|
Antigonish
Review # 147
| Michael Crummey |
|
Cover: "Found Dress"
by Wendy Weseen.
|
|
The 2006 Sheldon Currie
Fiction Contest
The Loneliness of the
Fiction Contest Juror
|
More and more these days I see the blind spots in my literary taste. The collection of stories I couldn't finish that goes on to rave reviews. The trite or overwritten or nonsensical novel that wins awards and passionate defenders among the friends whose judgements I trust most. And of course the opposite is also true. Books I love that no one else seems to notice. Stories that stick in my head like a burr that others gloss over without a second thought. I'm not always alone in my opinions thankfully, but it happens often enough to give me pause when I'm asked to "judge" a contest like this one. What if I miss a gem? What if I glom on to a dud as a winner? Who the hell am I to say anyway?
I guess what I'm trying to convey here is (a) God must be a very lonely guy and (b) these are not necessarily the best stories submitted to the Sheldon Currie Fiction Contest, but they are the ones that stuck in my head like a burr. And I can't think of any other achievement a writer should be aiming for.
Pamplona is a compelling take on obsession and fidelity that manages to be deadly serious and hilarious at the same time. The husband-narrator is a classic sensitive man, uncommonly insightful about himself and his circumstances and somehow impotent, unable to act to change himself or his situation. Favourite line: "There isn't one person living who hasn't been betrayed by a desire." Amen to that.
Singvogel is an odd story told by an odd narrator, the post-war English entertainer Clive Bish. I didn't like it at first and only realized on my second read it was Clive I didn't particularly care for - his pompous condescension, his way of saying "bloody ghastly." The story itself though is complex and convincing and the writing is bloody good.
What You Need To Make Glass is a minimalist portrait that uses a clever conceit as its organizing principle, each ingredient in the recipe used as a section heading. Conceits often end up choking a story with their cleverness as a writer ties herself into knots to keep the conceit afloat. Not here though. In little more than half a dozen pages we get a fully-rounded portrait of a family living with grief.
|
