Finding love in a time of Tinder
Danila Botha’s slim new collection, For All the Men and Some of the Women I’ve Known, whose18 brief, relationshipbased stories divided across five categories — “Meeting,” “Falling In,” “Falling Out,” “Friendship” and “Resolution” — is one of the best examples I’ve encountered of a book whose sum is greater than its parts.
That the stories’ quality can be uneven — some could have used a bit more elbow grease in the editorial department — is unsurprising given their quantity.
Pull back a bit, though, and the blemishes fade, leaving readers with what feels like a series of orchestral variations whose loops and iterations are made vital by the steady introduction of new elements.
Just one story is set in Botha’s native South Africa, the rest in and around the downtown neighbourhoods of her current home base, Toronto.
Their protagonists are women, usually childless, heterosexual 20-somethings in the early stages of their professional lives.
Many end with a breakup in which the main character dispassionately states that she never saw, or spoke, to her lover again.
Those are the similarities. But where Botha builds texture is in the differences: A shift between first, second and thirdperson narration; between soft and rough sex; emotional vulnerability and resilience.
These are stories full of people who disappoint, or are disappointed, yet they rarely end on a note of despair (“There was a tiny part of her that refused to give up on love completely”) which, in today’s Tinder-enabled relationship landscape, seems almost like an act of subversion. She has a fine talent, too, for putting emphasis in unexpected places.
Awoman whose weight gain contributes to the premature end of her marriage is left not with a sense of shame, but of irritation with her ex-in-laws for failing to recognize they’d once been family; this though she’d never liked them anyway.
The unexpectedness can extend to Botha’s turn of phrase, which, at its best, offers a wry counterpoint to her project as a whole.
“There was nothing pretty or individual about each snowflake. They fell in clumps, like feathers from a giant duvet. Soft but in numbers too large to count. Out of control, like the rest of it.” Emily Donaldson is the editor of Canadian Notes & Queries.