DYSTOPIAN DEBUT
Author asks ‘where can you stay?’
Thirteen short stories of yearning and upheaval, Jasmina Odor’s debut book masterfully explores displacement far deeper than merely geographical.
That the Edmonton author is navigating a move from one home to another as her book You Can’t Stay Here launches Thursday at Audreys has a lyrical poignancy.
Each time the Edmonton author has relocated, it’s been monumental. This includes first coming to Canada from Croatia with her family in 1993 — the Bosnian war burning in the rear-view mirror.
“Every move has been huge,” the 37-year-old notes at her future home in Highlands. “Any sort of change of place is slightly traumatic.
“The town I’m from, Vinkovci, was under quite heavy attack for a while — especially in the fall of ‘91. It had one of the finest libraries in the country — it was bombed, a big loss there.
“We went to the capital, fairly safe, and there was a lot of moving around. That’s probably where my dislike of moving comes from: (living) with this family member, then with this friend, then with these strangers. It was all weird, not great.
“We returned to the town before coming to Canada and there was lots of damage there and lives lost. That part of eastern Slovenia was quite an intense front line. Terrible things. We could have stayed, but …”
“That sense of being in limbo or being in between has been definitive of my own experience of the world, to put it really broadly. All kinds of things (in the collection) are of course invented. But it is drawing on my life. You’re always a little bit off.”
Throughout the anthology — including the war tale His, which won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story and silver at the Alberta Magazine Awards — conflict simmers quietly, each narrative having something do to with at least one character shaped in some way by war.
In The Lesser Animal, quite directly, Toma is haunted by a lack
of heroism in his past — though the story’s action takes place in Edmonton, as he tries to hold together a relationship.
From story to story, women and men look over the fences of their own partnerships, sometimes falling into passionless flings which solve little. Where there’s cynicism, it comes from experience, damage.
The aforementioned His, though set in a Slavonian village, has an almost Cormac McCarthy frontier setting. But most take place in either Toronto or Edmonton. One of the great questions of the book, to quote David Byrne, is “how did I get here?”
Odor has spent about 65 per cent of her life in Canada, going to high school in Toronto. Though being taught English from Grade 4 on, she recalls, “The first year I came I was silent, almost mute. English seemed complex and strange — partly because Croatian is a phonetic language. There are still times when I have to say three vowels in a row and I just kind of flub them.”
During her undergrad years, from which the earliest stories in You Can’t Stay Here were rescued, she studied at University of Alberta under Greg Hollingshead — thanked in the acknowledgments. “I remember him once saying, ‘The impulse to control others is the root of all evil.’ I was almost stumped by that — but now it seems obvious.”
Odor is now a professor at Concordia University, and a finalist for the 2017 CBC Short Story Prize.
Her writing is skilled, direct and alluring, as dystopian as she writes about suburban walk-ups in our waterless Edmonton winter as it is enticing, dangerously driving up unlit roads along the Dalmatian coast.
You Can’t Stay Here as a title magically fits every story in the book. But then I noticed something interesting: the phrase actually fits almost any story, from To Kill a Mockingbird to the adventures of Luke Skywalker.
“It emerged as really the only title for the book,” she explains, “because it seems just apt on every level. And it wasn’t intentional the collection should be that way — I was just writing stories. You know: eventually I’ll collect them, there will be enough for a book.
“But everything is about not being comfortable where you are, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically — or being driven out of where you are by outside circumstances.
“The central struggle to me is where can you stay — where do you get to stay? It becomes existential. We really don’t get to stay anywhere.
“And then,” she laughs, “you die.”
But everything is about not being comfortable where you are, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically — or being driven out of where you are by outside circumstances.