by Guy Vanderhaeghe
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by Miriam Toews
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Product Description
Amazon.ca
First published in 1982, Guy Vanderhaeghe's Man Descending, a collection of 12 finely crafted short stories set mostly on the Canadian Prairies, won Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction (an award that Vanderhaeghe won again in 1996 for his novel The Englishman's Boy). Showing tremendous range, Vanderhaeghe is equally adept at taking on the voice of an 11-year-old boy stuck on a dusty farm or an unemployed husband (the "descending man" of the title) whose marriage, like his scotch, is on the rocks. His characters--men, women, or children--are wholly believable and achingly human. There are no superheroes here, just real human beings with all their foibles and failings, charms and weaknesses.
Vanderhaeghe is particularly skilled at describing his creations: the grandmother with a "vinegary voice"; the father who was a "desolate, lanky, drooping weed of a man"; the child who is "loose-jointed" and "water-boned" with boredom; the husband with the "I'm-a-harmless-idiot-don't-hit-me smile." The dialogue flows with the patterns and ripples of genuine speech caught alive and still breathing, especially in "Going to Russia," in which a lunatic recalls his interview with a doctor. As they discuss a series of letters in a wonderfully resonant and twisting conversation, the two characters turn out to be tracing the ways art imitates life (and vice versa). These are rich, satisfying stories with a touch of wry humour. Despite their layers of meaning, which can reward rereading, they travel lightly. They are like the Prairies, in fact: allowing a clear view all the way to the horizon but revealing intriguing detail on closer inspection. --Mark Frutkin --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Product Description
These superbly crafted stories reveal an astonishing range, with settings that vary from a farm on the Canadian prairies to Bloomsbury in London, from a high-rise apartment to a mine-shaft. Vanderhaeghe has the uncanny ability to show us the world through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy as convincingly as he reveals it through the eyes of an old man approaching senility. Moving from the hilarious farce of teenage romance all the way to the numbing tragedy of life in a ward for incurables, these twelve stories inspire belief, admiration, and enjoyment, and come together to form a vibrant chronicle of human experience from a gifted observer of life’s joys and tribulations. This is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s brilliant first book of fiction.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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