[.ca] Real Life (ISBN 0006392342)

Amazon.ca:
In the grim, occasionally gripping, stories of Real Life, Sharon Butala introduces the reader to a number of women who are experiencing bitter difficulties--cancer, rape, beatings from husbands. Throughout the collection, as Butala's women feel trapped by fate or circumstance, the question returns again and again: what is free will and what is unavoidable destiny? Is fate, as she asks in the title story, "met" or "made"? One thing the women in these stories cannot seem to avoid is loutish men. Few of the males are helpful or positive figures--almost all are either downright evil, ignorant, or merely indifferent. At times, Butala can invest her stories with a palpable emotional content: the frustration of a rancher's wife unable to help a younger woman she knows is being abused, or the peaceful silence of a monastery that feels like a refuge to a single mother beset by difficulties. Almost all of the stories are set during winter on the Prairies, as befits their grey and black mood, and they come alive when Butala touches on the world of nature: snowstorms, forests, "copses of trees radiant in their fall golds and oranges." Many of the stories, however, are weakened by too many unsatisfactory depictions of dreams, ironic in a book titled Real Life. --Mark Frutkin