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Read Island: The Complete Stories (2011)

Island: The Complete Stories (2011)

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4.21 of 5 Votes: 3
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ISBN
0393341186 (ISBN13: 9780393341188)
Language
English
Publisher
w. w. norton & company

Island: The Complete Stories (2011) - Plot & Excerpts

Alistair MacLeod is not prolific, just a novel and these collected short stories on his shelf. Sixteen stories spread over 31 years. Perhaps he takes every other year off or maybe he has a ‘real’ job. More likely, he anguishes over every sentence, treated like his own child, because the result is a kind of perfection. There is craftsmanship here such that you can really let the book fall open and randomly start to read any paragraph and just be overwhelmed with the lushness of the styling. You do not, for example, need to know what the actual plot if any is in The Road to Rankin Point:The sharp, right-angled turn and its ascending steepness has always been called by us “The Little Turn of Sadness” because it is here that my grandfather died so many years ago on a February night when he somehow fell as he walked or staggered toward his home which was a steep two miles away. He had already covered the six miles from the village when he lost his footing on the ice-covered rock, falling backwards and shattering the rum bottle he carried within his safe back pocket. Now as I feel my own blood, diseased and dying, I think of his, the brightest scarlet, staining the moon-white snow while the joyous rabbits leaped and pirouetted beneath the pale, clear moon. It was a bright and quiet night without a breath of wind, as my grandmother has often told us. All night she kept looking out across the death-white fields for the form of her returning husband. Her eyes became so strained that as the dawn approached the individual spruce trees at the clearing’s edge began to take his shape and size and seemed to move toward the house. First one and then another appearing to move and take on human form. Once she was so certain that she went to the door and opened it, only to stare again across the whitened, empty stillness of the silent winter snow.These are tales of family, family stories and stains, of lobstermen and miners, harsh cold and rock. Plenty of animal husbandry. The pull of ancestry and the purchase of home on the human soul. Thus, a miner laments:I would like to tell my wife and children something of the way my years pass by on the route to my inevitable death. I would like to explain somehow what it is like to be a gladiator who fights always the impassiveness of water as it drips on darkened stone. . . .Our sons will go to universities to study dentistry or law and to become fatly affluent before they are thirty. Men who will stand over six feet tall and who will move their fat, pudgy fingers over the limited possibilities to be found in other people’s mouths. Or men who sit behind desks shuffling papers relating to divorce or theft or assault or the taking of life. To grow prosperous from pain and sorrow and the desolation of human failure. They will be far removed from the physical life and will seek it out only through jogging or golf or games of handball with friendly colleagues. They will join expensive private clubs for the pleasures of perspiration and they will not die in falling stone or chilling water or thousands of miles from those they love. They will not die in any such manner, partially at least because we have told them not to and have encouraged them to seek out other ways of life which lead, we hope, to gentler deaths. And yet because it seems they will follow our advice instead of our lives, we will experience, in any future that is ours, only an increased sense of anguished isolation and an ironic feeling of confused bereavement. Perhaps it is always so for parents who give the young advice and it is followed. And who find that those who follow such advice must inevitably journey far from those that give it, to distant lonely worlds which are forever unknowable to those who wait behind. Yet perhaps those who go find in the regions to which they travel but another kind of inarticulate loneliness. Perhaps the dentist feels mute anguish as he circles his chair, and the lawyer who lives in a world of words finds little relationship between professional talk and what he would hope to be true expression. Perhaps he too in his quiet heart sings something akin to Gaelic songs, sings in an old archaic language private words that reach to no one. You can see how maybe that might take some time. A matriarch’s grimy fingernails, an old Gaelic song, adolescent desire are all vividly portrayed.There is a milk cow in heat that “moaned and bawled her passion from the barn.” A shelf of books from the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins to a little book on sex technique called Getting the Most Out of Love -- “The former had been assiduously annotated by a very fine hand using a very blue-inked fountain pen while the latter had been studied by someone with very large thumbs, the prints of which were still visible in the margins.” A golden collie-like dog cavorts with children in the snow. “He is touched but never captured, which is the nature of the game.” * * * *This book is recommended in particular not to dog-lovers necessarily, but to those who have experienced an exchange between human and canine; not to those that have bumper stickers reading Labs Are People Too, but to those who know people are people and dogs are dogs but sometimes you wind up together, drifting on a melting hunk of ice.

