The Paris-Napoli Express

Janet MacArthur was a freelance writer in Calgary.

The nine stories in this volume offer a broad variety of characters, settings, and dramatic situations, which confirm Janice Kulyk Keefer’s versatility as a writer. Her particular gift is for imagery: many of the stories have a violent edge and leave one with a haunting but fascinated uneasiness provided by the vivid evocation of sensory impressions.

The best story in the collection is “The Paris-Napoli Express” which recounts the drunken, rollicking train journey of a callow youth caught up in a love affair with a brilliant femme fatale. The story is carnivalesque, combining alcohol and an exotic setting to create an intriguing situation.

Keefer is also at home in suburbia. Three of her stories, “Viper’s Bugloss,” “Mrs. Mucharski and the Princess,” and “In a Dream,” depict characters who lead comfortable lives in safe, domestic worlds. Of dramatic interest here, however, are the ways in which Keefer disrupts the insularity of middle class environments with the “other” worlds of political injustice and nightmarish oppression, or with the inchoate anxieties that are buried beneath the surface of North American complacency.

One particularly charming story, “Red River Cruise,” concerns the dating games of a group of teenagers from a Ukrainian college in Winnipeg. It is basically a story about adolescent angst, but it is given a unique ethnic twist. The old world rhythms of the writing also add to the story’s originality.

Keefer often makes skillful use of third person narration to achieve a respectable ironic distance. This, combined with the subtle humour and quiet good will which underlie many of the stories, make the experience of reading them worthwhile.