SUMMER STORIES
Selected and introduced
by Alberto Manguel
Penguin Canada, 394 pages, $24
More Arts Stories
Is it that we take off our clothes? Parka, sweater, socks, damned shoes removed - we caged and swaddled Canadians begin to vibrate in the sun.
Stripped, we examine the damage winter has wrought on our bodies, our psyches. The sun so bright! We can see clearly again; the first cool - so soft! - toe in lake water, the sun seeping into weary bones, chill drinks on bobbing docks.
And oh, how summer heralds the possibility of escape: To lake and woods, sand and rocks, across the ocean; and from things - if so briefly - jobs, school, difficult relationships, illness.
If we can travel, even a short distance to the cottage, can't our lives move, too?
It is this promise of rebirth that writer Alberto Manguel plays with so brilliantly in his most recent stunning anthology of short stories.
Finally, the one book you can safely select for a desert island stay.
Too often, collections slave a single theme, literally interpreted. In Manguel's hands, summer is so much more than a coveted season; it is also a state of mind, a passage in time, a connection between people, worlds - or a mere illusion.
In Wallace Stegner's The View from the Balcony, even the heat cannot heal the postwar wounds of young Brits and Americans struggling to re-stitch the shelled lives of their youth. "Lucy Graham lay alone on the deck in the sultry paralysis of afternoon. Her eyes looked into an empty red darkness; in her mind the vague voluptuous uncoiling of memory and fantasy was slowed almost to a stop, stunned almost to sleep." A. B. Yehoshua haunts with the horror of an early 1970s summer in Israel, where a Bible-clutching father, clothes rent, wanders into the Jordan Valley desperate to prove that his soldier-son has not been murdered after all. "And it blazes with such passion, softening the world for a final conflagration. And I have said in my haste: early summer, and here it is high summer already ... I believe I must go over the moment when I learned of his death again."
Two of Canada's best writers are displayed in all their glory.
Margaret Atwood's Death by Landscape reminds why she's revered with a canoe trip into the Canadian wilderness that will never be forgotten, albeit for all the wrong reasons. "Back there, the camp has vanished behind the first long point of rock and rough trees. Lois feels as if an invisible rope has broken. ... Beneath the canoe the lake goes down, deeper and colder than it was a minute before."
Alice Munro's Hired Girl captures the old summers of old money in resort Ontario, where the class distinction between those who serve and those who are served is most poignant. "I did not yet understand that maids didn't have to find their way anywhere. They stayed put, where the work was. It was the people who made the work who could come and go."
Alberto Manguel, who now does his reading in France (lucky man), name-drops throughout this sumptuous compilation, but with such good taste that even the most famous writers must earn their keep. Tennessee Williams's Three Players of a Summer Game is the insidious tale of a wife who wins her power through her husband's demise: "Two sections of an hourglass could not drain and fill more evenly than Brick and Margaret changed places after he took to drink." Fascinating that this piece, another dark look at marriage, came two decades after his 1940s success with The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.
Affairs, divorce, first sexual encounters have always been the stuff of summer literature - the clothes coming off again, no doubt - but Manguel, of course, offers everything but the clichéd. Daphne Du Maurier, perhaps a little overlooked by those who know only the bodice-ripping Rebecca, will astound with the power of The Pool, a female rite de passage exploring menstruation and madness: "There was no disharmony. The joy was indescribable, and the surge of feeling, like wings about her in the air, lifted her away from the turnstile and the woman, and she had all knowledge.
"That was it - the invasion of knowledge."
Manguel's collection solves another summer challenge: It is also the perfect gift. I've taken to giving it as a hostess (and host) book, as there are few people who will not find something delicious inside. So erotic is Bernard MacLaverty's A Pornographer Woos that it will lift the spirits of any husband hemmed in by kids, in-laws and a tiny motel room. "I have never written pornography before and I feel a conspicuous bump appearing in my bathing trunks. ... I have got the couple (with our own names) as far as the hotel room. They begin to strip and caress. I look up and your mother is looking straight at me. She smiles and I smile back at her. She knows I write for a living."
Every story in this collection hits a bulls-eye, save one. Mohamed Choukri's rough sketch of a dying man may be too wretched and unsympathetic for some, but the fact that this Moroccan did not learn to read or write until he was 21 goes some way to explaining the discordant style.
Still, it's a shot of wake-up bar rum in a fine liquor cabinet.
And there is so much more lushness, from around the world: Albert Camus, Australia's Helen Garner, Isabel Huggan, Japan's Shimaki Kensaku, Ray Bradbury, John Updike and vivid stories of war and ravaging from Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Russia's Ludmila Petrushevskaya.
I will not spoil all the late summery secrets, the bliss for you. Get your own copy; fill your glass; savour the last sultry moments before the darkness descends and we are Canadians in winter once again.
Paula Todd is the host of CTV Newsnet's The Verdict with Paula Todd and currently MIA in Muskoka.
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