Evidently the head trauma from a 1997 car accident has not inhibited W.P. Kinsella's imagination.

Unable to concentrate after being injured as a pedestrian, Kinsella did little for five years and considered himself to be retired-but has since become one of the country's top Scrabble competitors.

After a 15-year hiatus from publishing his work, the wizard of diamond lit and magic realism has rebounded with gusto for Butterfly Winter, another baseball novel.

"Butterfly Winter came about because I read an article about the migration of monarch butterflies from Canada and the USA to winter in Mexico,"; Kinsella told BCBW. "I made that into a short story. I had another short story about twins who play catch in their mother's womb. I combined the two stories for a novel, then rewrote it several times, changing narrators, and making the novel more of an interview.";

Two chapters were previously published in a slightly different form, as short stories. "Butterfly Winter,"; appeared in Red Wolf, Red Wolf, in 1987, and "The Battery,"; in The Thrill of the Grass, 1985.

Kinsella told BCBW his primary literary influence for Butterfly Winter was What The Crow Said, a novel by Robert Kroetsch. Quirky and convoluted, Kinsella's long-incubated novel offers cabbages waltzing, herons bayoneting villains and butterflies punishing evildoers.

The story is largely set in a fictional country called the Republic of Courteguay, located between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

"When I started the novel,"; Kinsella says, "I thought Courteguay was a real country in Central America, but it isn't, so I moved it to Hispaniola.";
[A Latin American dictatorship called Corteguay was first imagined by novelist Harold Robbins in The Adventurers, a trashy novel that became a trashy movie in 1969.-Ed]
Life in Courteguay changes with the arrival of a baseball missionary named Sandor Boatly who brings the word of baseball to the masses. There is an extremely unreliable narrator named The Wizard who says, "The word chronological is not in the Courteguayan language, neither is sequence.";

The considerable cast of characters in this novel turns out to be shorter than it appears. We realize the wizard and prime narrator is also Sandor Boatly, The Old Dictator, Jorge Blanco and Octavio Court, the founder and namesake of Courteguay, rolled into one. And could the wizard also be the villain, Dr. Lucius Noir, responsible for banishing baseball, for untold slaughters, and any number of despicable acts?

There's nothing our sleazy narrator can't do. He's as often the
villain as the hero. He rescues the
kidnapped Julio from the guerillas
by buying them off with colourful uniforms, descending grandly from the sky in his beloved hot air balloon.

The novel's protagonists are the pitching battery of Julio and Esteban who start playing catch in their mother's womb. These
miraculous twins are born to an impoverished and astonished couple, Hector and Fernandela Pimental.
As toddlers, the dashing Julio and plodding Esteban amazed international tourists who came to watch the diapered pair play baseball in their nursery. At ten, they were off to America to play on the "only major league baseball team in the True South,"; apparently the Atlanta Braves. Super star Julio will only pitch to his sibling, even though Esteban falls far short of his brother's brilliance.

The beautiful Quita Garza, Julio's true love, could conceivably also be an Alpha butterfly, or a heron, or exist in the retinue of one night stands to which Julio eventu-ally succumbs.
While much of the narration belongs to the wizard, a gringo jour-
nalist also elbows his way onto the
page, and, unlike the wizard, he does not shift shapes. He's just trying to do his job, attempting to sort out fact from fiction, past from present, and villain from champion.

The intrepid journalist has been over four months on the story, untangling the wizard's stories, and he's no longer on an expense account, but he is determined to write the history of Courteguay and its famous baseball twins.

Logic and time wobble about like the proverbial Jell-O on the wall; we have first-person segues into third-person narration in the same chapter, and people don't necessarily stay murdered.
The book's division into three sections, each with a myriad of short chapters, seems as whimsical as the plot. Each chapter is titled by a name: usually The Wizard, or The Gringo Journalist, occasionally Julio Pimental, Hector Pimental, (the twins' father), or Quita Garza. But that doesn't necessarily mean that chapter is delivered from that character's point of view, or that it will even have anything to do with that character.
With its time bending, shape shifting and death defying zaniness, Butterfly Winter kicks magic realism up a notch. The main thread of consistency is wonderful writing:

Properly played, baseball consisted of mathematics, geometry, art, philosophy, ballet, and carnival, all intertwined like the mystical ribbons of color in a rainbow.

Kinsella has been asked countless times by interviewers, 'why baseball?' He puts part of his answer into Sandor Boatly's excited revelation: "The field is not enclosed. The possibilities are endless. There is no whistle to suspend play, there is no clock to signal an ending.";

So the possibilities in Butterfly Winter are likewise endless.

"Magic is only something you haven't seen before,"; the wizard says to Julio.
So how come Butterfly Winter was released by a little-known imprint in Manitoba? That's almost as bizarre as the novel.

As the man who wrote Shoeless Joe, the basis for the movie, Field of Dreams, surely Kinsella can get published anywhere he chooses. But no way, Julio.
"Let's face it,"; Kinsella says, "the offer to publish from Enfield & Wizenty was the only offer. So I'm happy they decided to award me their Colophon Prize and publish the novel.

"Major publishers want huge sales. Something like 60% of all books are sold in Canada within a hundred miles of Toronto. I have never been a big seller in Ontario.

"My novel Box Socials sold like 70,000 hardcover copies in the USA, but when my next novel was ready they not only didn't want to buy it, they didn't want to read it. Reason? Not enough sales in Canada."; 978-1926531168

Cherie Thiessen reviews fiction from Pender Island.