Customer Reviews

Island: The Collected Stories of Alistair MacLeod

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I found the stories in Alistair MacLeod's Island to be beautifully moving--some incredibly powerful, others merely just very good. These are contemplative stories and because they all deal with similar underlying topics (but altogether different stories)--the return to the rural, the countryside's slow adaptation to change, youth contrasted with age--it makes sense to read these stories slowly, over several weeks. I believe reading these quickly may cause them to blend together, something you don't want to do because each story has its unique original beauty. MacLeod writes very carefully and his prose is very, I don't know, almost heavy, very powerful. You have to be in a contemplative mood, I believe, to appreciate these stories. This is not a collection for that cross country plane ride, or your week at the beach. Rather, these are stories to be savored slowly, in peace and quiet. Well done.

Fans of Alistair MacLeod, please understand -- I respect his writing abilities, but this book disappointed me. Perhaps it's too much in the vein of what little I've read of Hemingway and London -- but it just didn't hold me like I anticipated...and yes, I read it all the way through.

There were some stories I liked more than others -- but for the most part, I found them to be uninvolving. His descriptive talents are immense, and his feeling for his subjects and their setting -- Canada's beautiful but harsh Cape Breton Island, for the most part -- is obviously deep and heartfelt. Perhaps his characters and his storylines are just a little too rough-hewn for me, I can't really put my finger on it.

I'm glad I read this book -- I had heard a lot about MacLeod's work in the last year or so -- and I won't go so far as to recommend that others NOT read him. As I said, his talents are genuine and obvious, and others might enjoy these stories more than I did. By all means, if you enjoy reading the work of a craftsman, don't ignore this man's writing.

I've read collections of short stories in the past year that I enjoyed more -- by Russell Banks, John Biguenet, Adria Bernardi, and (my favorite) William Trevor.

I would have to agree with a previous reviewer who said that while he appreciates the works of such a talent as Alistair MacLeod, this book is just not my cup of tea and I don't really know why it's not. It could be that I just don't like short stories. I don't feel a connection with the characters as it takes time for character development...likely why I prefer a novel. I did read his novel "No Great Mischief" before reading this collection and loved it. I assumed I would love everything he wrote but I guess I was wrong. It was ok but not nearly as good in my opinion as his novel. So if you don't care for this collection of short stories, don't let that turn you against the writings of Alistair MacLeod. As I said previously, his novel was wonderful.

Alistair MacLeod writes of isolation and loneliness and loss. His characters are often solitary people, yet they are solitary people with a strong sense of both history and community...the community of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

MacLeod's characters are a dying breed, people we don't see many of these days: coal miners, fishermen, farmers, lighthouse keepers. They are a people held together by a strong Gaelic thread; they speak Gaelic, sing Gaelic songs and live lives upheld and reinforced by strong Gaelic traditions. They are a rural people and they very much prefer things to stay the way they have been.

But, as we all know, things never stay the way they have been. MacLeod's rural characters are the older ones. The younger ones have left the lonely farms of Cape Breton to work and study in the cities. The tourists are moving in, and, finding the Cape Breton landscape "unspoiled," and, therefore, very much to their liking, they are spoiling and defiling it, taking the first steps toward turning it into the very thing from which they wish to escape.

In "Island," MacLeod, writes mainly of the modern, city-wise, young people who come home to visit the dying world from which they wanted to escape. What they find is a world and a culture that will not die, that refuses to be obliterated. "The Closing Down of Summer" is a story that illustrates this persistence of the past perfectly.

MacLeod is at his best in this collection of stories. His prose is emotional but never maudlin, precise but never terse and it possesses a rhythm so Gaelic it can't fail to strike a chord of recognition in anyone who is in the least bit familiar with Cape Breton and its inhabitants. MacLeod is not a "rural" writer, yet his love for the rural is one thread that wends its way through all of these disparate tales.

To the uninitiated, MacLeod may seem a bit artificial in his dialogue. He's not. He's just being "Cape Breton" to the core. The dialogue of Nova Scotia is a dramatic one, full of artifice and beautifully cadenced. MacLeod captures all of this perfectly.

The stories in "Island" are simple, honest, earnest stories about simple, honest, earnest folk. They may, at times, sound a bit naive, but that's just the total honesty of them. And, it is the very thing that makes them so beautiful and unforgettable.

Some of these stories are older stories, so they may have a bit of an old-fashioned ring to them. Don't let that put you off. MacLeod isn't old-fashioned, he's timeless, and this book proves it. These stories, revolving around a vanishing people and a disappearing way of life, are marvelous, contemplative creations and it would certainly be a shame to miss them.

MacLeod's stories evoke a sense of place better than most living writers. He does not rend his characters with relentless descriptions of their appearance (in fact, in some of the stories, the characters have no names and we are given little or no hint of what they look like); rather, they seem to emerge from the very landscape the author describes. They are coal miners, fishermen, lighthouse keepers and their wives and children, living in a part of the world that is alternately gorgeous and ferocious. MacLeod recognizes that this is all we need to know of them to understand their lives. What is even more impressive than MacLeod's elegant, understated style is the fact that the stories in Island were published over the course of 30 years, from the late '60s to 1999. Yet the author's voice and the quality of his craftsmanship are so masterful, the span of time between the stories is virtually indiscernible. This is what makes literature classic.

