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Down the Road to Eternity: New and Selected Fiction
Down the Road to Eternity: New and Selected Fiction by M.A.C. Farrant (Talonbooks $19.95)
A self-proclaimed "archaeologist of the absurd,"; M.A.C.(Marion) Farrant of Sidney is perhaps Canada's most ascerbic and intelligent humourist. Farrant's stories are not fiction in any conventional sense. Don't expect to find much character development, or conflict, or plot (in other words, realism) on her pages.
Down the Road to Eternity: New and Selected Stories is a fantastic trip through twenty years of metaphorical and metaphysical imaginings.
Most of the stories are short, some no longer than a page. Other selections are essays, vignettes, stream-of-consciousness musings and internal monologues.
Throughout it is the author's wild imagination, her willingness to break the rules, that is on display, that creates the fireworks.
It seems Farrant can (and does) write convincingly on just about any subject, finding humour (and pathos) in the most unlikely places.
Where else would you find a conversation between Barbie and her younger sister Skipper, a funeral for a budgie who has committed suicide, or a man serving as material for his wife's fiction who lives in a cage?
Farrant's stories can be wickedly funny, but they are rarely clever for the sake of being clever (okay the description of the nativity scene made out of luncheon meat may be an exception).
Generally, though, there is a seriousness, an awareness of uncomfortable truths anchoring the metaphorical flights, and of course this is what the absurd is all about: finding a way to talk about things we can't talk about any other way.
Farrant is a trapeze artist of the imagination, swinging over the existential void.
We meet a hermit who digs himself a trench as a bulwark against a postmodern age, a man suffering from EDT (end times trauma), street poets facing extinction, and a husband who won't get off the couch until the polar ice cap stops melting.
The selections from Farrant's earliest collection, Sick Pigeon, though still fanciful, read more like conventional stories than her later ones, with their tales of the lonely and the dispossessed.
One story is about a nineteen-year-old welfare mother with seventeen cats who barricades the door against the social workers. They are always asking, "How does it feel, Sybilla, to be on welfare? Oh terrific. No, really Sybilla, how does it really make you feel?";
In her second collection, Raw Material, Farrant unleashes her genius for the absurd. Her writing becomes more daring, more zany.
In The Comma Threat, a woman is giving away commas. "I gave some to my aunt to decorate her curtains; she flung handfuls of them against the drapes hoping for a Jackson Pollock effect."; When all the commas are gone, the piece turns into one long run-on sentence.
Bright Gymnasium of Fun is an absurd riff on the people who make laugh tracks. Who are these people? Who pays them? Without them, how would we know what is funny?
One of the funniest stories, The Heartspeak Wellness Retreat, spoofs the pseudo-profundity of New Age beliefs. The characters include a couple who consult a book called Instant Feng Shui. They decide they must bomb their house to get rid of bad karma.
Farrant frequently invokes the names of the great masters of literature and art, musing on the works of Blake, Borges, Nabokov, Chekhov, and Georgia O'Keefe, among others. Sometimes she writes stories about actual writers, one involves eating beans with Leonard Cohen and another recounts Dorothy Parker's rounds of cocktail parties at the Algonquin Hotel.
My favorite of the stories in this vein is Alice & Stein, a mini-biography of the literary icon Gertrude Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas.
Stein, who is busy "building platforms"; for herself from which to make her pronouncements on art, is juxtaposed with her amanuensis (Alice) who sweeps floors and types manuscripts, but nonetheless manages to have her own "white wine with breakfast"; period. The reader is left wondering whose life has been better, the one who creates, or the lover who loves.
The selections from the most recent work, North Pole, tend to be more philosophical as the mature artist contemplates the diminishing days, struggles to define what writing should be, and considers the surreal prospect of the nursing home.
But shot through the darkness are explosions of light: small epiphanies, unexpected revelations, quiet affirmations.
"There are times when the experience of living in this world is rapturous. And there are times when it curls us crying in our beds. Between these extremes we tell each other what we know...";
987-0-88922-615-9
A new collection of Farrant's personal essays on family life, The Secret Lives of Litter Bugs (Key Porter Books $17.95) was also published earlier this year. These complement her coming-of-age memoir, My Turquoise Years, published in 2004.
