Kathleen Winter
boYs
Biblioasis (2007)
189 pages
Her vibrant use of language raised a bar for me, as a writer.
Kathleen Winter’s vibrant collection of short stories, boYs, has won the hip-assuring Metcalf-Rooke Award and the prestigious Winterset award. If you haven’t read it yet, what more encouragement do you need?
This book is alive, sentences pop like firecrackers, you expect nothing and love everything. This is ultra-modern, punchy, lucid diction. What I enjoyed the most were her consistently jagged, unexpected, and yet remarkably apt descriptions, some of which catch you offguard, like, “Sponge flan soaked in red sauce that tasted like bandages,” and “[The wind] smelled like wildflowers and clouds and lakes with trout in them.” As I read the pages I saw images, not words. It is one of few books I’ve read that appeals to all of the senses: even the sounds blare off the pages, and then there are the smells, like “…sweet to breathe the mysterious scent of someone else’s blankets.” We all know that smell, right? This is a catchy, diction-driven book well-deserving of all of its attention.
While her lively diction is at the forefront in terms of this book’s literary merit, the book is also laced with the occasional, perfectly placed aphorism, and many of these stories and characters capture actualities about our world in a very nice, uncontrived manner. The toad-rearing, kaleidoscope-making father in “You Can Keep One Thing”, to me, embodies the mystical, unknowable nature of most of our fathers.
I didn’t want to compare her to her brother, Michael Winter, so I won’t, but it is evident that these two inherited something that enables them to articulate character-defining features like no one but … each other: “When he chewed his sandwich she could see how the teeth were not part of him and had no sensitivity.” Every paragraph is blocked full with such microscopic attention to detail.
And I loved the characters too, she brings each one to life as well as any writer I’ve read. She whips out the most unexpected and spot-on sentences to illustrate them, and uses dialogue quite skillfully to further enliven them. In my mind, there really is a handsy, juice-loving, and often incoherent Sandy Milandy out there, who “kept a perpetual glass of juice going. He drank so much of it Marianne was worried about the chemicals.” And I’ll never forget the toothless, bun-loving Ms. Snellen.
Lastly, hats off to her publisher, Biblioasis, and their wonderful Metcalf-Rooke Award. Read the last two winners of this award too: Amy Jones’s What Boys Like (Salty Ink is about to say more there), and Rebecca Rosemblum’s Once (Rebecca isn’t an Atlantic Canadian, but damn she’s good.).
Keep Your Eyes Open For Kathleen’s Upcoming Novel, Annabel, This June, from Anansi.
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