Drug of choice

Alcohol is the catalyst in short siories that launch Canadian thematic anthology series

Ounce of Cure. Alcohol in the Canadian short story, Anthology edited by Mark Anthony Jarman, Beach Holme Publishers,

$14.95.

EFORE YOU start drooling over or dreading yet

another rehashed account of what Morley Callaghan

said to the half-swacked Hemingway before biffing him silly in their famous Paris boxing match in the ’20s, be advised that this is nota potpourri of anecdotes about drunk writers, Canadians or otherwise.

“In this anthology | wanted good stories where alcohol is a catalyst, a virus in the language, a strangely familiar shadow at the elbow. | want io reflect the attrac- tion and repulsion of booze, the crazy ambiguities our culture has regarding alcohol, most people’s drug of choice,’’ editor Mark Jar- man says in his introduction, and this distinctive collection certainly fulfils the mandate.

The stories span an impressive gulf, from Alice Munro’s title story, an almost unbearably realistic tale of a teenage babysitter’: disastrous first encounter with liquid courage, to Michel Tremblay’s surrea! hallucinatory horror-fan- tasy, “Fifth Drinker: Gerblicht’s Wine.”

Some, but by no means all, are set in bars, those impromptu stages where very littie actually happens, but where human beings are transformed, after sufficient in- fusions, into the personae of Greek tragedy, declaiming the stories of their lives, J.B. Joe’s “In

John Moore BOOK REVIEW

the Loony Bin,’’ Lois Braun’s ‘Yohnny Winkler,’ and Sandra Smith's ‘‘tnsta-Wed"’ brilliantly capture the bizarre ambience of the public confessional/barroom where the bottomless keg of human sadness is tapped.

tn most of the stories, Guy Vanderhaeghe’s ‘‘Man Descen- ding,’ W.D. Valgardson’s “Celebration,” and Linda Svend- sen’s “Who He Slept By,” alcohol is not the subject, but merely the lubricant on the slip- pery slope of lives already com-

Locai authors in print

Paul Deggan, of North Van- couver: All Our Summers are French, Estival Press, 176 pp., $14.95 paper, August 1992 release. This book recounts in vivid and amusing detail how Deggan, a painter, and his French wife Babette fell in love, began a family and founded a school of painting, French Jan- guage and creative writing in the medieval hilltop village of Mon- taigut-le-Blanc.

Virginia Jones Harpe, of North Vancouver: Time Steals Softly, Dorrance Publishing, 221 pp., $16.95 hardcover. This historical novel chronicles the fascinating story of Lydia Boggs Shepherd Cruger, an independent, deter- mined woman who played a vital tole in the development of northwestern Virginia from the time spanning the American Revolutionary War until the Civil War.

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mitted to slow self-destruction.

What is especially notable about this collection is that, in spite of (or because of) Jarman’s unusual premise and eclectic, admittedly somewhat whimsical editorial criteria, he’s found newcomers like Diane Falck, Sandra Smith and Levi Dronyk who aren’t dwarfed in the company of heavy-hitters like Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Hugh Garner et.al.

Ounce of Cure is the first of a series of ‘‘thematic anthologies’’ promised by Victoria’s Beach Holme Publishers. If the ones that fotlow are up to this imaginative standard, we have some exciting reading to look forward to.

I drink to that. Pass the Perrier, please,

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