FAVORITE
AUTHORS: Alistair MacLeod, a Canadian whose
work is rooted in the life of Cape Breton Island is a favorite
writer of Kristin Nord's. Now
his stories are introduced to US readers in an anthology called
"Island: The Complete Stories."
BOOKS:
The prolific Joyce Carol Oates creates another family, "We
Were The Mulvaneys," and we are carried along, as it tries
to cope with devasting problems. Julia Sneden reviews the novel,
now in paperback.
AND
CONSIDER THIS:
"Galileo's Daughter,
" the letters from Suor (Sister) Maria Celeste, a nun confined
to her convent, to her father, Galileo Galilei, give us a window
to the customs and events of the seventeenth century.
Jacquie Kennedy's glamour
and style are on display in a Met Costume Institute show that
reveals a woman very much in control of her image.
Favorite Authors:
Allistair MacLeod
by Kristin
Nord
Over the last eight
years or so, I’ve taken it upon myself to introduce as many passionate
readers as I know to the writing of Alistair MacLeod, a Canadian
whose work is rooted in the life of Cape Breton Island. Until
last year this work has consisted of just two slim collections
of short stories.
This winter W.W. Norton
& Company has introduced his stories to the United States in an
anthology that it calls "Island: The Complete Stories."
It was first published as "Island: The Collected Short Stories
of Alistair MacLeod, McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 2000. The anthology
contains all the stories that appeared in the two Canadian collections,
and two new ones.
I return to these stories
each summer when I am on the island, often sitting on a beach
that once was part of MacLeod’s family farm. I bought my first
paperback collections at a gift shop just a few miles from the
clifftop cabin where MacLeod writes in the summertime, and on
a later occasion found that the young womanwaiting on me behind
the counter was his daughter.
At readings he appears
to be a shy man with delicate hands and an unimposing physical
stature, though once he is up at the podium he is soon breathing
life into stories of unexpected power. His mission has been to
evoke the world of broad-shouldered, large-handed men of his heritage
--- Scots Catholic Gaelic-speaking men and their families. This
is a fecund and physical world, where the men the men are farmers,
miners, fishermen and loggers who bear scars and twisted fingers
as trees bare rings that tell their age. They are married to women
you’d see at the family dances on the rocky Cape Breton coast
on a Friday night, who appear fiercely proud and independent .
Their children are dark- or copper-haired with light blue eyes
--you’d see them in the pipers’ circle at the Highland Games in
Antigonish in July.
Storytelling, music
and dance have been at the heart of this once predominantly Gaelic-speaking
world, and these tools have remained as powerful antidotes to
the poverty and tragedy that islanders have encountered. MacLeod’s
stories are dark, and often begin as if the speaker were bathed
in candlelight, reeling us in for an evening’s yarn. For instance,
here is the voice of a mother, announcing matter-of-factly, “we’ll
just have to sell him,” in The Fall, a story in which that main
character must choose between feeding her family and maintaining
the mining pony who has faithfully served her husband. Or consider
the opening lines in The Boat, an achingly beautiful story about
a son who loses his father to the sea: “There are times even now,
when I awake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible
fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting
for me in the room below the darkened stairs...”
This is also an exquisitely
rendered natural world: “Now in the early evening the sun is flashing
everything in gold. It bathes the blunt grey rocks that loom yearningly
out toward Europe and it touches upon the stunted spruce and the
low-lying lichens and the delicate hardy ferns and the ganglia-rooted
moss and the tiny tough rock cranberries,” and: “Overhead the
ivory white gulls wheel and cry, flashing also in the purity of
the sun and the clean, freshly washed air...” The beauty of such
a world, when matched by the often grim realities of making an
island living, fills the lives of these families with often heart-wrenching
choices. Should the oldest of the family leave the island on the
day of his 18th birthday, in search of a future but all too aware
that he may be saying good-bye foreever to his aging grandparents
and lung-scarred mining father? Is it right that the grown children,
long gone to the cities of Toronto and Vancouver, should return
each summer in a fevered attempt to convince their aging mother,
who raised them for most of their lives single-handedly, to give
up her farm?
These stories also
look deeply at the role of tradition within these tight enclaves
and at the price that has been exacted as recent generations of
Cape Bretoners have sought to better their lots and venture into
the wider world. Like so many real Cape Bretoners, MacLeod’s characters
have increasingly been forced off-island in search of gainful
employment, all the while never quite reconciling themselves to
the sense of displacement they feel. They have gone to university
and distanced themselves from the harsh lives of their parents,
but remain haunted, missing the island and its music and dance.
They listen to old fiddle records, as the lawyer in "The Return"
does, when his Montreal-born and bred wife is away.
MacLeod’s families
are unsentimental about such choices, though his narrators do
not shy away from the pain these moral dilemmas provoke. His work
does not offer answers to ongoing threats to authentic Gaelic
culture, whether they be attempts to commercialize the island’s
music or to acquire yet another farm for its oceanfront. The island’s
major industries have failed and been replaced by a dispiriting
mix of tourism and welfare, but he would have us remember the
islanders who remain at the end of summer.
MacLeod himself, who
has taught creative writing and 19th century literature for many
years at the University of Windsor, is among those who have left
but return to their extended families in the summers. Over 33
years MacLeod has published 16 short stories and after 13 years
in the making, No Great Mischief, his first novel, was published
to acclaim last year. It was recently listed as a finalist for
the prestigious Dublin Impac Literary Award, a prize that will
be announced in May.
At the same time, Island
has swiftly amassed an enthusiastic following in this country,
making both the San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe best
seller lists. Joyce Carol Oates has compared MacLeod’s work to
James Joyce’s Dubliners and Winslow Homer’s watercolors of the
people and seascapes of Prout’s Neck, Maine, and Cullercoats,
England. No wonder.These are searing and poetic works will leave
you in awe of this writer’s breadth of thought and emotion.
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