Bookworm, no. 40
Alexander Sallas on Zoe Whittall’s “Wild Failure.” Caroline Noël reviews Marie Uguay’s “Journal.” A page from “Love Novel.” Inside the May issue.
For Mature Audiences Only
Wild Failure
Zoe Whittall
HarperCollins
224 pages, hardcover and ebook
Sensitive readers beware. With unvarnished prose, Zoe Whittall’s debut story collection, Wild Failure, deals with death, drugs, excrement, porn, and sex, among other explicit matters. This is not mindless schlock. In the spirit of writers such as Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, Whittall explores the human condition by looking down, not up.
In the title story, Jasper and Teprine, a couple on the verge of a breakup, take a ceremonial final hiking trip together. After a mountain lion nearly mauls Teprine, she and Jasper return to their rented guest house and make love with renewed passion. The adolescent star of “More Holy” falls for an oblivious older guy. Years later, she comes out as queer, but she can’t stop thinking about the first orgasm he unknowingly gave her during a drive home. The book ends with the darkly comic “Murder at the Elm Street Collective House,” a paranoid hippie's first-person account of the mysterious slaying of one of his foursome. The killing inspires uncharacteristic introspection among the easygoing beatniks: “We had all slept in the same house with John for months, we’d all literally slept with John, but none of us had any idea who he was.”
Whittall seems to scorn euphemism; she depicts depravity and violence directly. She seems to scorn some elements of grammar, too. Comma splices—“she sucks on a mango Popsicle from the last gas station, her fingers smell like hand sanitizer”—and sentence fragments abound. The coarseness of her language reflects the coarseness of her subject matter. Linguistic purists may be irritated, but for everyone else, the technique will enhance these bold stories.
—Alexander Sallas
Matters of Life and Death
Journal
Marie Uguay, translated by Jennifer Moxley
Cormorant Books
344 pages, softcover
Marie Uguay’s Journal, published posthumously with the help of her long-time partner, Stéphan Kovacs, reconstructs the story of her battle with cancer through diary entries, letters, and poems. Both a sombre prelude to death and an exuberant celebration of life, it provides a unique perspective on Quebecois poetry in the 1970s and ’80s.
In 1977, doctors discharged Uguay from “a Montreal hospital” after diagnosing her with bone cancer and amputating her leg. With palpable urgency, the twenty-two-year-old vowed to “live to the nth degree, push my passion as far as it can go, but not like I’ve got all the time in the world, this time get it right.” Tormented by an unrequited love for her married fifty-year-old oncologist, Uguay questioned her attractiveness: “Whenever I looked at my body I fell into fits of despair. I found myself hideous. I couldn’t imagine taking off my clothes in front of a stranger.” As her illness progressed, she concerned herself with less superficial thoughts. She came to embrace complex theories about death, duty, and art, and this period led to some of her most powerful passages:
The body loves and its creative possibilities surpass those of the mind. Its heart, in order to survive, is huge. It loves, to the point of never accepting the end, and even during the last convulsions, death is not in the body, but against it.
Although some readers will find Uguay’s excessive devotion to her oncologist tiresome, her desire for him reveals something of the ailing poet. By her death at twenty-six, Uguay’s experience was limited. “I haven’t loved all of the men I could have loved, nor have I laughed enough, seen enough, tasted enough, loved enough,” she confessed. “It’s too late to learn how to live.” With all its honesty, Journal is a moving account of a brief yet remarkable life.
—Caroline Noël
Book Tasting: Love Novel
She listened to him intently, scrunching her knickers in her hand and staring in the same direction he was, but much farther, across the glistening water towards the open sea, into black, and when he asked what she was looking at she said nothing, and when he asked what she was thinking about she said nothing, and when he asked what was going on with her, again she said nothing, and he was sure he understood this nothingness, when you think of nothing and when you need nothing, except maybe a cigarette, because you’re just happy and you’re trying to commit it to memory; he truly believed she was sitting there on that shitty beach without any desires, facing the darkness, relishing the uncertainty just like he did, and that she too felt like she could die, right then, while everything was still in place, undamaged, before they’d started resenting each other over promises unfulfilled, over weakness, laziness, selfishness, over stupid trifles and the goddamn rent, while they still believed that love saves, that love feeds, that love fixes what’s broken, that love offers tacit answers to the most difficult questions and that it is, thank God, free. That’s why he had hope and that’s why he didn’t throw himself off a cliff, that’s why he didn’t give in to the seductive tragedy of a great romance novel; instead, he repeated what will be will be, or rather, that it’d be all right, everything would be all right, everything would be all right, every single thing, and that was yet another small problem with love, that it lies like a tombstone.
He can’t remember how they got to bed. He was drunk. He dreamt he was riding a bicycle. In the middle of winter. She was sitting on the handlebars, clutching on to them frantically, and she kept asking him to watch it, watch it, watch it, because the road was icy, the cars were speeding, and no one cared about cyclists. We’ll crash! She screamed with all her might that they’d be crushed by oncoming vehicles, and he did indeed see a pair of headlights piercing the driving snow, so he made an abrupt turn towards the billboard on the left side of the road, rode right through it, and went on pedalling. He could hear his knees creaking and his teeth chattering and again she screamed careful, careful, as more cars sped at them, blinded by thick snow, so he turned right and went straight through a concrete wall, and he kept turning left and right, cycling through billboards, fences and walls, and just as he thought there was nothing to worry about because the world was built of jelly and air, they slammed into a brick wall, head on.
—Ivana Sajko
Excerpted with permission from Love Novel (Biblioasis). Read more about Ivana Sajko’s book, translated from the Croatian by Mima Simic, in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada.
Inside the May Issue
Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses, reviewed by André Forget.
“A powerful counter-narrative to colonization.” Jenn Thornhill Verma reviews Avanimiut: A History of Inuit Independence in Northern Labrador.
Kristen den Hartog’s The Roosting Box: Rebuilding the Body after the First World War, reviewed by J. L. Granatstein.
And much more!