Montreal Stories: Selected Stories, 3

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This is the third volume of a projected four-volume collection of Clark
Blaise’s short stories. Southern Stories appeared in 2000, Pittsburgh
Stories in 2001, while International Stories is scheduled for
publication in 2005. This arrangement reflects what Peter Behrens, in
his introduction, describes as Blaise’s “accomplished, peripatetic
career.” Originally, however, the stories were written—and so were
arranged—differently. Thus, five of the stories reprinted here come
from Blaise’s first publication, A North American Education (1973),
four from Tribal Justice (1974), and two from Resident Alien (1985),
while two appear for the first time. A similar rearrangement is (or will
be) found in the other three books.

This new way of presenting the stories—in terms of a coherent
geography—is important because it has unusual consequences. Blaise, an
artistically fastidious writer, planned each of his original collections
with care. Each story is complete in itself, yet each is also affected
by its position within the whole book, where different stories reflect
back and forth upon each other. In particular, stories set in one
country and/or culture were creatively juxtaposed with those set in
another.

Here, however, a new pattern has been created. In Alexander Macleod’s
words quoted at the end of the book, this four-volume series “takes
what was previously a more subtle tension between individual locales in
individual stories and individual collections and magnifies this
place-to-place comparison into a much more striking volume-to-volume
juxtaposition.”

This book, then, is (along with the rest of the series) important for
two reasons: first, it contains Blaise’s new stories; second, it
encourages us to look at Blaise’s work in a new way. And it should be
noted that, by finding marvellously evocative colour photographs to
grace the covers of each book in the series, the Porcupine’s Quill has
provided a stunning visual equivalent to this rich and stimulating
readerly experience. The publication of these books is a noteworthy
event in Canadian literature.