Country of Cold: Stories of Sex and Death - Hardcover

Patterson, Kevin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385506279 ISBN 13: 9780385506274

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 2003

Synopsis

A Vintage Tales Book.

Graduating from high school in a small Canadian town, you are immediately faced with two stark choices: leave or stay. Country of Cold follows the stories of a disparate group of Dunsmuir, Manitoba’s class of 1980, most of whom leave, imagining that life happens elsewhere. They flee to the freedom of the big cities of the world and the far corners of Canada, but many end up feeling rootless and alone, whether as a physician in an Arctic Inuit community, a temporary boyfriend in Paris, or a student in the McGill Ghetto. The characters attempt to unravel the impossible puzzles of adulthood -- searching for answers by hurtling over falls in a barrel, building a boat to escape a teen-daughter-gone-bad, or embarking on an unlikely affair with a two-bit wrestler.

Kevin Patterson won international accolades for his wonderfully observed and moving memoir, The Water in Between. This fiction debut confirms him as a major new literary talent.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

Review

Bartenders, accountants, military doctors, spent lovers, rootless wanderers: this is what has become of Dunsmuir, Manitoba's class of 1984. Country of Cold: Stories of Sex and Death, the debut collection of short fiction from Kevin Patterson (author of the travel memoir The Water In Between), is an oblique history of Dunsmuir's graduates, from their high school humiliations to their divorces, reunions, and brushes with death.

Life isn't easy for any of Dunsmuir's children. Some become medical doctors (perhaps because Patterson himself is a physician), but this is no guarantee of success: one of Country of Cold's most harrowing stories recalls a family tragedy in the Keewatin District that leaves the local doctor paralyzed with guilt. Escape to the cities doesn't work, either; Patterson's characters find their ways to Paris, Toronto, and Montreal, only to wind up alone. Staying near home is no better, for anyone who tries that winds up looking for other means of escape--speeding over a waterfall in a capsule is only the most extreme example.

Patterson's stories are melancholic and quietly empathetic, and the loose structure of his book lets him range far beyond the adventures of a single social clique. His one great weak spot is dialogue--he is seldom capable of writing believable speech--but this doesn't weigh his book down much, for these stories tend to avoid conversation. As such, Country of Cold is a flawed book, but it is also a decidedly satisfying one, for the range of Patterson's experience and imagination more than make up for his tongue-tied characters. Patterson knows people, and he knows them profoundly--his stories demonstrate this amply. --Jack Illingworth, Amazon.ca

From the Back Cover

" Country of Cold is a terrific book. Kevin Patterson writes frequently about misfits and loners, but he presents them with such hard-edged clarity and insight that it’s impossible not to think of these people as kin. And whether it’s slapstick hilarity in a prairie Dairy Queen or the dead-serious menace of a winter storm north of the treeline, the writing is always pitch perfect."
-- Michael Crummey, author of River Thieves

About this edition

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0385506279
• ISBN 13: 9780385506274
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272