The Journey Prize Anthology, 9

Claire Wilkshire is a PhD candidate in English at the University of
British Columbia.

The Journey Prize Anthology is an annual publication of the stories
shortlisted for the prize established by James Michener in 1989. The
1997 edition is a solid and respectable collection of recent Canadian
fiction.

Gabriella Goliger opens the anthology with its most powerful story. The
haunting, delicate, and evocative “Maladies of the Inner Ear” is
about a Montrealer, Dr. Gerda Levittson, who lies awake at night hearing
noises. In the long hours before dawn, Gerda thinks about her family:
her mother, long since dead in Germany; her father with whom she escaped
to Canada; and her brother Ludwig, who refused to accompany them. “At
what point did she forget to think about Ludwig?” the guilt-ridden
insomniac wonders. “Ludwig slipped from her mind somehow and at that
moment, it would seem, a cattlecar door clanged shut.” Tinnitus is a
mysterious condition with a variety of possible causes; it works
beautifully as a metaphor for the disturbance Levittson experiences.

It is an odd coincidence that three of the four most memorable stories
in the collection (there are 12 in all) have to do with World War II.
Goliger’s story begins with the Holocaust, which is where Judith
Kalman’s ends. “Not for Me a Crown of Thorns” combines pathos with
lyricism as it constructs a powerful contrast between a girl’s idyllic
childhood and her brutal death. Dennis Bock’s “Olympia” is about
an Ontario boy’s summer of 1972, the visit of his Uncle Gьnter, and
the Munich Olympics. Terry Griggs’s “Momma Had a Baby,” which has
nothing to do with war, is a zesty story of the narrator’s birth.

The remaining stories reflect a wide range of subject matter. In Andrew
Mullins’s comic dystopia, “The World of Science,” women conduct
scientific research while bored men stay home preparing quail with
cherries and growing resentful. “Canada Geese and Apple Chatney” by
Sasenarine Persaud centres on three Guyanese men who are sharing an
apartment and trying to get on in Canada. The new mother in Anne
Simpson’s ambitious “Dreaming Snow” reads the journal of an Arctic
explorer until her world merges with his.

These are all interesting, thoughtful stories; some of them are
exceptional.