sewn paper
e-mail the Author
Stories; FIC 029000
October 2005
176 pages
ISBN 0-88984-280-9
ISBN-13 978-0-88984-280-9
$19.95
The Sound of All Flesh
Barry Webster
The Sound of All Flesh is a volume of apocalyptic stories
full of loud sounds and bright colours. Daily life becomes infused
with a hallucinatory brightness and Rabelaisian energy and excess.
In Barry Webster's unique stories, earthquakes happen when people go too
long without sex, a grand piano becomes a sailboat crossing the
ocean and clowns hiding in the Canadian Shield suddenly invade the
suburbs of Toronto. We meet a sexually-impotent gay fashionista,
a travel writer terrified of being photographed, a suddenly
hydrophobic competitive swimmer and an opera singer
who finds inspiration by bathing in tubs of margarine.
These stories, which meander from Switzerland's
imaginary avenues of cash to the streets
of Toronto and Berlin, are musical scores, full of unexpected
crescendoes and sudden fortissimos.
Webster
humanizes his bizarre tales with humour and
and unexpected moments of pathos. Readers
will find unforgettable characters among
the sound and fury of Webster's language,
characters who struggle to overthrow
their obsessions.
The Sound of All Flesh brings us into another world,
at once hilarious, disturbing and poignant.
Stories in the collection have been shortlisted for
the National Magazine Award and the CBC-Quebec prize.
`Warning: The following stories contain nudity, violence, pianos, amazingly
radiant verbalising, venomous weather, and funny clanking noises in
the tiled washrooms of the nation. Viewer discretion is advised.' `Barry Webster is a classically trained pianist. Parents of budding
prodigies beware: If Webster's story collection reflects his experience, you'd do better to
put your money on tap dancing. His story The Royal Conservatory Statement and Fugue
for Eight Voices opens with a piano teacher gazing from her studio window at
"dangling icicles, dead squirrels, and tress reft by lightning." The hard chill, the
little frozen corpses, the shattered trees preface an aria of beauties and horrors.
In a fearless, magnificent run-on sentence, we encounter gold-buckled shoes, slit throats,
tulips, scorpions and fresh hearts "whose blood drips in straight lines down the
wallpaper and coagulates in little puddles below the electric sockets." Enter
the ice-pick-wielding mezzo-sopranos.' `Montreal author Barry Webster is a classically trained musician, a
pianist to be precise, and in his writing, that fact couldn't be made more clear.
The Sound of All Flesh, his first published compendium of short
fiction, is ruled by rhythm, breathing imagery in and out like
the dependable lungs of an accordion.' `Barry Webster's stories constitute a magical glass window through which we
see more clearly into the human story than with ordinary prose.
Webster's fiction neither magnifies nor distorts, but its clarity of
vision permits a reader to see the longing for a better life that
underlies ordinary existence -- that wish his characters (and
ourselves) have for a happier past, a more caring and just present, a
beneficent future. By unflinchingly revealing the gritty and the
glorious, these tales bring into sharp focus previously opaque
dimensions to how people function amid restrictive social constructs
and a damaged natural world that we inherit and must transform or at
least cope with.' `Both highly erotic and anti-pornographic, humanizing
investing souls in objectified bodies.' `Imagine a world threatened by clowns, enriched by music,
and teetering on the edge of change, and you have a taste of
the rich offering in this strong debut collection.'
-- Mark Anthony Jarman
-- Jim Bartley, the Globe & Mail
-- Isa Tousignant, Hour (Montreal)
-- Tom Wayman
-- N. A. Hayes, Pop Matters
-- Laurie Elmquist, Monday magazine
A seasoned traveller, Webster was living in Berlin the night the Wall fell, has lived in England and hitch-hiked from Alberta to Toronto.