Island : Collected Stories - Softcover

Alasta MacLeod

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099422328 ISBN 13: 9780099422327

Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (a Division of R, 2002

Synopsis

Set against the unforgiving landscape of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, these stories are all concerned with the complexities and mysteries of the human heart. Steeped in memory and myth and washed in the brine and blood of the long battle with the land and the sea, they celebrate a passionate engagement with the natural world and a continuity of the generations in the face of transition - in the face of love and loss.

About this title

Review

"Once there was a family with a Highland name who lived beside the sea." So begins "As Birds Bring Forth the Sun," a 1985 entry from Island. The story continues, "And the man had a dog of which he was very fond." And there you have the basic elements of an Alistair MacLeod story: dog, family, and sea. The author--whose 2000 novel No Great Mischief won him a measure of long-overdue acclaim--shuffles these elements into a surprisingly infinite variety of configurations, always with the same precise, confident, quiet language.

His big theme is the abandonment of the rural. Though his characters live in the fishing communities of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, the seaside isn't a place where they dwell contentedly. In half the stories, young men and boys feel a pull toward academe and the center of the country. In the other half, academically successful middle-aged men return to the wild eastern coast of Canada to try to reclaim the life they left behind. Both dilemmas are impossible to resolve--no one can be both a city mouse and a country mouse--and MacLeod wisely doesn't offer easy solutions.

What makes the writing sing, though, is the specificity of his descriptions of rural life. He tells you exactly how things work: "The sheep move in and out of their lean-to shelter, restlessly stamping their feet or huddling together in tightly packed groups. A conspiracy of wool against the cold." The people here are ultimately defined by the physical world, and MacLeod has a farmer's visceral feel for geography. As he writes in "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood": "Even farther out, somewhere beyond Cape Spear lies Dublin and the Irish coast; far away but still the nearest land, and closer now than is Toronto or Detroit, to say nothing of North America's more western cities; seeming almost hazily visible now in imagination's mist." This is regional fiction in the best sense: it belongs to one perfectly evoked place. --Claire Dederer

From the Publisher

11 cds

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (a Division of R
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0099422328
• ISBN 13: 9780099422327
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448