Prizes and Awards: Giller Prize Shortlist
2002
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Product Details
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Product Description
From Amazon
Mount Appetite, Bill Gaston's fourth collection of short fiction, is a deliciously carnal little book, full of tugging, teasing desire and the occasional moment of satiation. It isn't a sex book, and Gaston is neither an Irving Layton in prose nor a Canadian Nicholson Baker, but it is nonetheless a compelling dissertation on the psychology of the flesh.
Gaston's stories are fresh, strange, and filled with the strain of melancholic levity that is common in Hank Williams songs but scarce in literary fiction. Matt Cohen fans will love these stories, as will anyone looking for a dozen startlingly original plots that seamlessly mingle the sublime and the mundane. In "Driving Under the Influence," a broken-hearted drunk driver, accompanied only by his dog, Spatula, traverses an impaired driving roadblock again and again, mesmerized by a beautiful policewoman. "A Forest Path" reappraises Malcolm Lowry's time in British Columbia through the voice of his embittered illegitimate son, while "The Alcoholist" concerns the last moments of Lyle Van Luven, the most delicate of professional tasters. This is, appropriately enough, addictive writing, and readers new to Gaston may find themselves in grave danger of getting hooked. --Jack Illingworth
From Publishers Weekly
A dozen rueful and gorgeously observed if sometimes oblique stories centered on the idea of appetites (their denial and their satisfaction) make up Gaston's (The Good Body; Sex Is Red; etc.) latest. In "The Alcoholist," a man with an exquisitely sensitive palate who is dying of cancer mourns all that he will no longer consume and, at the same time, makes peace with his death through the experience of one final intimate tasting. In "The Little Drug Addict Who Could," a young heroin addict, turning to his Uncle Jack for support as he tries to kick his habit, ends up introducing Jack to the drug, which is, the boy says, as magical as "sucking the big, beautiful breast. Not just any breast. Mother's breast. The best mother's breast.... It's like sucking Eve's breast." A heavy drinker's hopes for romance with a road-block cop are sweetly unrealistic in "Driving Under the Influence," and a fish researcher's sexual urges become tied to the fate of her latest aquatic subjects in "The Northern Cod." Gaston's prose is careful and probing, which makes up for a few rambling entries and the odd lethargic conclusion.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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NOT KNOWING WHAT WAS afoot in the next room, Mr. Oates told her to stand and take off her blouse. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
NOT KNOWING WHAT WAS afoot in the next room, Mr. Oates told her to stand and take off her blouse. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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