The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

A Dance of All the isms
Barry Callaghan, ed.
15 Years in Exile. Exile Editions n.p.
Exile's Exiles, the Happy Few. Exile Editions n.p.
Reviewed by Marta Dvorak
Thank you, Barry Callaghan, for "de-ghettoizing"
Canadian literature in the 15 years
of publication of Exile, the literary quarterly
in which international contributors
and Canadian writers, painters, composers,
and photographers have together found a
haven and joined in a dance of all the isms:
the fox trot, the tango, modernism and postmodernism,
the concrete Cakewalk and comic
book tales and gothic ghost stories and summonings
in circles of sacred stones from all
over the world. If you are looking for a real
treat, don't miss this superb anthology
culled from the best of its past 15 volumes,
published to celebrate Exile magazine's 15-
20th anniversary!
Adding to the eclecticism is the fact that
we find young writers alongside established
ones, and writers from Eastern Europe as
well as Africa, Australia and South
America, alongside the major contributors
from Western Europe. But the best part of
the treat is the fact that some of these works
have been published nowhere else. One
delightful example is Mavis Gallant's Mau
to Lew: the Maurice Ravel-Lewis Carroll
Friendship. This witty short story, that does
not appear elsewhere, is reminiscent of the
best works produced by nonsense artists,
from Edward Lear on through Ogden Nash,
Peter Sellers and the Goons, the Marx
Brothers, and Monty Python. Through her
brand of nonsense, M. Gallant explores the
universe of discourse and of (re)discovery.
The aim is to sow the seeds of doubt, to
disorient, to question what is (too) commonly
known and (too) easily accepted. In
this gradual and impeccably structured
reversal of roles mirroring the perverted
world of Through the Looking Glass, we find
true gems based on a deft control of bathos.
Then those unfamiliar with the experimental
work of Hungarian-Canadian
Robert Zend can sink their teeth into an
excerpt from OAB, or the delightful story
The Key, an admirably well-structured
deconstruction, beginning (of course) with
The End, which is followed by a Footnote
On the Conception of the Short Story
Entitled "The Key", in turn followed by a
Footnote On the Miscarriage of the Short
Story Entitled "The Key", and the Footnote
on Footnotes... The Key is a wonderful twist
on the chest-of-drawers story, a blend of
fiction and metafiction, intertextuality and
interdisciplinarity, synthetic and playful literary
analysis and narrative. In the embedding
process, Zend even manages to
include doodles that we could call concrete
prose!
Those who admire Murray Schafer the
composer can now enjoy Murray Schafer
the author, in a work that defies description.
Suffice it to say that it is a sensuous
exploration of form and space and texture.
Contributing to the diversity of the material
are sketches, oils, engravings, and photographs,
often playful, often experimental,
such as the intriguing fusion of nude and
landscape in Michel Lambeth's Nuescapes.
or the deceptive simplicity of line of Tomi
Ungerer's disturbing drawings, or Claire
Weissman Wilks's editing of Hannah
Maynard's extraordinary photographs.
Robert Markle combines sketches with a
reflexion on the eroticism and beauty of the
female body. In the Hogg Poems and
Drawings, we savour an intriguing oil pastel
along with Barry Callaghan's poem Judas
Priest, in which he demonstrates a mastery
of the metrical, syntactical, and rhetorical
possibilities of the couplet, and a superb
control of rhyme worthy of Pope and
Byron and Bob Dylan all rolled into one.
One thinks of the line by Swift: For Pope
can in one couplet fix/ More sense than I can
do in six.. The rhythm gallops along in the