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Pleased To Meet You
Holder of two Ethel Wilson Fiction Prizes and three CBC literary awards, Caroline Adderson has followed her two novels and one previous story collection with Pleased to Meet You (Thomas Allen $26.95). Each of her nine new stories reflects a differing reality with meticulous precision, describing all-too-believable characters who run the gamut from suffering and seedy, to compassionate and culpable.
In the title story, Hauska Tutustua-a Finnish phrase that means pleased to meet you-David Elton has lost his beloved wife and finds it hard to cope a year after her death. As a volunteer with the Hospice Society, he visits and assists a dying man from Finland. Oddly touched by the bachelor's lonely death, Elton attempts to find the daughter the dead man abandoned at birth in Finland.
In Ring, Ring we meet the indolent young mother of a mentally challenged boy; the last person who should have responsibility for a special needs child-the kind of parent who makes us want to pick up the phone and call the authorities.
"Dumpster stench, fried chicken stench. She flicks the lighter, dully expecting the unmoving air to ignite. A moustache of perspiration sprouts as she sucks the hot smoke in....The balconies of the facing building expose themselves: bicycles, junked furniture, mops, buckets, toys, coolers, bleach bottles, mattresses, dead plants in plastic pots. Some are fringed with laundry. Rap music punches out.";
By selecting images, styles and syntax to reflect the environments her characters inhabit, Adderson succeeds in creating a specific mood for each story. At every conclusion we find ourselves uplifted, disgusted, angry or depressed. Her skill is so insidious we're hardly aware of it.
Readers may not be pleased to meet some of the characters in Pleased to Meet You, such as Manfred, the decidedly unpleasant protagonist in Spleenless. As a shallow, selfish, and womanizing bachelor who is recovering from an emergency splenectomy, Manfred suffers loneliness and an agonizing nightmare. The ex-wife he's decided he really loves is not masochist enough to leave her new husband and baby for another tortured round with him, and his current love abandons him to go on the trip the couple had planned to take together.
In Adderson's deftly drawn Shhhh. 3 Stories About Silence, readers accompany a reporter and photographer on a frustrating assignment during which a casual relationship shifts and shimmers with the possibility of seduction.
In The Maternity Suite, a reluctant husband, who is about to become an even more reluctant father, stews over his wife's pregnancy. The use of subtitles: The Reluctant Grandmother, The Expectant Mother, The Suspecting Father, and The Unexpected, serve the author well as she shifts from the various points of view.
Adderson is also adept at portraying her minor characters. These include the degenerate elderly woman who agrees to 'babysit' the handicapped boy in Ring Ring; the reporter's depressed, cartoonist husband in Shhh: 3 Stories About Silence; the pregnant woman's jealous sister in The Maternity Suite; and the feisty dying Finn the widower has been visiting in Hauska Tutustua.
The collection also includes gentle, sympathetic stories about the ordinary people who enhance our lives; people like the underwriter in Falling, a graceful tale about a middle-aged, staid husband and father who is jolted out of his daily routine by his wife's minor accident with his car. Forced to take a bus, he is exposed to poetry that shares space alongside the bus's advertisements. Amazed that poetry still exists, he reads a poem fifteen times and finds himself subtly and unexpectedly transformed towards grace.
Every story delivers just enough to disturb, delight, and fascinate.
-- by Cherie Thiessen
In the title story, Hauska Tutustua-a Finnish phrase that means pleased to meet you-David Elton has lost his beloved wife and finds it hard to cope a year after her death. As a volunteer with the Hospice Society, he visits and assists a dying man from Finland. Oddly touched by the bachelor's lonely death, Elton attempts to find the daughter the dead man abandoned at birth in Finland.
In Ring, Ring we meet the indolent young mother of a mentally challenged boy; the last person who should have responsibility for a special needs child-the kind of parent who makes us want to pick up the phone and call the authorities.
"Dumpster stench, fried chicken stench. She flicks the lighter, dully expecting the unmoving air to ignite. A moustache of perspiration sprouts as she sucks the hot smoke in....The balconies of the facing building expose themselves: bicycles, junked furniture, mops, buckets, toys, coolers, bleach bottles, mattresses, dead plants in plastic pots. Some are fringed with laundry. Rap music punches out.";
By selecting images, styles and syntax to reflect the environments her characters inhabit, Adderson succeeds in creating a specific mood for each story. At every conclusion we find ourselves uplifted, disgusted, angry or depressed. Her skill is so insidious we're hardly aware of it.
Readers may not be pleased to meet some of the characters in Pleased to Meet You, such as Manfred, the decidedly unpleasant protagonist in Spleenless. As a shallow, selfish, and womanizing bachelor who is recovering from an emergency splenectomy, Manfred suffers loneliness and an agonizing nightmare. The ex-wife he's decided he really loves is not masochist enough to leave her new husband and baby for another tortured round with him, and his current love abandons him to go on the trip the couple had planned to take together.
In Adderson's deftly drawn Shhhh. 3 Stories About Silence, readers accompany a reporter and photographer on a frustrating assignment during which a casual relationship shifts and shimmers with the possibility of seduction.
In The Maternity Suite, a reluctant husband, who is about to become an even more reluctant father, stews over his wife's pregnancy. The use of subtitles: The Reluctant Grandmother, The Expectant Mother, The Suspecting Father, and The Unexpected, serve the author well as she shifts from the various points of view.
Adderson is also adept at portraying her minor characters. These include the degenerate elderly woman who agrees to 'babysit' the handicapped boy in Ring Ring; the reporter's depressed, cartoonist husband in Shhh: 3 Stories About Silence; the pregnant woman's jealous sister in The Maternity Suite; and the feisty dying Finn the widower has been visiting in Hauska Tutustua.
The collection also includes gentle, sympathetic stories about the ordinary people who enhance our lives; people like the underwriter in Falling, a graceful tale about a middle-aged, staid husband and father who is jolted out of his daily routine by his wife's minor accident with his car. Forced to take a bus, he is exposed to poetry that shares space alongside the bus's advertisements. Amazed that poetry still exists, he reads a poem fifteen times and finds himself subtly and unexpectedly transformed towards grace.
Every story delivers just enough to disturb, delight, and fascinate.
-- by Cherie Thiessen
Submitted on November 15, 2006 in By David.
