Painting the Dog: The Best Stories of Leon Rooke

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“In this one house lives this young girl who possesses a necklace made
of living lizards. She has stitched seven lizards head against tail,
employing the best silk thread and a craftful hand. She has only to
swallow, or twist her head, or herself lunge into sudden movement, to
make these lizards swish in frantic laps around her neck. Cordelia is
convinced the racing lizards empower her with otherworldly abilities. So
long as they are racing, she can clamp her eyes shut and squeeze every
muscle and utterly focus her every thought—and thus tell you what you
are doing, what is going on at your house, if you have the ill fortune
to live within the vicinity.”

This collection of short stories is “classic” Leon Rooke. Selected
from 15 collections that span Rooke’s writing career, these 17 tales
are all so different that they defy categorizing, yet all have that
unmistakable spine-tingling edgy style that Rooke has made his own.
Masterpieces in this collection include “A Bolt of White Cloth,”
“The Birth Control King of the Upper Volta,” and “Lady Godiva’s
Horse.” Rooke builds his stories around everyday themes—door-to-door
salesmen, unhappy lovers, dysfunctional families—and then weaves a
tapestry of quirky, hilarious, and often unpleasant plots and subplots.
For example, the story “Early Obscenities in the Life of the World’s
Foremost Authority on Heidegger” begins with the excerpt at the
beginning of this review and then launches into a tale of a seemingly
typical family quarrel revolving around a pan of muffins. The man,
woman, and teenage daughter characters seem hopelessly angry with each
other, only to be reconciled (at least, the mother and daughter are) by
an annotated volume of Heidegger.

This volume should be required reading for any CanLit course and for
anyone who wants a great introduction to Rooke’s nearly 300 published
short stories.