Home
Keath Fraser was born in Vancouver on December 24th, 1944. The remarkable range of his stories has drawn high praise from the country's most discriminating critics. He has traveled extensively throughout the world, lived in London, England from 1970 to '73 and taught in Calgary for five years. He gave up a tenured position teaching university English and began writing fiction fulltime in 1980, returning to live in Vancouver where his wife is a teacher. His first collection of stories, Taking Cover (1982) prompted Canadian Fiction Magazine to devote an entire issue, number 49, to publish two of his novellas. His work has been recognized relatively quickly by his peers and the country's leading literary magazines but Fraser remains almost unheralded in his hometown. "The Vancouver Sun is just pitiful, the book pages they have. It's just tragic, the lack of solicitation to local writers,"; he said in the 1980s. "We are now getting reviews by Margaret Atwood which I read one week in The New York Times, appearing the next week in the Vancouver Sun. So we are getting book reviews by Canadian writers now through the filter of cheaper, American wire services. Until that situation improves at our largest newspaper, local recognition of our writers isn't going to improve either.";
Fraser's stories are primarily set in Vancouver and are assertively local to an unprecedented degree. Only Vancouver readers can possibly catch all the nuances of offhand references to personalities such as Tony Parsons, Ron Zalko or Chunky Woodward, or locales mentioned casually and without explanation. ("I pinch the odd tie off Chunky Woodward but listen. It stops there, eh?";) His style is deeply serious and condensive, apparently colloquial and slapdash, yet riveting and strange, as he invites his reader into a maze of clues which cumulatively evolve into a non-linear story.
The diversity of characters and approaches to storytelling in Foreign Affairs, and his original prose techniques, prompted Toronto critic Ken Adachi to recommend the book for a Governor General's Award in the Toronto Star. The first story, 'Waiting', enters the mind of a Vancouver Hindu who is a waiter in a high class French restaurant. 'The Emerald City' unravels the turmoil of an adulterous TV gardening show host. 'Teeth' is about a fatal camping expedition by two retired brothers in mobile homes who encounter a bizarre sect in the woods north of Pemberton. '13 Ways of Listening to a Stranger' captures the communal atmosphere of a Vancouver boarding house where the male residents unite each evening to watch the CTV evening news.
The best and longest story, 'Foreign Affairs' succeeds in making attractive the complex problems of a frustrated invalid and the confused social alienation of his waifish, punk-haired companion. Passing the English Bay bathhouse during Sea Festival, "His gaze is determined to covet everything. The filmy blouses of thin-strapped, heavy-breasted girls in white jeans and black heels. Helium balloons shaped like silver salmon tied to the wrists of oriental infants. Bowling pins in the air around a juggler's head. The mincing steps of male couples in pressed jeans and white sneakers. Sloops and yawls of drinking revelers anchored offshore in the twilight. An apricot sky turning tomato, and the mountains of Vancouver Island standing up to a pink apocalypse.";
Fraser is understandably concerned that the literary culture of Vancouver has yet to cohere and his reputation at home is almost non-existent. Besides blaming the Vancouver Sun, he describes the cultural policies of the B.C. provincial government as "philistine. It's pitiful when you think that I'm getting more money, more support, from the government of Ontario than I'll ever get out of the government of B.C. When you consider that we have such a strong artistic constituency on the West Coast, it's absurd."; But he is simultaneously devoted to local turf. "I can't imagine living elsewhere and trying to write about it. For all the drawbacks, this is a privileged place to be for a writer. It's such virgin territory.";
In 1986 Fraser is tending an infant son and completing a novel. He is a close literary friend of Sinclair Ross.
Fraser's stories are primarily set in Vancouver and are assertively local to an unprecedented degree. Only Vancouver readers can possibly catch all the nuances of offhand references to personalities such as Tony Parsons, Ron Zalko or Chunky Woodward, or locales mentioned casually and without explanation. ("I pinch the odd tie off Chunky Woodward but listen. It stops there, eh?";) His style is deeply serious and condensive, apparently colloquial and slapdash, yet riveting and strange, as he invites his reader into a maze of clues which cumulatively evolve into a non-linear story.
The diversity of characters and approaches to storytelling in Foreign Affairs, and his original prose techniques, prompted Toronto critic Ken Adachi to recommend the book for a Governor General's Award in the Toronto Star. The first story, 'Waiting', enters the mind of a Vancouver Hindu who is a waiter in a high class French restaurant. 'The Emerald City' unravels the turmoil of an adulterous TV gardening show host. 'Teeth' is about a fatal camping expedition by two retired brothers in mobile homes who encounter a bizarre sect in the woods north of Pemberton. '13 Ways of Listening to a Stranger' captures the communal atmosphere of a Vancouver boarding house where the male residents unite each evening to watch the CTV evening news.
The best and longest story, 'Foreign Affairs' succeeds in making attractive the complex problems of a frustrated invalid and the confused social alienation of his waifish, punk-haired companion. Passing the English Bay bathhouse during Sea Festival, "His gaze is determined to covet everything. The filmy blouses of thin-strapped, heavy-breasted girls in white jeans and black heels. Helium balloons shaped like silver salmon tied to the wrists of oriental infants. Bowling pins in the air around a juggler's head. The mincing steps of male couples in pressed jeans and white sneakers. Sloops and yawls of drinking revelers anchored offshore in the twilight. An apricot sky turning tomato, and the mountains of Vancouver Island standing up to a pink apocalypse.";
Fraser is understandably concerned that the literary culture of Vancouver has yet to cohere and his reputation at home is almost non-existent. Besides blaming the Vancouver Sun, he describes the cultural policies of the B.C. provincial government as "philistine. It's pitiful when you think that I'm getting more money, more support, from the government of Ontario than I'll ever get out of the government of B.C. When you consider that we have such a strong artistic constituency on the West Coast, it's absurd."; But he is simultaneously devoted to local turf. "I can't imagine living elsewhere and trying to write about it. For all the drawbacks, this is a privileged place to be for a writer. It's such virgin territory.";
In 1986 Fraser is tending an infant son and completing a novel. He is a close literary friend of Sinclair Ross.
Submitted on August 13, 2003 in By David.
