Reviewed here:
Truth and Other Fictions, by Eva Tihanyi
Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, by Stuart Ross
This One's Going to Last Forever, by Nairne Holtz
Selected Blackouts, by John Goldbach
Human identities are forged in the fires of narrative. Without our stories, we don't know who or where we are. The short story may be one of literature's most striking examples of the way narrative creates meaning and identity.
Thanks in part to judicious support from government bodies such as the Canada Council, and despite the complaints of right-wing ideologues who would prefer that all matters literary to be determined by the Draconian judgments of the cash register, Canada has a relatively healthy (if often imperilled) array of small literary magazines and serious small presses that provide a home for short fiction. The four collections under review here are all the products of that publicly supported literary world and, as different as they are one from another, taken together they make a compelling argument that the tax dollars that go into supporting Canadian writing are well spent.
Truth and Other Fictions
, by Eva Tihanyi, Inanna, 135 pages, $22.95
Eva Tihanyi, a widely published poet and instructor at Niagara College in Welland, Ont., was born in Budapest in 1956. She edits a small magazine, In Retro, and for many years she reviewed fiction for The National Post, the Toronto Star and Books in Canada. Truth and Other Fictions is her first book of stories, and it is an impressive and promising debut.
As the title implies, the stories in Truth and Other Fictions turn on the mutable and contested nature of truth, opening with Green is the Most Difficult Colour, a tale set in Picasso's Paris studios and narrated by one of the many young model/lovers the artist exploited over his long run as the city's resident genius/provocateur/dirty old man. The issue of the nature of reality and the ambiguous difficulties entailed in trying to represent it that are introduced in this story resonate through the remaining stories, tales that are set in various locales and decades up to the present. Quoting Picasso, the narrator says: “ ‘If there was a single truth, you couldn't make a hundred paintings of the same subject.' A hundred women, one man. A hundred truths. No truth at all. And you start with something. One woman, one man.”
And so it goes throughout this wonderfully written collection of takes on the elusiveness of truth, followed next by No Ordinary Eyes, a dream-like story rendered in the difficult-to-master free indirect style. The Hungarian protagonist, Gyula Halasz (known as Brassaï), was a figure in Parisian arts bohemia between the wars, a friend of Henry Miller and the creator of haunting photographs of Paris by night. The story successfully provides a verbal equivalent of the shifting light and shadows of Halasz's photographic night world, and advances Tihanyi's sophisticated meditation on the nature of art and its complex and paradoxical relations to the truth, without abandoning attention to the particular and the concrete invoked by Picasso's betrayed lover in the opening story.
Body and Soul weaves glimpses of two compellingly powerful women, jazz great Billie Holiday and pioneer paleontologist Mary Leakey, into a prose blues for all women that breaks the reader's heart with its beauty.
Tihanyi is too artful a thinker and rigorous a creator to suggest that the tensions between art and truth can ever be unequivocally resolved, but her final story, Truth, uses the details of a complex set of friendships among women and the narrator's obsessive use of the Google search engine as ways to illuminate, if not settle, these vexing issues.
The author never sacrifices the particular human reality of her characters to the larger theoretical concerns she invokes, and the persuasiveness of her characterizations and the luminous quality of her visual descriptions of cityscapes and landscapes is strong enough to support her intellectual ambitions.
