Will any of us learn why?
Canadian literature is tough to define. What makes it Canadian per se? Hockey? A landmark city? Tackling indigenous issues and traumas? All of these are features that could be argued as making literature produced in this country unique. Regardless, it is easy for works written by contemporary Canadians to get lost in the shuffle or simply go unnoticed internationally and even by the Canadian reading public. The good news is that with minimal effort it easy to discover a vast array of novelists and poets nationwide who are writing right now and publishing exciting works!
One of these writers is Jonathan Ball, from Winnipeg, Manitoba. I stumbled upon Ball in grad school completely by chance, and I am glad it happened that way. I was first exposed to Ball’s experimental poetry book Ex Machina, which reads like a choose-your-own adventure that can infinitely reset as the reader makes their choices. Poetry can be challenging to appreciate, but Ball, by using his personal writing philosophy of “writing the wrong way”, allows his work to garner non-traditional appeal. It comes without surprise that Ball’s first prose collection, The Lightning of Possible Storms, follows the same trajectory.
The Lightning of Possible Storms consists of seventeen short stories contained within a larger frame narrative. The frame follows the story of Aleya, a café waitress who discovers a collection of stories left behind by a customer she serves regularly. Seeking to know more about the book and its mysterious author, Aleya begins to read it late one night at home. Aleya is caught off guard when she discovers that the book is dedicated to her with the inscription “For Aleya, who will learn why.” Driven to find an explanation, Aleya ventures into these strange stories and into a world that causes her to question the most basic things about her existence.
The stories contained in The Lightning of Possible Storms range in genre and style. “National Bestseller” centres on a writer who, in typical Canadian fashion, “dreams small” and tries to figure out how to write a national bestseller and make a living. “Judith” has a dystopian/science fiction appeal with “death machines” always correctly predicting how someone will die. The further Aleya and the readers get into the book the more the stories become abstract, existential, and horrific. Within a few short pages “The War with the Dead” depicts a physical war between death and life while at the same time creating a mythology for a completely different world.
At first these stories—which move through realism into science fiction, mythology and existential dread— seem to have no connection at all to each other. In fact, Aleya ponders over this exact idea as she breaks from her reading for a caffeine refuel. However, when I made it to “The Palace of Ice” I was reminded of the deep psychological implications in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as Marlow ventures deeper and deeper into the jungle and his conversations with Kurtz. “The Palace of Ice” follows Sara, who increasingly seeks to escape her physical body and exist solely in dreams.
Ball’s strength in The Lightning of Possible Storms is his lack of predictability. Too often I find frame narratives come to logical narrative conclusions. They are strictly grounded in the literary world and bound to follow literary tropes. Ball avoids this by challenging all of the readers’ assumptions and traditional tools for reading by artfully writing about the process of creation. Ball’s “writing the wrong way” creates a work that feels like a room filled with mirrors with one single beam of light bouncing in endless paths throughout the room. Each beam of light is a possibility. The conclusions that can be reached while reading these stories seem to recall the title of the collection, The Lightning of Possible Storms. Possibility is the key to the collection as a whole and, I think, to truly appreciating Ball’s work.
Canadian literature, that ephemeral entity from another dimension, offers so many possibilities and potentialities that we should all do our best to support the writers who are creating these works. Thanks to chance I discovered Jonathan Ball, who is very active online with his podcast, Writing the Wrong Way and his company, Stranger Fiction. Through his involvement in the Canadian writing scene, I’ve been exposed to other Canadian writers including Chadwick Ginther, S. M. Beiko, and G. M. B. Chomichuk. There is so much variety and innovation in contemporary Canadian literature that there is inevitably something out there for everyone. While a small group, Canadian writers tend to stick together and work off each other which is great for readers seeking to discover who is writing out there right now across the nation.
Lennoxville Library News
Get ready for Canada Reads 2023!
Our beloved Lennoxville edition of the CBC’S Canada Reads featuring local presenters, lively discussion and debate will be held Wednesday, March 15th at 7pm. More information will be forthcoming on the Library website and Facebook page.
The CBC will announce the 5 books that will be debated on January 25th. Copies of each book will be available at the library shortly after that for you to borrow.
Many books from the Canada Reads long list are already at the Library. It’s a great selection!