sewn paper
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Fiction/Short Stories
October 2003
192 pages
ISBN 0-88984-270-1
$18.95
Montreal Stories:
Selected Stories, Volume Three
Clark Blaise
`I grew up without a home -- what was it, the south, Pittsburgh? -- and
by my mid-twenties the anxiety had grown palpable. My most
potent memories were southern, but the inherited memories were of
my parents' Canada, especially Montreal, where they had met and
life had taken an improbable turn for both of them. But by 1966,
when I moved my family to Montreal, my parents had divorced, my
father was in Mexico, my mother had returned to Winnipeg, I had
married a woman from India, and I didn't know where I'd come from
or where I was going. Montreal provided the
answer.
`I re-entered a world I had never made, Montreal, and determined I
would become the son I might have been, and would assert
authority over an experience I could and should have had, but
never did. Confusion remained, but at least I would be the
French and English son of befuddlement, the crown prince of
Canadian identity.' Here gathered together are the Montreal-set stories
which made Clark Blaise famous -- such stories as `A Class of New
Canadians', `Eyes', and `I'm Dreaming of Rocket Richard' -- alongside
two new and unpublished Montreal stories, `The Belle of Shediac'
and `Life Could Be a Dream (sh-boom, sh-boom)'.
`One way ... to approach the collection is to soak up the atmosphere of
the city that Blaise describes with an almost uncanny acuity. He is a
sure master, whether painting landscape -- the mean east-end streets of
the 1950s seen as "one big icy puddle of frozen gutter water, devoid of
joy, colour, laughter, pleasure, intellect or art" -- or charting social
change in the Plateau, the district transformed in the 1980s from "a
low, squalid slum, dismal and tubercular" to "Soho de chez nous ...
young, upscale, arty and French." ' In a recent review of
Pittsburgh Stories (Selected
Stories 2) in Essays in Canadian Writing,
Alexander Macleod considers the series as a whole:
`Mingling new pieces written especially for each collection
with several older, `classic' stories, the series is an unprecedented
event in the history of Canadian literature. Never before has
such a large body of work been re-collected in such a way. Never
has a writer been so quickly and so completely "re-presented" to
us. The strength of the project is its ability to foreground the
complexity of Blaise's geographical
imagination. [ ... ] The series illustrates, more clearly than ever
before, that there is something remarkably original about
Blaise's work. Blaise is more than just a local colourist who
ferrets out the curious details of "marginal" communities in
order to delight cosmopolitan readers. Rather, if we consider the
full arc of his work, we see that for nearly fifty years he has
been challenging the way that we understand the concept of place
in contemporary Canadian and American literature.' `Clark Blaise is a born storyteller ... a writer to savour.' `More than any other writer, Blaise has shown how Canada is linked
by geography, immigration and cultural affinity to the wider
world ...'
- Clark Blaise
-- Elaine Kalman Naves, the Montreal Gazette
- Alexander Macleod, Essays on Canadian Writing
- The New York Times Book Review
- Jeet Heer, the National Post
