sewn paper
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Author
Fiction
1991
260 pages
ISBN 0-88984-125-X
$12.95
The Happiness
of Others
Leon Rooke
The Happiness of Others brings together the best stories from
Rooke's first two books published in Canada,
The Love Parlour (Oberon,
1977) and Cry Evil (Oberon, 1980), both now out of print, with a
selection of stories from
The Broad Back of the Angel
(Fiction Collective, 1977) which was never available in this
country.
At the centre of this collection is the novella
`The Street of
Moons', which, as Rooke writes in the introduction, `takes as its
point of departure from that particularly American, particularly nasty
sensibility which regards all countries, especially Latin-American
ones, as adjuncts of their own property, and their people as
second-class citizens who ought to be speaking English.' And as
Russell Banks comments, `It's when he's funny ... which he often
is, that he's at his most dangerous.... He's a writer
with a voice so sharp and personal that he
changes your life while you're busy
laughing at it.'
`This -- and every -- collection from Rooke reminds me of one
of those omelets people make for themselves on Saturday mornings.
Once folded and eased onto the plate, it's not necessarily the prettiest thing to look at,
but it is full of good things, so full in fact that odd bits of onions, red
pepper and ham squeeze out. That's the way it is with Rooke. He doesn't have
the lightest touch, but he is generous. There is never a bland mouthful in
his stories.' `Leon Rooke's novels are wondrous enough for anyone's taste, but
his stories are wondrous strange. In the last two decades his
literally hundreds of stories have made him into one of the very
few writers the rest of us have to read in order to know what the
short story form can and cannot do, for he works way out there
in terra incognita mapping limits. Beyond this, he can break
your heart in half all at once, like a kindly assassin, or chop
it to bits with a dozen swift, sure strokes. He's a writer with
a black belt in portraying the small daily tragedies that break
bones and leave no visible wounds. It's when he's funny, however,
which he often is, that he's most dangerous. Like Stanley Elkin
and Donald Barthelme, he's a writer with a voice so sharp and
personal that he changes your life while you're busy laughing at it.' `Rooke's vision is Manichaean, melodramatic, exaggerated, and
sometimes intentionally cartoonish. At its root, it is pure antithesis -- angels
against devils. This formal opposition, though, is the engine of his furious style.
Leon Rooke doesn't write like any of those precious minimalists or k-mart realists
cluttering the literary marketplace these days. He is the high-priest of
maximalist panache, the standard-bearer for a hyper-rhetoric that is at once
strange, eccentric, and beautiful.'
- Canadian Book Review Annual
- Russell Banks, author of Continental Drift
- Douglas Glover in Books in Canada.
