THE WALRUS READS

Canadian authors pick the year’s best books

Paige Cooper’s Zolitude: there are tropical forests; strange, shackled beasts in the underbrush; and a febrile, phosphorescent imagination with wastrels and rock divas on speed dial. Every sentence in this story collection is a spring-loaded trap covered in leafy camouflage. Here’s an example of such a sentence, picked arbitrarily by closing my eyes and putting my fingertip on a page somewhere in the middle: “As I sprint I’m afraid that the rockslide is going to fill the canyon, yet I am sprinting towards it.” This sentence opens like butterfly wings that are bark brown on the outside and flamboyant orange on the inside.

We don’t expect the revelation.

The narrator is heading toward the destruction at a sprint. The sentence is full of suspense. Well, obviously I can’t stop there, because that sentence is a cliffhanger, with boulders tumbling down an actual cliff. So, further down the page: “The baby is shrieking. The stroller rests, half-submerged in icy water, plastic windshield intact.” I love that comma after rests. A reprieve from the shrieking, balance. But no, the stroller is sinking, and then another comma, another reprieve, the windshield intact. The word intact, in this instance, alive with impermanence and fragility. All the clauses provoking opposite reactions, packed in the one sentence. As with the tense, vibrant sentences of writers Mark Anthony Jarman and Elise Levine, each line of Zolitude is neon. The atmosphere in these stories crackles and clings for a long time after reading. Or devouring. I love these stories.