-- review by Sheila Munro, a freelance writer in Powell River.
[BCBW 2009]
A self-proclaimed "archaeologist of the absurd,"; M.A.C.(Marion) Farrant of Sidney is perhaps Canada's most ascerbic and intelligent humourist. Farrant's stories are not fiction in any conventional sense. Don't expect to find much character development, or conflict, or plot (in other words, realism) on her pages.
Down the Road to Eternity: New and Selected Stories is a fantastic trip through twenty years of metaphorical and metaphysical imaginings.
Most of the stories are short, some no longer than a page. Other selections are essays, vignettes, stream-of-consciousness musings and internal monologues.
Throughout it is the author's wild imagination, her willingness to break the rules, that is on display, that creates the fireworks.
It seems Farrant can (and does) write convincingly on just about any subject, finding humour (and pathos) in the most unlikely places.
Where else would you find a conversation between Barbie and her younger sister Skipper, a funeral for a budgie who has committed suicide, or a man serving as material for his wife's fiction who lives in a cage?
Farrant's stories can be wickedly funny, but they are rarely clever for the sake of being clever (okay the description of the nativity scene made out of luncheon meat may be an exception).
Generally, though, there is a seriousness, an awareness of uncomfortable truths anchoring the metaphorical flights, and of course this is what the absurd is all about: finding a way to talk about things we can't talk about any other way.
Farrant is a trapeze artist of the imagination, swinging over the existential void.
We meet a hermit who digs himself a trench as a bulwark against a postmodern age, a man suffering from EDT (end times trauma), street poets facing extinction, and a husband who won't get off the couch until the polar ice cap stops melting.
The selections from Farrant's earliest collection, Sick Pigeon, though still fanciful, read more like conventional stories than her later ones, with their tales of the lonely and the dispossessed.
One story is about a nineteen-year-old welfare mother with seventeen cats who barricades the door against the social workers. They are always asking, "How does it feel, Sybilla, to be on welfare? Oh terrific. No, really Sybilla, how does it really make you feel?";
In her second collection, Raw Material, Farrant unleashes her genius for the absurd. Her writing becomes more daring, more zany.
In The Comma Threat, a woman is giving away commas. "I gave some to my aunt to decorate her curtains; she flung handfuls of them against the drapes hoping for a Jackson Pollock effect."; When all the commas are gone, the piece turns into one long run-on sentence.
Bright Gymnasium of Fun is an absurd riff on the people who make laugh tracks. Who are these people? Who pays them? Without them, how would we know what is funny?
One of the funniest stories, The Heartspeak Wellness Retreat, spoofs the pseudo-profundity of New Age beliefs. The characters include a couple who consult a book called Instant Feng Shui. They decide they must bomb their house to get rid of bad karma.
Farrant frequently invokes the names of the great masters of literature and art, musing on the works of Blake, Borges, Nabokov, Chekhov, and Georgia O'Keefe, among others. Sometimes she writes stories about actual writers, one involves eating beans with Leonard Cohen and another recounts Dorothy Parker's rounds of cocktail parties at the Algonquin Hotel.
My favorite of the stories in this vein is Alice & Stein, a mini-biography of the literary icon Gertrude Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas.
Stein, who is busy "building platforms"; for herself from which to make her pronouncements on art, is juxtaposed with her amanuensis (Alice) who sweeps floors and types manuscripts, but nonetheless manages to have her own "white wine with breakfast"; period. The reader is left wondering whose life has been better, the one who creates, or the lover who loves.
The selections from the most recent work, North Pole, tend to be more philosophical as the mature artist contemplates the diminishing days, struggles to define what writing should be, and considers the surreal prospect of the nursing home.
But shot through the darkness are explosions of light: small epiphanies, unexpected revelations, quiet affirmations.
"There are times when the experience of living in this world is rapturous. And there are times when it curls us crying in our beds. Between these extremes we tell each other what we know...";
987-0-88922-615-9
A new collection of Farrant's personal essays on family life, The Secret Lives of Litter Bugs (Key Porter Books $17.95) was also published earlier this year. These complement her coming-of-age memoir, My Turquoise Years, published in 2004.
-- review by Sheila Munro, a freelance writer in Powell River.
[BCBW 2009]
Submitted on September 3, 2009 in By David.
