Decalogue 2: Ten Ottawa Fiction Writers is a very good collection of technically sound pieces. But despite its obvious quality, there is a side to Decalogue 2 that puzzled me. Most stories worked in terms of function, and the boards broke effortlessly, but others seemed forced. The punches thrown were imperfect and the boards broke thanks to crude muscle rather than elegance. For example, Emily Falvey's work was structurally sound, but somehow lines like "Debris hung about the room like clusters of silent grey insects" jarred me. How can debris hang? Is all debris tiny and grey? Insects don't usually remain silent and still so why invoke their image? Likewise, despite Clare Latremouille's excellent first novel, The Adventures of Jesus Drysdale reads weakly against the obvious talent her first novel displayed. The vivacity of her previous work seems here transmuted into a sort of cartoon, especially concerning the appearance of Jesus outside a café.
But then, some of these stories vibrate with that wonderful feeling of perfection you get from a piece of really elegant and powerful writing.
Particularly charming
Gabriella Goliger tells the coming-of-age story of a young daughter of Holocaust survivors who "struggles with her emerging lesbian identity." I have to admit that just about every element of that description made my face blank with dread. But it's to the author's credit that she can make a combination of such incredibly common literary tropes - domineering mother, lesbian, coming of age, Jewish - into a touching and interesting story.
The overwhelming tone of this collection is one common to Canadian literature - of perseverance and endurance in the face of failure. Somehow the act of simply surviving reflects and reinterprets the experience of failure - whether spiritual, moral or physical - into something savagely beautiful. It is certainly not a noble or dignified beauty, but somehow we feel that simply remaining is a sort of justification. Maybe this is the burgeoning literary voice of Ottawa - an unconscious resistance to the feeling of insectile bureaucracy that pervades. In this, Decalogue 2 is beautiful.
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