Despair: And Other Stories - Hardcover

Alexis, Andre

3.6

89 ratings by Goodreads

9780805059793: Despair: And Other Stories

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805059792 ISBN 13: 9780805059793

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2000

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The publication of Andr� Alexis's award-winning first novel, Childhood, in 1998, marked the United States debut of one of Canada's most gifted young writers. Now, with Despair, Alexis offers further proof of his brilliance and displays a talent for spinning disturbing but elegant tales.

Emerging from the landscapes and the folklore of Trinidad and Canada, Despair reveals a world both recognizable and shockingly strange: in cities riven by fear and violence, quiet inhabitants lead outwardly banal lives that conceal sinister realities. A failed artist with beautiful hands is driven by a fetish for injuries in "The Third Terrace." While on an excursion to a bakery, a man wrestles with his capacity for evil deeds in "The Metaphysics of Morals." "Horse" centers on the bizarre experiments of a doctor who has rented space in the house of a grieving man. In "The Night Piece," a boy is haunted by a story told to him about a soucouyant, a vampire in the guise of an old woman who has settled nearby.

In eight exquisitely crafted stories, shimmering with malevolence and longing, Andr� Alexis has fashioned an underworld and limned it with light.

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Review:

The themes of Andr� Alexis's first story collection--belonging, displacement, alienation, and desire--may strike some readers as overly familiar. And most of the action in Despair takes place in downtown Ottawa, not exactly a city that makes the heart beat faster. Yet the author's achievement here is anything but mundane. Recounting his stories in precise, unadorned language, Alexis produces quiet dramas of nightmarish threat, in which reality itself constantly threatens to degenerate into (as "Kuala Lumpur" would have it) "something ecstatic and unhealthy."

Almost all the characters in Despair are isolated by circumstances beyond their making--or simply by their own imaginings. And Alexis manages to combine the cultural traditions of Trinidad and Canada to eerie, searing effect. In "The Night Piece," for example, a young guest at a wedding is haunted by a tale of the Soucouyant, a folkloric vampire who kills his victims by slowly biting their backs and the soft flesh behind their knees. "Despair: Five Stories of Ottawa" opens with the last words of a 50-year-old parakeet: "Jesus, Maria, my corns are killing me." But this avian fare-thee-well sets in motion a truly unsettling series of events, including the ascension of the peripheral (but symbolically weighty) Mr. Paz:

Mr. Paz lay on the green grass with his arms out, like a man crucified. Soon Mr. Paz's body rose from the lawn; his body rose. It ascended. It floated above the houses in Merivale. It sailed over the thousands of freshly tarred roofs. It passed by tall buildings and from the ground it appeared to be a cross or a starfish, and then a speck in the sunlight.

Elsewhere, plants grow out of the mouths of the poor, disembodied heads cackle and jeer. Alexis's brand of homegrown surrealism seldom seems contrived to shock us. Instead, he explores the interplay between the real and the not real, sketching out a fictional universe in which existence itself becomes a "confusion, a welter, a tangle, a tumult." --Ruth Petrie

About the Author:

Andr� Alexis was born in Trinidad in 1957 and grew up in Canada. Despair was published in Canada in 1994 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. His first novel, Childhood, is available from Owl Books (see page 33). Alexis lives in Toronto.

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