Hungers [Paperback]

Genni Gunn's background as a musician serves her well in Hungers, her first short story collection. Some of the shorter pieces, such as "Fugue" and "Rondeau," borrow musical structures. Others focus on characters who communicate through music, such as the brother and sister in "Measures": "Music, indispensable, necessary, no matter how much he denies it," thinks Eve at one point about her guitarist brother Brian. Gunn, whose previous books include the novel Tracing Iris, is not a great short story writer, but she's a good one, and occasionally she gets it just right. In "Public Relations" she ties together several themes, including father-daughter relations, communication (or lack of it), alienation, and passionless sex, and wraps them up with a neat little twist. In the opening story, "Desperadoes," a married couple attempting to reconnect with happier times by revisiting a vacation spot run instead into a malevolent general, while "Sailing" is a brief but effective character sketch of a voyeuristic 55-year-old behavioural psychology professor.

Not all of Gunn's attempts at experimental structure work, and "Models," with its three sketchy vignettes (how did the husband in the second part, "How to Behave," die?), feels more like a creative writing exercise than a story. Much more impressive is the novella-length title story, which contains a family Christmas dinner from hell that is the book's best scene. As long-held grudges and secrets spill out, Gunn's pitch--sustained between maximum tension and humour--is near perfect:

"Jesus, you're a liar," Marcia says viciously. "Or a selective amnesiac." She stares at me a moment. "I bet you still have the scars. They say hair never comes back after a burn." "Anybody want a drink?" Dad says in his terribly bright voice.

--Shawn Conner

Few contemporary writers can match Gunn in irony and searing characterization. -- The Toronto Star, September 29, 2002

Gunn unfolds the stories carefully, exposing the characters' mutual betrayals with the well-paced control of a striptease. -- Quill & Quire, September 2002

Gunn's wonderfully quirky and rigorous imagination, her unquenchable curiosity, her poet-passion for the plasticity of language...are alive and kicking. -- The Globe & Mail, November 16, 2002

From the accomplished author of Tracing Iris comes a mesmerizing collection about yearning, vice and the dark side of love. The stories in Hungers expose the voids in our hearts that propel us to do the unexpected, the difficulty of maintaining personal boundaries and the potential hostility beneath the calm surface of our most intimate relationships. The savage Aztec god Tezcalipoca, who set people against one another and created anguish and disquiet, presides over many of Hungers' characters. Tezcalipoca was called "the enemy on both sides," and these stories perceptively explore this particular form of enmity. The linked quintet of stories that closes the book eloquently captures this discord, showing two sisters whose relationship is so anguished that reconciliation is impossible -- yet the love between them persists. Here are beautifully controlled and crafted stories about the uncontrollable and ungovernable forces in our lives.

Genni Gunn was nominated for the 1990 Commonwealth Prize for her novel Thrice Upon a Time and is the author of poetry, Mating in Captivity, short fiction, On the Road, and a recent much-praised novel Tracing Iris. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.