Any Mail? And Other Stories

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

This ably translated collection of nine well-crafted pieces opens with
“Treble Clef,” in which a naive young farm boy is introduced by his
teacher, Soeur Cecile, to the forbidden world of her repressed desires.
Another story centres on the coming of age attraction between the eldest
teenage son in a family of nine rebellious hellions and the young
“curvaceous and well put together” maidservant who keeps them in
line. “The Wasp Slicer” is a masterful comic blend of the themes of
sex, culture, and nationality in which a French-Canadian couple visit
their French hosts who take them on a whirlwind pilgrimage of France’s
traditional tourist spots before the husbands have a politicized falling
out and the French-Canadian wife accuses her husband of lusting after
the other woman. In a quieter vein, “Fкte du Canada Day” recounts a
young couple’s enigmatic return to reality as they travel from
Montreal to their Manitoba home after participating in the defeat of the
Oui side in the Quebec referendum. “Omer on His Deathbed” describes
the reconciliation of an estranged mother and son as he lies dying of
cancer, while “A Scenic Spot” traces the vivid deterioration of a
lawyer’s mind as he writes endless briefs in a room where imaginary
crumbling mushrooms fall from the walls. The nine windows of Tougas’s
world, each with a different view, are well worth peering into.