Man Descending - Softcover

Vanderhaeghe, Guy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771086849 ISBN 13: 9780771086847

Publisher: Emblem Editions, 2000

Synopsis

These superbly crafted stories reveal an astonishing range, with settings that vary from a farm on the Canadian prairies to Bloomsbury in London, from a high-rise apartment to a mine-shaft. Vanderhaeghe has the uncanny ability to show us the world through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy as convincingly as he reveals it through the eyes of an old man approaching senility. Moving from the hilarious farce of teenage romance all the way to the numbing tragedy of life in a ward for incurables, these twelve stories inspire belief, admiration, and enjoyment, and come together to form a vibrant chronicle of human experience from a gifted observer of life’s joys and tribulations. This is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s brilliant first book of fiction.

About this title

About the Author

Guy Vanderhaeghe was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. He is the author of four novels, My Present Age (1984), Homesick (1989), co-winner of the City of Toronto Book Award, The Englishman’s Boy (1996), winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for The Giller Prize and the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and, most recently, The Last Crossing (2002), a long-time national bestseller and winner of the Saskatoon Book Award, the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. He is also the author of three collections of short stories, Man Descending (1982), winner of the Governor’s General’s Award and the Faber Prize in the U.K., and The Trouble With Heroes (1983), and Things As They Are (1992).

Acclaimed for his fiction, Vanderhaeghe has also written plays. I Had a Job I Liked. Once. was first produced in 1991, and won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama. His second play, Dancock’s Dance, was produced in 1995.

Guy Vanderhaeghe lives in Saskatoon, where he is a Visiting Professor of English at S.T.M. College.


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover

“These stories are wonderful! I thought I’d ‘sample’ them, and I’ve read them all with that astonished gratitude you feel when you meet a real writer.”
–Alice Munro

“Technically delightful, with multi-themes and layers of meaning.…These are stories to be reread and remembered.”
–Books in Canada

“[These stories] all repay close reading with solid entertainment.”
–New York Times

“Original and stylish, written with a quirky, self-deprecating awareness of the sad shifts men are put to in order to survive.”
–Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

“Flawless.…Each of these stories circles around in the mind, weaving itself into the fabric of the imagination, until the final lines, when, as if a trap door suddenly opens, the whole world of the story drops en masse into the realm of the heart.”
–Bloomsbury Review (U.S.)

“A remarkable achievement.…The stories mark a compelling debut of an artist who sees with compassion the terror and sometimes the joy of the human condition.”
–David Staines, Ottawa Citizen

“[Vanderhaeghe] is blessed with remarkable poise and assurance.…There’s the same shiver of delight and joy of discovery that accompanied Alice Munro’s first collection of stories.”
–Globe and Mail

“Admirably crafted.…”
–The Guardian

“Stunningly good stories.…The action and dialogue are vivid, authentic and often hilarious.…”
–Winnipeg Free Press

“[The stories] shows Vanderhaeghe’s mastery of irony and his dexterity in maneuvering from the comic to the tragic.”
–Journal-Constitution (U.S.)

“[A] remarkable selection of stories.”
–ALA Booklist (U.S.)

“Any Canadian looking in the bathroom mirror is sure to recognize one of Guy Vanderhaeghe’s people. Man Descending is the startling debut of an excellent writer.”
–Rudy Wiebe

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I suppose it was having a bad chest that turned me into an observer, a watcher, at an early age.

“Charlie has my chest,” my mother often informed friends. “A real weakness there,” she would add significantly, thumping her own wishbone soundly.

I suppose I had. Family lore had me narrowly escaping death from pneumonia at the age of four. It seems I spent an entire Sunday in delirium, soaking the sheets. Dr. Carlyle was off at the reservoir rowing in his little skiff and ­couldn’t be reached — something for which my mother illogically refused to forgive him. She was a woman who nursed and tenaciously held dark grudges. Forever after that incident the doctor was slightingly and coldly dismissed in conversation as a “man who betrayed the public’s trust.”


From the Paperback edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Emblem Editions
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0771086849
• ISBN 13: 9780771086847
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 272