Kristjana Gunnars: Essays on Her Works

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern
Languages and Literatures at Laurentian University.

This excellent collection of nine essays and two poems exploring
Kristjana Gunnars’s work is masterfully anchored by an introduction, a
brief biography, and an interview with Gunnars.

Gunnars’s work is complex and rich, simultaneously seductive and
elusive, and the essays editor Monique Tschofen has chosen for this
collection respond to these characteristics through the variety of
approaches they represent. K.L. Press contributes two poems inspired by
Gunnars’s The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust (1996); Stephen
Scobie, in “Away from Zero,” writes “a review that is not a
review,” mirroring a work—Zero Hour (1991)—that Gunnars describes
as “a story that is not a story. A novel that is not a novel, a poem
no longer a poem.” Some essays consider particular themes in
Gunnars’s opus: this approach is taken in M. Travis Lane’s study of
the poetic voice, Judith Owens’s analysis of wholeness and
dislocation, and Christl Verduyn’s exploration of culture and gender.
Other critics focus on specific works: Janice Kulyk Keefer describes her
love affair with The Prowler (1989) as she explores the confluences of
writer/reader/theory/fiction/critic; Anna Malena traces the translator
in The Prowler and Zero Hour; Siobhan O’Flynn privileges narratives of
place in The Rose Garden; Deidre Lynch focuses on Carnival of Longing
(1989) in her examination of theory and experience in Gunnars’s
writing. Tschofen contributes the final insightful essay, mapping
Gunnars’s rhetorical strategies and inviting the reader to continue
the journey. The essays are arranged in chronological order
corresponding to the publication dates of the principal works concerned,
a strategy that gives the collection an overall sense of coherence. The
Critical Bibliography at the end offers a treasure trove of information
and sources.

This collection is, indeed, as Tschofen hopes, one that offers many
“productive points of entry” to Gunnars’s work and a fine
contribution to the growing corpus of literary criticism on Canadian
writers.