My White Planet.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Jarman’s style has always seemed like a kind of individual deconstruction: a first-person, fiercely personal, dangerous undertaking into a world full of fragmented circumstance. His latest collection of stories, prizewinners all, illustrate what this reviewer, writing about Jarman’s earlier collection, New Orleans is Sinking (1998), called “a consciousness bordering on fatalism … powerful stuff: death, disease; many defeats, few victories.” The 14 pieces in My White Planet are again written in the first person. From the lead piece, “Night March in the Territory,” describing efforts to stay alive in the middle of an unnamed war, to the last, “Our Stewardess Swims Over the Sea,” where a plane’s equivocal flight is a symbol of life—“you cannot take it back, cannot exchange it once it’s started”—Jarman shows again why he is his own quirky star in Canada’s literary nebula. His staccato prose writhes with imagery. From paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence, there are surprises. Take this passage from the story “Assiniboia Death Trip”: “We walk the world’s addled avenues, turn here, turn there, and various viruses meander toward us like zigzag butterflies. Your one-eyed teddy bear; where does it lie now? And the new diseases, the only child lost to diphtheria; all chance, a chance to walk.”

Throughout the stories, Jarman makes his turns and twists without signalling, without warnings of any kind, save, perhaps, for a stylistic wave out the window, a sort of challenge to the reader to follow if he dares. Jarman now lives in New Brunswick and teaches at UNB. He is also the fiction editor of the esteemed literary magazine The Fiddlehead. Highly recommended.