Evidence.

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

Halifax writer and librarian, Ian Colford links his stories in this first collection through the main character, his anti-hero Kostandin Bitri, a young man who has chosen to wander through Europe, mostly Eastern Europe, after spending some years as a part time college teacher in the United States and Canada. Bitri himself is a refugee from a country formerly behind the iron curtain—all the stories seem to be set in the period following the breakup of the Soviet Union. The dozen pieces lack titles. Some have been published before in magazines and anthologies. What marks the writing is that it gets better and better as the collection progresses. This may have more to do with how the stories are arranged in the book than with any chronological composition. Colford, who has himself done his share of voyaging, gives Bitri a sensibility and awareness which stretches both in its humanity and its skepticism—traits which are certainly not mutually exclusive.

In one of the earlier stories, Kostandin is on a cruise, a vacation from his job as a waiter, and is duped into developing an attraction to a fellow passenger who, inexplicably, disappears. A story towards the middle of the collection introduces Kostandin to Keller, an art critic, following an exhibition in Greece. Keller insists upon befriending the younger man, for reasons never made entirely clear. The book’s final story sees Bitri returning to Albania to seek for evidence of his parents’ deaths. Colford is now in full command of his craft, shading the characters with depth and colour not visible in the earlier pieces. Kostandin’s fatalistic manner of seeing the world seems to stem as much from his acceptance of things as they are as it does from his wishes for change. While he frequently attempts to aid others, he just as often turns away. A combination of Kafka and Kosinski, one critic observed, and the comparison is not off the mark. There is a darkness, an understated way of looking at events and at people that does echo both writers. Some of the stories have deservedly won prizes in Eastern Canada.