Alistair MacLeod leads us to a community that is both foreign (to those far from Atlantic coast Canada) and deeply familiar. You can't help but be moved. It's literary excellence that you don't notice until the story is complete. Perhaps his greatest feat: despite the rawness of emotion shown here, you still want to visit this haunting corner of the world.

I needed to read these stories after finding MacLeod's No Great Mischief. His scene is Cape Breton. His times are those of his unfolding generations of Scots. His style is idiosycratic. He can make you believe that he was there, whenever the time, whoever the family, whatever the cameo experience.

MacLeod uses the voices of generations of Canadians who always remember that they are Scots. They are Scottish even if they have never seen their country or never even know just where their forebears belonged.

The stories are simple. In the Golden Gift of Grey, eighteen year old Jesse pockets his first pool balls and his first winning dollars. Macleod makes scenes like this live through the smells of the bar, its men's washroom and the gyrations of the dancer. The edge of Jesse's tension is seen through the limp, damp dollar notes of his winnings, crammed in a ball in his pockets. The twist to end the story is satisfying, if predictable.

Some of the stories are tough and tell of a harsh life. Again MacLeod evokes his scenes through heat and cold, rain and hail and snow and through light and dark. His men can be mean and cautious, but also complicated and kind, especially the many grandfathers. In To Everything There is a Season, Macleod is able to build a tension in a little story about a son's homecoming at Christmas that would do justice to a suspense story.

Macleod is a craftsman writer. He shows his characters through their scenes rather than through descriptive narrative about personality. These are very satisfying stories and I have to say that I hunger for more of the tales of Cape Breton from this writer.

Alistair MacLeod is a Canadian national treasure. I hope they appreciate his talent as much as I. This collection reaches deep in to the psyche of natives of Cape Breton Island, descended from strong Scottish stock, roots deep within the land and the hard work necessary to maintain life and soul on the sometimes unforgiving islands.

The writing is lyrical with wonderful glimpses of Gaelic, which few of us know anything about. MacLeod's use of Gaelic, his talk of farm living and mankind's link with the sea, and more importantly, mankind's link with the past enable the reader to intimately feel the island culture, separate from the rest of Canada.

The tone is mournful, graceful, and paradoxically, both harsh and kind. Each story is self-contained. I usually had to stop between stories to allow the last one ot settle within me. Such power and understanding!

Macleod's sixteen short stories are a treasure, tales of growing up, going away, coming home, and dying, on the beautiful and terrible island of Cape Breton. I didn't love them all, but each contains wonderfully evocative passages that demand one pause and savor the scene and characters.

I read this book over a period of 10 days; I suggest readers make it last 10 weeks.

One of the wise Elders in the story says. "Music is the lubricant of the poor all over the world. In all the different languages." Books like these and the people who write them provide the same comfort, and encouragement, and are a gift for readers to continue reading when there seems to be less writing of this caliber produced. The quote from the first paragraph is actually from Mr. Alistair MacLeod's work, "No Great Mischief". It was the first novel he wrote and was one of the finest reading experiences in the last several years for me. This collection of short stories was published in 2 separate books prior to his novel, and they distinguished him as one of the great talents writing today.

These stories may indeed be short when measured by the page; however any given piece that you care to choose is essentially faultless. The concept of, "second sight", is a subject that arises in some of these tales, and while Mr. MacLeod may not have that particular brand of vision, he like any great writer does see things differently than most people perceive them. And his sensitivity to detail extends to the other senses, and then he is able to place it upon pages for the rest of us to enjoy. He engages the reader on every level with the environment he creates, the sounds, and the very texture of the places he brings you to. This is the kind of work that you get so deeply involved with that you think about these people as real, as real as the names of the places they live, work, and die that appear on a map.

I don't believe there is one transcendent theme he is presenting with these stories, there is far too much involved in each to place a label on them all. The climate is as vital as many of his characters, and he imbues it with personality that is nearly sentient. Water provides the food for eating and employment, to illustrate tradition, and to show its demise. It cruelly takes life, when as ice it is deceptive and kills, then provides the stage for heroic deeds, and also crossings that bring forth new human life to its shores. And when it is neither liquid nor solid but an amalgam, it becomes a barrier that forces a person to watch the passage of two caskets containing her Parents as the funeral cortège proceeds on the unreachable far shore.

The Author will take every emotion and not just make you feel it, but at times hurt or suffer from the intensity that he brings with his writing. A Grandmother holds her 11-year-old grandchild, and says that of her 30 grandchildren she will never know him, as his Parents do not value visits home. And the husband, his Grandfather tells the child if the interval of time is the same until he again visits, there will be no meeting as the Patriarch will most certainly be dead. Cruel words to a child? Not when this man writes the exchange. What comes through is truth and the acceptance of it, pleasant or not.

New technology may keep all books available sometime in the near future but that does not mean availability creates demand. Very few Authors write work that is so special that readers are interested in the work today, and in 100 years from now. This man is just such an Author. He is the type of writer that causes people to read for the pleasure of his thoughts.

Unconditionally recommended!