River of Stone: Fictions and Memories

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.

Rudy Wiebe has won two Governor General’s Awards, and by any standard
ranks as one of Canada’s most significant writers—one whose work
will endure. River of Stone is a collection of 22 short pieces that
constitute some of Wiebe’s best writing. Like A Discovery of Strangers
(1994), his most recent novel, many of these pieces draw us into his
world, one woven of north-ness, the wilderness land, Canada’s
aboriginal peoples, pioneer life, a spirituality nurtured originally
within a Mennonite community, and a searching examination of the human
heart. The prairie is also part of Wiebe’s world. In “Passage by
Land” he writes, “There is too much here, the line of sky and grass
rolls in upon you and silences you thin, too impossibly thin to remain
in any part recognizably yourself.”

To experience something of the extraordinary range, the dry humor, the
virtuosity of mood and tempo in Wiebe’s writing, one must read “The
Beautiful Sewers of Paris, Alberta,” an autobiographical tale of Wiebe
at 17 working as part of the construction crew laying water and sewer
mains in Coaldale, Alberta, his head filled with Victor Hugo’s epic
novel, Les Misérables. River of Stone should be in every Canadian
library and on every CanLit course.