Forms of Devotion: Stories and Pictures - Hardcover

Schoemperlen, Diane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002245663 ISBN 13: 9780002245661

Publisher: Harpercollins Canada, 1998

Synopsis

Diane Schoemperlen's acclaimed In the Language of Love expanded our expectations of the contemporary novel, using everyday words to deconstruct a young woman's life and loves. In her new short story collection,Forms of Devotion, she again tests the bounds of her craft, creating an arresting and wonderfully readable work that is also a treat for the eye.

Forms of Devotion contains eleven stories, each one a brilliant interplay of words and images. The illustrations, selected by Schoemperlen and depicting almost every subject imaginable, are wood engravings and line drawings from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In some cases, she was inspired to write the story after studying the illustrations; in other cases, she wrote the story first, then chose or constructed the pictures to accompany it. The result is a playful, sometimes surreal and often mysterious juxtaposition of a historical fascination with anatomy and classical themes with the author's contemporary exploration of everyday people, places and things.

Each story is a creative delight, perfectly formed and rich in mischievous wit, irony and multi-layered meaning. The title story, “Forms of Devotion,” is a wonderful literary cataloguing of the traits and qualities of the faithful, those who “sail off to work, perfect confident that they will indeed get there: on time, intact. It does not occur to them that they could just as well be broadsided by a Coca-Cola delivery truck running the red light at the corner of Johnson and Main.” “Five Small Rooms” is an intriguing, spectral journey into the narrator's imagination, with the reader left wondering, “Is it madness or a murder mystery?” In “How Deep is the River,” the author offers an innovative, completely compelling take on the ubiquitous high school math problem that begins “Train A and Train B are traveling toward the same bridge from opposite directions...”

Quite different in form, yet alike in their ability to entertain and provoke, the stories inForms of Devotion show once again that Diane Schoemperlen's voice is as intriguing, fresh and electric as ever.

About this title

About the Author:

Award Winner "Forms of Devotion" is the winner of the 1998 Governor General's Award for English Fiction, Canada's most prestigious literary prize. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Echoing her first novel's artifice (In the Language of Love, 1996), Schoemperlen uses images culled largely from the 18th and 19th centuries as inspiration for her storytelling, winding up with a string of aborted experiments. It may be inaccurate even to call all 11 pieces here stories, since several are witty, wicked mock pieces of social commentary. The title piece offers ten categories for understanding ``the faithful,'' defined through reference to such things as innocence, abundance, and hope, and using as illustrations of these qualities engravings of good burgher-citizens leading unremarkable, inane lives. Similarly, a decorative alphabet seems to have been the inspiration of the concluding piece, ``Rules of Thumb,'' in which the text appended to each letter offers ironic advice on everything from well-being to xenophilia, lampooning those who think too well of themselves to accept the burgher label. Sandwiched between these is more ironic material, ranging from the purely expository ``How to Write a Serious Novel about Love'' to the more allegorical ``Count Your Blessings (A Fairy Tale).'' The latter offers the book's single sop to conventional narrative: A perfect woman, Grace, finds a perfect mate, William, who gives her perfect children but cant prevent her from sinking ever-more deeply into depression, until an old-fashioned doctor making a house call uses radical surgery to cure her (the cure, obviously, being worse than the affliction). Among the less sustained narrative efforts is ``How Deep Is the River?,'' a quixotic look at passing trains, each with its cargo of discontented passengers headed in opposite directions in search of the same satisfactions. While theres no denying the authors considerable skill at turning a wry phrase, all the glitter here yields precious little substance. (144 b&w line drawings and half-tones) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins Canada
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0002245663
• ISBN 13: 9780002245661
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220