One Room in a Castle: Letters from Spain, France and Greece

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

In a letter to the reader, which serves as a preface, Karen Connelly
writes of “the peculiar magic of a letter. Of words, received.”
Letters are her favorite way to write, her favorite thing to read:
“The letter as a literary form invites a rare, sometimes funny,
sometimes jarring intimacy. Its truth is selective and highly
personal.” And finally, “no matter what it actually says, every
letter proclaims, I am alive here, in this place, now.”

Having nailed her colors to the mast and loosened the constraint of
chronology (“no dates, just headings”), Connelly organizes the book
into four sections—one about her preparation for the journey in
Calgary, and the other three covering her experiences in Spain, southern
France, and Greece. We might call them short essays, or prose poems, for
Connelly’s prose is typically poetic. Her sentences are like
paintings, lit by visual images, redolent with color and emotion:
“Cimmeron, the bay horse, hot-skinned and sleek, what did she smell
like? Fields, sweat, Spain, grasses, rain, earth.”

Words are the poet’s coin of the realm, talismans against the
inevitable losses wrought by time, “the crashing, silent waves of
time.” Connelly uses them warmly, whimsically, lyrically, fantasizing
about whatever comes to hand, whether it be the photos in a strange room
or the view from a roof. For example, Spain is friendly, welcoming:
“[a]s though they were flowers, I gather the faces of people.”
Avignon, not at all to her liking, is “a sewer where all the muck of
the universe collects.” Greece, by contrast, is a country that
“begins with poetry. ... I’m speechless, awed by this place in a way
I wasn’t expecting.”

Connelly’s first book won the 1993 Governor General’s Award for
nonfiction. One Room in a Castle shows that this young writer is more
than promising. She’s good.