perplexes, reminding us of André
Gide's axiom: `Great works do not so much teach us as they plunge us
into a sort of almost loving bewilderment.' But it elucidates, as well,
enlarging and enlivening our awareness of ourselves, our world and the
immense range of our possibilities, both for fevers and calms, creation
and damage. This is a work of rare beauty and terror and joy: a work
well worth any amount of waiting.' - The Globe and Mail
` ... this is a book that is lush with detail. Every page offers up a succession
of vivid images and one exquisitely wrought phrase after another. Yet we never
feel the author is showing off or allowing her mastery of language to get the
better of her internal editor. As with all good fiction character remains at the core of
Kerslake's novel, and beyond its ability to dazzle, the language of Seasoning
Fever serves its primary function - to evoke setting, to reach inside characters
and bring them to life, to tell a story - with rare fluency.' - Ian Colford, The Fiddlehead `Kerslake's novel is first-class literary fiction, polished and poetic,
evocative of time and place, resplendent with imagery, and populated with cleverly
drawn characters that are revealing of the human condition.
Seasoning Fever is a book to be read and reread for the pleasure
of its language, the subtlety of its story, and the universality of its insights.'
-- Wayne Cunningham, Canadian Book Review Annual
Photo by Michael Lawlor
`... Kerslake is a talented writer, courageous and original in her choice of subject matter.' - Globe and Mail