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4.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful Introduction to Gabrielle Roy's Work, April 12, 2001
This small collection of four pieces of short fiction (ranging from a short-story-like 10 pages to an almost novella-length 50) is an excellent introduction to the work of Gabrielle Roy, one of the most important figures in Canadian and French-Canadian literature of the 20th century. Against an often stark natural backdrop, Roy imbues her very human stories with enough warmth to get you through a winter in the Yukon.
What has always amazed and impressed me most about Roy is her ability to successfully maintain a tension, in her fiction, between the fact that her characters are so often uprooted or rootless and the fact that they have, despite this, a real sense of and feel for (and even love for) their setting. Immigrants, vagabonds, and wanderers all move restlessly across Roy's Canada, unable or unwilling to settle, and usually searching for some unobtainable rest. From different perspectives, Roy traces their wanderings with care and grace, and genuine sympathy.
My favorite piece here is "Where Will You Go, Sam Lee Wong?", which focusses on a recent Chinese immigrant to the Great White North, and narrates his difficulties planting himself and thriving in the harsh ground of his newly chosen world. A close second is "Hoodoo Valley," a brief glimpse of an entire community of new arrivals from Eastern Europe in search of a place in Canada that reminds them of their former home.
Bookending these two immigrant narratives are the first and final stories, including the title piece, which closes the book out in a beautiful way. The French title of the story (and thus of the collection) is "A Garden at the Edge of the World," which captures a little more bluntly what Roy does in this flourishing finish. In what is here called "A Garden in the Wind," Roy situates us at the border--recognizable but not absolute or permanent in any way--between the mapped and known and habitable and controllable Canada, and the endless sprawls of naked land that fan out in almost every direction.
In a strange way, then, Roy manages to make her Canada (she's from Manitoba) imaginable simultaneously as a center or final destination AND as the very marginal threshold of what is known. It's this willful and well-managed blend of opposites--of lovability and unlivability--that makes Roy's fiction such an interesting, moving and edifying read.
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