In anticipation of an upcoming trip to Cape Breton, a friend recommended this author, who is a native of that area and sets his stories there. Island compiles two earlier collections of stories, and stands as a complete collection. He's also written a novel, No Great Mischief, which I'll surely read.If Alice Munro and Jim Harris whisked away to a rocky island in the north Atlantic and had a torrid affair, MacLeod might be the resulting love child. Like in Harris's stories, this writing is very male and earthy, sometimes literally of the earth, or even below the ground (in coal mines, in hand-dug graves). And it has the time spanning sprawl that Munro does so well, weaving through several generations, yet circling back again and again to the story at hand.The stories are ordered chronologically, from 1968 to 1999, and mostly cover the time between the two world wars, but sometimes flow back to ancestral Scotland and forward to an undefined "present." Within the pages there are coal mines, mining disasters, many blinded characters (including horses that work the mines), many, many sets of twins, divided families, parted lovers, violent alcoholism, wrenching betrayal, and lots of plain, hard living. There is also great love and loyalty: for family, for the Gaelic language the characters often use among themselves, for their Scottish-Canadian culture. There is also a lovely undercurrent of the allegiance between man and animal. One story, about a horse that must be sold rather than be fed through the winter, is a killer. The stories are equal parts brutal and elegiac, a combination I happen to love, when it's done so well.I lean toward writing that gives a strong sense of place, as these stories do. The characters seem so real I kept wondering if all of them were relatives and ancestors of the author, their stories heard again and again within the family, and retold and put to paper for the rest of us. I feel like I will come back and read this book again, just to experience that time and place all over.

What do You think about Island: The Complete Stories (2011)?

Every story in this collection is beautifully written and, taken together, makes an argument for Alistair MacLeod as one of the very best craftsmen of the short story. I'm mystified -- and a little embarrassed -- that I'd never heard of him. He has a wonderful ear for language and an uncommon ability to give his writing a sense of depth and wisdom. He knows people--actually, it's more accurate to say that he knows a certain kind of people. He anchors all of his stories in the history and culture of the Gaelic people who settled in and around the small mining and fishing villages of Nova Scotia, particulary the area of Cape Breton Island where MacLeod grew up. They are rugged, salt of the earth people, bound to the land, their families and their Scottish heritage. MacLeod's stories rely heavily on the theme of returning to the place of one's origin or escaping to the wider world beyond, and the constant tension that exists between the two.If I had to offer one criticism, however, I would say that MacLeod's strength can also be a liability. His familiarity with this group of people and their way of life allows him to render very poignant, richly detailed portraits of their lives. But, at least in this collection of stories, he doesn't deviate much beyond this template. As much as I loved the writing, I began to get the feeling that I was reading the same story over and over, just different facets. MacLeod doesn't show much versatility. Having said that, though, I highly recommend this book. It was like a master class in the art and craft of writing.
—Dan

