[.ca] Island: The Collected Stories of Alistair MacLeod (ISBN 0771055714)

From Amazon.co.uk:
Alistair Macleod's Island: The Complete Stories begins "Once there was a family with a Highland name who lived beside the sea." The 1985 entry continues, "And the man had a dog of which he was very fond." And there you have the basic elements of an Alistair MacLeod story: Dog, Family, and Sea. The author--whose 2000 novel No Great Mischief won him a measure of long-overdue acclaim--shuffles these elements into a surprisingly infinite variety of configurations, always with the same precise, confident, quiet language. His big theme is the abandonment of the rural. Though his characters live in the fishing communities of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, the seaside isn't a place where they dwell contentedly. In half the stories, young men and boys feel a pull toward academe and the centre of the country. In the other half, academically successful middle-aged men return to the wild eastern coast of Canada to try to reclaim the life they left behind. Both dilemmas are impossible to resolve--no one can be both a city mouse and a country mouse--and MacLeod wisely doesn't offer easy solutions. What makes the writing sing, though, is the specificity of his descriptions of rural life. He tells you how things work, exactly: "The sheep move in and out of their lean-to shelter, restlessly stamping their feet or huddling together in tightly packed groups. A conspiracy of wool against the cold." The people here are ultimately defined by the physical world, and MacLeod has a farmer's visceral feel for geography. As he writes in "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood": "Even farther out, somewhere beyond Cape Spear lies Dublin and the Irish coast; far away but still the nearest land, and closer now than is Toronto or Detroit, to say nothing of North America's more western cities; seeming almost hazily visible now in imagination's mist." This is regional fiction in the best sense: it belongs to one perfectly evoked place. --Claire Dederer, Amazon.com

Remarkable.:
Alistair MacLeod leads us to a community that is both foreign (to those far from Atlantic coast Canada) and deeply familiar. You can't help but be moved. It's literary excellence that you don't notice until the story is complete. Perhaps his greatest feat: despite the rawness of emotion shown here, you still want to visit this haunting corner of the world.

Misrepresenting the Truth:
One of the great lies existing within Canada is that the corner of the world known as "Cape Breton" is a mystical, haunting, culturally rich area. This is a complete falsehood. I lived in CB for over 25 years. It is an impoverished, dirty, run-down hellish little island with extremely high unemployment and alcoholism. The "culture" existing, consists of bastardizing the English language and drunken "fiddlers" hopping around, believing that they are prodigies. This book, while well written, further perpetuates the myths about this island. That is unfortunate.

Beautiful Stories:
I found the stories in Alistair MacLeod's Island to be beautifully moving--some incredibly powerful, others merely just very good. These are contemplative stories and because they all deal with similar underlying topics (but altogether different stories)--the return to the rural, the countryside's slow adaptation to change, youth contrasted with age--it makes sense to read these stories slowly, over several weeks. I believe reading these quickly may cause them to blend together, something you don't want to do because each story has its unique original beauty. MacLeod writes very carefully and his prose is very, I don't know, almost heavy, very powerful. You have to be in a contemplative mood, I believe, to appreciate these stories. This is not a collection for that cross country plane ride, or your week at the beach. Rather, these are stories to be savored slowly, in peace and quiet. Well done.

A Vanishing Way of Life:
Alistair MacLeod writes of isolation and loneliness and loss. His characters are often solitary people, yet they are solitary people with a strong sense of both history and community...the community of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. MacLeod's characters are a dying breed, people we don't see many of these days: coal miners, fishermen, farmers, lighthouse keepers. They are a people held together by a strong Gaelic thread; they speak Gaelic, sing Gaelic songs and live lives upheld and reinforced by strong Gaelic traditions. They are a rural people and they very much prefer things to stay the way they have been. But, as we all know, things never stay the way they have been. MacLeod's rural characters are the older ones. The younger ones have left the lonely farms of Cape Breton to work and study in the cities. The tourists are moving in, and, finding the Cape Breton landscape "unspoiled," and, therefore, very much to their liking, they are spoiling and defiling it, taking the first steps toward turning it into the very thing from which they wish to escape. In "Island," MacLeod, writes mainly of the modern, city-wise, young people who come home to visit the dying world from which they wanted to escape. What they find is a world and a culture that will not die, that refuses to be obliterated. "The Closing Down of Summer" is a story that illustrates this persistence of the past perfectly. MacLeod is at his best in this collection of stories. His prose is emotional but never maudlin, precise but never terse and it possesses a rhythm so Gaelic it can't fail to strike a chord of recognition in anyone who is in the least bit familiar with Cape Breton and its inhabitants. MacLeod is not a "rural" writer, yet his love for the rural is one thread that wends its way through all of these disparate tales. To the uninitiated, MacLeod may seem a bit artificial in his dialogue. He's not. He's just being "Cape Breton" to the core. The dialogue of Nova Scotia is a dramatic one, full of artifice and beautifully cadenced. MacLeod captures all of this perfectly. The stories in "Island" are simple, honest, earnest stories about simple, honest, earnest folk. They may, at times, sound a bit naive, but that's just the total honesty of them. And, it is the very thing that makes them so beautiful and unforgettable. Some of these stories are older stories, so they may have a bit of an old-fashioned ring to them. Don't let that put you off. MacLeod isn't old-fashioned, he's timeless, and this book proves it. These stories, revolving around a vanishing people and a disappearing way of life, are marvelous, contemplative creations and it would certainly be a shame to miss them.

A Magnificent Work:
MacLeod's stories evoke a sense of place better than most living writers. He does not rend his characters with relentless descriptions of their appearance (in fact, in some of the stories, the characters have no names and we are given little or no hint of what they look like); rather, they seem to emerge from the very landscape the author describes. They are coal miners, fishermen, lighthouse keepers and their wives and children, living in a part of the world that is alternately gorgeous and ferocious. MacLeod recognizes that this is all we need to know of them to understand their lives. What is even more impressive than MacLeod's elegant, understated style is the fact that the stories in Island were published over the course of 30 years, from the late '60s to 1999. Yet the author's voice and the quality of his craftsmanship are so masterful, the span of time between the stories is virtually indiscernible. This is what makes literature classic.