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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great, subtle story about family,
By bookishgal25 (ontario, canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Leaning, leaning over water: A novel in ten stories (Paperback)
Itani's look at an Anglo family living literally and metaphorically on the edge of English and French cultures is an understated story about family roles, adult relationships, and childhood perceptions. The story of the family is told by Trude, the middle child: Perceptive and honest, Trude makes a refreshing narrator. Her sensitivity to the intricacies of her family's relationships with one another, along with their relationship to friends and neighbours they have rather unwillingly settled amongst (at the insistance of Trude's father, who wants to live by the river) show both the innocence and the maturity of her memories.Itani's obvious preference for description over dialogue can become tiring, but the smoothness of her writing ultimately redeems the story and makes the book one worth reading.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another Exceptional Offering from poetic Canadian Itani,
By rachel (Toronto) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Leaning, Leaning Over Water : A Novel In Ten Stories (Paperback)
I enjoyed this collection focused on the lives of a family living in rural Quebec in the post-war period. Like some of Alice Munro's work, the stories threaded together as a novel broken into several, poignant fragments.
Perhaps my favourite story---for its simple, emotional resonance-- was A Long Narrow Bungalow. As in Deafening, Itani paints a community and life that---although I never lived in--- I am left nostalgiac for. Itani knows when to insert poetry, when to flower her prose with description, when to leave the reader hanging like a musical chord without resolution. While the stories can range from light family matters ( such as preparing for a day at church) they can realistically dip into sombre territory. Perhaps Itani's work is best encapsulated in the gripping sentence which closes the work: "There are shadows[...] Sometimes we see our reflection, sometimes we don't. It depends on how dark the sky." (p.206). Like the book itself which, so compelling in its exposition, caused me to relate to moments in each character's life( happiness, isolation, the yearning for solitude and grief )it could simultaneously invite me in and keep me at a distance. This was a pleasant and thougthful read to take on vacation. On a bus across Cape Breton under very lugubrious and mournful clouds, my appetite was sated.... proving short stories invaluable as summer traveling companions.
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