sewn paper
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Author
Fiction
1997
116 pages
ISBN 0-88984-185-3
$14.95
If I Were Me
Clark Blaise
Clark Blaise was born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1940 to French and Anglo-Canadian parents. He moved often
during his childhood years as the family followed the usually
disastrous fortunes of his
furniture salesman father
which have been chronicled in the author's `post-modern' autobiography I Had a Father.
Blaise graduated from Denison
University in Granville, Ohio
in 1961 and then went to Harvard to study writing with Bernard
Malamud. In 1962 he moved
to attend the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, where he met and married
the well-known American novelist,
Bharati Mukherjee.
He emigrated to Montreal in 1966 in search of his French-Canadian roots and taught
for the next twelve years at Sir George Williams University where he established what
is now Concordia's creative writing workshop.
After a brief period at York University, Clark and Bharati moved back to the
United States where Clark took up the position of Director of the prestigious International Writing
School at Iowa.
If I Were Me is the culmination of Clark Blaise's career as a geographer of the human heart.
In the character of Gerald Lander he has created a modern Faust who carries the world within him, but must
travel to learn its meaning. At the age of fifty, Gerald Lander is granted a vision.
He reads his future, resolves his past and for ten luminous years applies himself to the mysteries of language,
Alzheimer's and consciousness itself.
Barry Cameron writing in Canadian Writers and Their Works concludes his
article with the following words: `Blaise has given us, in my judgement, some of
the most rewarding books of fiction ever produced in Canada.'
Blaise's brilliance was immediately obvious in his first two books of stories
A North American Education and Tribal Justice. After more than twenty
years they remain monumental in the world of the Canadian Short Story. The stories
that make up the novel If I Were Me are written in a different style and cadence,
sombre and demanding work which will enlarge Blaise's already stellar reputation.
`If I Were Me is an intriguing and rewarding
book. Only
120 pages long, it is packed with fascinating
speculation about any number
of subjects, from Japanese cults to the value of waste
and corruption in
human society. Blaise's plot - such as it is -
develops almost imperceptibly
through a series of ostensibly unrelated chapters. A
blockbuster commercial page-turner this ain't, and the
penultimate chapter offers up a couple of whopping
great
coincidences of the sort that can happen only in real
life. But the slow
unfolding of Lander's very literal voyage of discovery
is satisfying
indeed. This slender volume is meaty, and entirely
fat-free.' `I still can't say with certainty what this little
book is
about, but I am certain that it's Blaise's
masterpiece, and that I'll
return to it often.'
- The Globe and
Mail
- Books in Canada
He now lives in San Francisco with his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, and teaches at the University of California-Berkeley.
Other PQL Books by Clark Blaise include Lunar Attractions, Pittsburgh Stories, and Southern Stories.