The mysteries of women
How To Get Along with Women is an irresistible title for a book of short stories. It shouldn’t mislead men into thinking Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s tales will offer advice on repairing relations with your spouse or meeting women.
Author de Mariaffi’s fiction is about individual women and how they cope with life, how they get along with each other, and most interestingly, how they see the world.
The book is de Mariaffi’s first and, astonishingly for a premier effort from a small press, it has been nominated for Scotiabank Giller prize this year. Hard to believe for a first book that isn’t by a known writer.
De Mariaffi’s stories are often psychological or dreamlike, perhaps even surrealistic, as her characters think about how their lives were or could be.
My favourite story is “Kiss Me Like I’m the Last Man on Earth”. Here, de Mariaffi accomplishes something difficult for a writer. She gets into the psyches of two adolescents living in an immigrant neighbourhood, a Jewish boy named Asher and a Hungarian girl whose name we never learn.
But they are equals: two immigrant children exploring each other’s homes and lives with a friendship approved by their parents.
“Asher wasn’t more than an inch or two taller than me,” notes the Hungarian girl, “and he still had his little-boy skinniness, all rib cage and big teeth at odd angles, but he approached grown-ups with a balanced irreverence. Where I was normally never allowed to go even as far as the smelly garbage chute in the hallway by myself, somehow if I was with Asher, my grandmother was only too pleased to wash her hands of me.”
They hung around every day telling each other about their families, sharing plum dumplings rolled in sugar, listening in as grandfather played a Wagner record and, playing games they invented, such as Lockup, tying doors and furniture with ropes and manoeuvring around them as fast as possible. Eventually the friendship petered out, as do many childhood ties.
But the two characters are irresistible as they wander around their neighbourhood and discover new things about each other.
Mariaffi’s final story, “You Know How I Feel”, is about a single mother with a toddler who spends the weekend at a friend’s cottage. The portraits of the various cottage visitors are so right-on, so believable, that we can imagine ourselves there at the cottage, on the deck, snuggling into a sleeping bag.
De Mariaffi is a writer adept at painting pictures from words and she approaches her characters with a firm sense of humour, understanding that all of us are slightly wacky and difficult. She explores the sexual tension between men and women, the jealousies that can arise and the conversations that are often never completed but are somehow still understood by those who know us best.
It will be interesting to learn how the Giller nomination affects her writing life and if it eventually leads to a novel. It’s fun discovering new talented, writers such as de Mariaffi and it bodes well for the health of the Canadian book industry. We need all the talented writers and devoted publishers we can find. jhunter@thestar.ca