I read this this past summer due to a round-about recommendation from a friend. Loved the book then. Gave it five stars here but didn't write a review but did recommend it to my main book group which voted to read it for November.Update: November 12, 2010 Started rereading this yesterday with pencil in hand to underline passages and write comments. This is a book where people and place and their way of life are inseparable. Cape Breton Island is the stage on which most of these stories take place. But in all of the stories set there the island also has a constant presence on stage the same as any of the human characters. Also the history of the people sits there in the shadows upstage and even, occasionally, stands up and comes to the front of the stage and speaks a piece. Having just finished Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter I can see a strong similarity between Island and books and stories set in the American South. The connections to place and a way of life is evident, and crucial, in Island the same way it is in Southern literature. The coal mining and the fishing on Cape Breton replace the cotton farming of the South but break a man and his wife down just as surely as the summer sun and bad harvests of Mississippi and Alabama do. One of the things I really enjoy about MacLeod's writing is that while spare and straight forward it is also rich and elegant. A sentence from the story "The Vastness of the Dark" will serve as a good example. An eighteen-year-old boy is leaving home and is hitchhiking his way off the island. He has gotten a ride in a coal truck. "The truck makes so much noise and rides so roughly that conversation with the driver is impossible and I am grateful for the noisy silence in which we are encased."(p. 45) The last part of the sentence, ". . . and I am grateful for the noisy silence in which we are encased." is almost a throwaway, a bit tacked on at the end, not crucial to the action, but it provides us so much information about the young man's state of mind and spirit at this point in the story. Also, "noisy silence" is such a great description of riding in a decrepit, old truck.Anyone who is on goodreads should enjoy the first story, "The Boat," since in that story there is a tension, a push/pull, between those who read and those who find it a waste of time. And that is what many of the stories deal with — the push/pull of a place of beauty that is harsh and demanding; of a way of life that was lived by your ancestor and so it is to be honored but it is also cruel and a sure way to an early grave; of the old ways vs. the new ways; of book learning vs. learning that comes from using your hands. Island is a chance for the contemporary person living in our fast-paced world of e-mail, the Web, 24-hour news cycles, and constant change to slow down and examine a world where what happened over the years is remembered, cherished and held on to; and the old songs are remembered and sung. Where the past not only has a seat at the kitchen table but rides in your hip pocket every day of your life and tags along for the ride when you leave the island. Island is also a chance to examine the tensions that that way of live has had presented over the last half century and longer to the people who live on The Island.Finished rereading this Nov. 26, 2010. Took much longer to reread than to read the first time. This time through I tried to do a close reading, observing connections within stories and between stories. Definitely a 5-star book. Too bad so few people read short stories anymore.
—Nick Schroeder

Reviewed in 2012Although 'Island’ is clearly fiction, I prefer to imagine this collection of stories as the portrait of a community and its history and traditions, as if Alastair MacLeod were in reality a social geographer in the mode of Henry Glassie and had collected these stories from the people of his community and then retold them in his own words. And I say ‘his’ community not only because I know he grew up on Cape Breton Island but also because of the love of the people, the animals, the land and the sea that is woven into every sentence, many of which I read again and again, revelling in the searing truth and beauty of the images.This chronologically arranged collection is composed of stories written between 1968 and 1999, which makes it very interesting to the reader who is new to MacLeod because we see the evolution in his writing and thinking. The early stories tend to be classic and tightly constructed while the later ones are more expansive, containing stories within stories, but are even more powerful in spite of that looseness of structure. I began to have real difficulty leaving the characters of each story behind from ‘Rankin’s Point’ onwards but at the same time the common landscape of the collection allows you to stay in the atmosphere of the previous tale even as you move on to the next. There is also a more meditative strain in the later stories as MacLeod begins to reflect on the passing of a way of life that he respects so much. He also focuses more on the Scottish origins of his characters and on Scots Gaelic and Scottish legends in the later stories, as if, being older, he is now more preoccupied with the distant past.The characters are by turns isolated farmers, fishermen, miners; sometimes they can be all three at once. Their world is a masculine one of complex relationships between sons, fathers and grandfathers, as well as close ties to beloved dogs and horses. This is a world of strong physical work and women women appear mostly in the background although there are a few fine portraits of women, women who are feared, venerated, or simply loved.As I was reading, I was reminded of the writing of John McGahern who also wrote beautifully about his own place and then I remembered where I had heard of MacLeod for the first time: in McGahern's Love of the World: Essays, a volume that includes some of the book reviews he did for a few select journals. McGahern didn't write many reviews but MacLeod was among them and he gave him the highest praise.This collection has a prime place on my bookshelves.
—Fionnuala

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