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The World Afloat — Miniatures by M.A.C. Farrant (Talonbooks $12.95)
Like everything else on this planet, fiction faces a simple choice; evolve or become extinct.
M.A.C. Farrant continues to make it clear she has no intention of walking with the dinosaurs.
With her new collection of surreal 'miniatures,' The World Afloat, Farrant reappears to remind us that CanLit still has a few bats in the attic.
While university creative writing departments from coast to coast are no doubt preparing a new generation of authors to follow in the footsteps of the Nobel Prize-winning Alice Munro, Farrant's The World Afloat is tuned to an FM wave-band in which brevity is the soul of writ, perhaps because contemporary narrative fiction has to compete with texts composed on cell phones.
A perceptive Globe & Mail reviewer once called Farrant "the bizarro Alice Munro,"; a particularly apt description of the narrative style of her collection, Darwin Alone in the Universe (Talonbooks, 2003).
While many of those stories superficially resembled traditional short stories in length and opening lines, we quickly found ourselves sucked through the looking-glass by a seductively subversive parody of conventional narrative that is disrupted by filmic jump-cuts and tectonic clashes of inner and outer reality. The cumulative effect leaves us feeling like patrons trapped in a fire-bombed cabaret where the comedy duo of Franz Kafka and Groucho Marx are working the smoldering stage because the show must go on.
The 'miniatures' of The World Afloat are briefer, and as wild as colourful birthday helium balloons released into a hurricane; small points of cheerful light whirled in a dark and violent wind.
In painting, Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico represent the extremes of surrealist art-Magritte's playful, cheerful juxtapositions in which defiance of gravity, 'floating,' is a recurrent theme, versus de Chirico's dark and deserted distorted cityscapes, anchored by unspeakable anxieties. These are the emotional poles of our inner lives, our dreams, and it's clear which side of the table Farrant hovers weightlessly above, tipping a signature bowler hat.
Necessarily surreal because of their extreme brevity, stories like those in The World Afloat used to be called 'postcard stories'-though nobody younger than your grandmother actually sends postcards anymore. It's not a new concept; Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway both struggled to write very short stories because they recognized that such stories demand not only more from the writer; they force readers to slow down, go back, re-read, and make sure they haven't missed not just something, but everything-the literary equivalent of Slow Food.
Nobel Prize-wining Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata wrote numerous (what he called) "palm of the hand"; stories, some of which were attempts to condense his already notably brief novels into a few terse paragraphs. In 1987, Quebec writer Gilles Archambault won the Governor General's Award for French language fiction for L'obsedante obese, (published in English as In a Minor Key by Oberon Books in 1990), a classic of the genre probably little-known to most English readers other than, possibly, M.A.C. Farrant.
Since the early 1990s, these kinds of stories have been called 'flash fictions' and published extensively on websites. Most of them are not memorable in the conventional sense. There are no ironic, dramatic plot twists in the manner of Maugham or de Maupassant. Like poems, or recalled fragments of dreams, these kinds of stories are meant to resonate, rather than reveal, to stir up the mental sludge, flush out the septic tank of the subconscious, to make us feel more truly aware and alive.
M.A.C. Farrant has made a career-a dozen books thus far, and counting-of literary subversion. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to don the rubber gloves and apron and put an edge on the knife if fictional narrative is to be more than a self-indulgent hobby for egoists or a domesticated cash cow for cynical hacks who'd rather be writing film scripts. 978-0889228382
John Moore reviews fiction from Garibaldi Highlands.
M.A.C. Farrant continues to make it clear she has no intention of walking with the dinosaurs.
With her new collection of surreal 'miniatures,' The World Afloat, Farrant reappears to remind us that CanLit still has a few bats in the attic.
While university creative writing departments from coast to coast are no doubt preparing a new generation of authors to follow in the footsteps of the Nobel Prize-winning Alice Munro, Farrant's The World Afloat is tuned to an FM wave-band in which brevity is the soul of writ, perhaps because contemporary narrative fiction has to compete with texts composed on cell phones.
A perceptive Globe & Mail reviewer once called Farrant "the bizarro Alice Munro,"; a particularly apt description of the narrative style of her collection, Darwin Alone in the Universe (Talonbooks, 2003).
While many of those stories superficially resembled traditional short stories in length and opening lines, we quickly found ourselves sucked through the looking-glass by a seductively subversive parody of conventional narrative that is disrupted by filmic jump-cuts and tectonic clashes of inner and outer reality. The cumulative effect leaves us feeling like patrons trapped in a fire-bombed cabaret where the comedy duo of Franz Kafka and Groucho Marx are working the smoldering stage because the show must go on.
The 'miniatures' of The World Afloat are briefer, and as wild as colourful birthday helium balloons released into a hurricane; small points of cheerful light whirled in a dark and violent wind.
In painting, Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico represent the extremes of surrealist art-Magritte's playful, cheerful juxtapositions in which defiance of gravity, 'floating,' is a recurrent theme, versus de Chirico's dark and deserted distorted cityscapes, anchored by unspeakable anxieties. These are the emotional poles of our inner lives, our dreams, and it's clear which side of the table Farrant hovers weightlessly above, tipping a signature bowler hat.
Necessarily surreal because of their extreme brevity, stories like those in The World Afloat used to be called 'postcard stories'-though nobody younger than your grandmother actually sends postcards anymore. It's not a new concept; Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway both struggled to write very short stories because they recognized that such stories demand not only more from the writer; they force readers to slow down, go back, re-read, and make sure they haven't missed not just something, but everything-the literary equivalent of Slow Food.
Nobel Prize-wining Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata wrote numerous (what he called) "palm of the hand"; stories, some of which were attempts to condense his already notably brief novels into a few terse paragraphs. In 1987, Quebec writer Gilles Archambault won the Governor General's Award for French language fiction for L'obsedante obese, (published in English as In a Minor Key by Oberon Books in 1990), a classic of the genre probably little-known to most English readers other than, possibly, M.A.C. Farrant.
Since the early 1990s, these kinds of stories have been called 'flash fictions' and published extensively on websites. Most of them are not memorable in the conventional sense. There are no ironic, dramatic plot twists in the manner of Maugham or de Maupassant. Like poems, or recalled fragments of dreams, these kinds of stories are meant to resonate, rather than reveal, to stir up the mental sludge, flush out the septic tank of the subconscious, to make us feel more truly aware and alive.
M.A.C. Farrant has made a career-a dozen books thus far, and counting-of literary subversion. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to don the rubber gloves and apron and put an edge on the knife if fictional narrative is to be more than a self-indulgent hobby for egoists or a domesticated cash cow for cynical hacks who'd rather be writing film scripts. 978-0889228382
John Moore reviews fiction from Garibaldi Highlands.
Submitted on March 6, 2014 in By David.
