Other Selves: A Collection of Short Stories

Patrick Van Mil was a freelance writer in Banff, Alberta.

This is an immigrant’s song. It is beautifully crafted and moving. It is both passionate and analytic. It is analogous to a piece of music that moves and inspires and fills one with an intuitive knowledge of things never before considered.

The “thing considered” here is the experience of leaving one’s land and familiar background (in this case, Italy) for an entirely foreign one (i.e., Canada) full of strange customs and ideas. Canada is as strange to the Italians presented in this volume as the Italians are to the Canadians they meet. Pressures, both internal and external, form cracks and faults and finally almost split the new Canadians’ personality. The seven stories in this volume give some insight into how the immigrants and their offspring attempt to reconcile the pressure of adapting to their new country and the pressure of living by the strong traditions and customs of their Italian heritage.

C.D. Minni writes in a simple prose with strong images. He allows us to enter characters’ minds and we are swayed back and forth by the same images that sway the character. A love for the Italian countryside, with its strong sun, dusty streets, stone houses, and scruffy almond and fig trees, is juxtaposed to an equal love for the wetness of British Columbia’s rain forests and the bustle of Vancouver. In most of the stories the images represent a conflict between reality and a memory of the old country or the influence of somebody from the old country. Both the reader and the character feel the call of allegiance that each world demands; both discover that it is impossible either to affirm or to deny one world or the other.