Amazon.com Review
The themes of André Alexis's first story collection--belonging, displacement, alienation, and desire--may strike some readers as overly familiar. And most of the action in
Despair takes place in downtown Ottawa, not exactly a city that makes the heart beat faster. Yet the author's achievement here is anything but mundane. Recounting his stories in precise, unadorned language, Alexis produces quiet dramas of nightmarish threat, in which reality itself constantly threatens to degenerate into (as "Kuala Lumpur" would have it) "something ecstatic and unhealthy."
Almost all the characters in Despair are isolated by circumstances beyond their making--or simply by their own imaginings. And Alexis manages to combine the cultural traditions of Trinidad and Canada to eerie, searing effect. In "The Night Piece," for example, a young guest at a wedding is haunted by a tale of the Soucouyant, a folkloric vampire who kills his victims by slowly biting their backs and the soft flesh behind their knees. "Despair: Five Stories of Ottawa" opens with the last words of a 50-year-old parakeet: "Jesus, Maria, my corns are killing me." But this avian fare-thee-well sets in motion a truly unsettling series of events, including the ascension of the peripheral (but symbolically weighty) Mr. Paz:
Mr. Paz lay on the green grass with his arms out, like a man crucified. Soon Mr. Paz's body rose from the lawn; his body rose. It ascended. It floated above the houses in Merivale. It sailed over the thousands of freshly tarred roofs. It passed by tall buildings and from the ground it appeared to be a cross or a starfish, and then a speck in the sunlight.
Elsewhere, plants grow out of the mouths of the poor, disembodied heads cackle and jeer. Alexis's brand of homegrown surrealism seldom seems contrived to shock us. Instead, he explores the interplay between the real and the not real, sketching out a fictional universe in which existence itself becomes a "confusion, a welter, a tangle, a tumult."
--Ruth Petrie
From Publishers Weekly
Trinidadian-born Canadian author Alexis was shortlisted for a Commonwealth prize for this daring collection of eight dark, quixotic stories. Most feature a guileless, straightforward narration that belies the true eccentricity of the narrators, who have fetishes for deformed hands or who broodingly impart tales of voodoo curses, vampire hauntings and a doctor's unusual experiments. In "Horse," Dr. Pascal rents a room in a house owned by a man mourning the death of his mother. Ordinary logic stops here, as Pascal calmly offers to pay extra rent to compensate for the fact that, though he fornicates, he has "no issue to show for it," and begins his research, which consists of stapling thousands of flies to wooden boards. This story is weighted with baffling psychological metaphors and puzzles so meticulously and convincingly constructed they somehow make sense. Dream logic marks all of Alexis's stories, especially in "The Third Terrace." Here the unnamed male narrator is an aspiring painter, newly arrived in Toronto, who trolls the streets looking for prostitutes with mutilated hands, and what he does with them somehow involves burlap and axle grease. He toils as a hand model in erotic movies to pay the bills. After consorting with a prostitute, he is robbed and beaten, his own painting and modeling hand mangled. All this is related in a weirdly resigned monologue so disturbingly detached the reader is left to puzzle over bizarre events that seem to be, in the unruffled narrator's world, quite ordinary. In "The Night Piece," a young man called Winston claims he is dying because his landlady is a SoucouyantAin Caribbean mythology a person (usually female) who lives by sucking blood from others at night. Part ghost-story, part Borgesian meta-reality, part Twilight Zone, Alexis's book may confuse and frighten mainstream audiences, but readers looking for innovative, sharp and twisted new fiction will find it here.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
