The Tattooed Woman

Janet MacArthur was a freelance writer in Calgary.

In his preface to The Tattooed Woman, published posthumously in the Penguin Short Fiction series, Timothy Findley suggests that the stories selected are characterized by a “collective oddness.” Many are indeed distinguished by the presence of odd, even alarming, characters and situations. They are often about misfits: born freaks like Mareille in “Madame Hortensia, Equilibriste” who parlays her oddity into a successful carnival career, or self-made freaks like Marge Elph in “The Life of Bernard Orge” who dons a false nose as part of her transformation into a wildly irresponsible bohemian. Surely the most memorable freak in this volume is the betrayed housewife in “The Tattooed Woman” who outdoes nature in her quiet desperation by ravaging her aging body with a razor blade. After her husband leaves her for someone younger, she carves cross-hatchings, stars, and arabesques into her flesh. Engel is most adept at these almost comic allegories of human suffering. In this story, she leavens despair with enough mischief so that masochism is ultimately transformed into a frenetic creativity.

In her introduction, Engel confesses that she finds ordinary reality incomprehensible and traditional narrative difficult to write. This may be why the majority of her stories combine a realism probably derived from what she calls her “well-disciplined Ontario subconscious” with a wild and magical irrationality. Such “magic realism” is nowhere more evident than in “Banana Flies.” In this story, she metamorphoses and celebrates the lives of ordinary women, creating a colourful culinary fantasy world for them where flying banana peels and winged grocery carts become symbols of a graceful transcendence.

Not infrequently, however, the more orthodox storyteller is in control. There are many stories in this collection that emerge from the impulse to represent human experience in more identifiable contexts. In one, Engel uses an epistolary format to chart the progress of a man recovering from his wife’s death by cancer; another deals sensitively with the difficulty of reconciling love for a new spouse with the memory of the old. Another story examines a writer’s predicament after he uses extremely personal material from his wife’s past in his fiction.

What unifies the stories is not technique, or recurring images of the magical and grotesque, or the presence of misfits and outsiders, or death or loss, but a kind of comic compassion that renders oddballs and peculiar situations comprehensible and the more recognizable realities and conventional characters unique.