To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

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An occasional reading list:
Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India (Milkweed,
$13.00): a reprint of Ice-Candy-Man, a novel
about Partition, by one of Pakistan's leading
women writers, now resident in Texas; it
tells its readers it is told from a young girl's
perspective, but reconciling speech with the
claim to be realistic is a recurrent problem,
for it clearly uses an adult vocabulary.
Doris Lessing, The Real Thing
(HarperCollins, $28.95): a collection of stories
and sketches focussing on women who
cope with "the real" world of ego and
resentment; one story ends: "He was waiting
to see if she would turn and wave or smile
or even just look at him, but she did not."
Beverley Farmer, The Seal Woman (U
Queensland, $29.95): a novel in which a
woman leaves Scandinavia for Australia,
mourning her dead husband; emotions
become images here, yet the prose seems
recurrently to take more interest in explaining
and defining what people are to feel.
Yvonne Vera, Why Don't You Carve Other
Animals (TSAR, $11.95): fifteen short stories
by a Zimbabwe-born writer now studying
in Canada; these show an early talent, better
in the sketch form (the less explained,
the less overly dramatized) than in the first
attempts at extended fiction.
Beryl Fletcher, The Word Burners (Daphne
Brasell, n.p.): in New Zealand, a woman
and her two daughters must, separately and
together, come to terms with who they
are—and where; a lesbian woman dismissing
men at one point also dismisses the
whole tenor of NZ academic discourse: "It's
a Pakeha disease, this need for security, the
delineation of the colonial identity...."
Earl McKenzie, Two Roads to Mount Joyful
and other stories (Longman, n.p.): short
stories, many of them overexplained.
Lorna Goodison, Baby Mother and the
King of Swords (Longman, n.p.): fourteen
stories about critical moments in life, by
one of the leading younger poets in
Jamaica; one story ends, "Some people say I
know things. I know one thing. I come
through." It's politically significant, perhaps,
that the stories assert (rather than
reveal) survival power; the writer's poems,
so far, tend rather to reveal it.
Olive Senior, Arrival of the Snake-Woman
and other stories (Longman, n.p.): this collection
is one of the author's finest so far; in
it a loving re-creation of time past establishes
for the narrator a sense both of the
craziness and of the power of reiterating
childhood, through its games, its rituals, its
imprinted associations; the generation that
remembers in this way, however, is also
expressing its unhappiness and its uncertainty
as it moves towards a category that
other people call "old age."
Sam Selvon, Foreday Morning: Selected
Prose 1946-1986 (Longman, n.p.): the
author, now a Canadian citizen, assembles
here much of the fiction and some of the
essays that have never before been collected;
a lot of the early work was published
in his native Trinidad under pseudonyms.
Of particular interest are stories such as
"Calypsonian" and the extended autobiographical
writings.
Alecia McKenzie, Satellite City and other
stories (Longman, n.p.): this is a fine book
by a wonderful new writer from Jamaica;
the stories do not on the surface probe
"grand" themes, but they discover importance
in small ones: people ride buses, give
parties, a woman gets a scholarship, another
woman exchanges letters with her grandmother—each
of these apparently ordinary
incidents gives rise to extraordinary revelations
about gender, poverty, class, language,
and madness. Stylistically, these stories are
polished and inventive. I look forward to
reading more of McKenzie's work. W.N.
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