Fiction 1

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 1, winter 2001/2 Letters in Canada 2000 Fiction 1 / SUSAN KNUTSON Among the works of fiction by new authors published in 2000 are several that resist classification, shaping fiction to the ends of history, poetry, and theory. One such is Alana Wilcox=s novel, A Grammar of Endings, a firstperson narration of two unresolved losses, the narrator=s girlhood bereavement of her father to hemophilia B, or Christmas disease, and her more recent abandonment by her lover, Aidan, to growing indifference and another love. These are explored in short poetic/theoretical texts headed up by entries from Stedman=s Medical Encyclopedia, which structure the book around words of diseases beginning with the letter a. >How beautiful, the language of disease. It has a cipher, certain groups of letters that always refer to the same things. bio life neuro nerve cardi heart. And a. Negation, deprivation, absence. A prefix added to take something away.= Moving through the list, abiosis, abulia ... and so on, the a of negation strikes at life, agency, articulation, normal emotion, and every aspect of language function, from the ability to correctly formulate a statement (acataphasia), to the ability to communicate by speech, writing, or signs (aphasia). The final entries, threatening bodily rhythm (arrhythmia) and mental coherence (asyndesis), close with avulsion, >a tearing away or forcible separation,= and the narrative closes with the speaker moving away from her memories of loss into a new relationship in which she will risk loving again. An archetypal narrative, then, of death and rebirth, refracted through the textual complexity of medical etymology and good writing. In its address, A Grammar of Endings is an unfinished love letter that folds into itself citations from love letters through the ages, written by wellknown lovers such as John Keats, Anaïs Nin, Edith Wharton, Eloïse, and Dylan Thomas. Because Aidan is no longer in love with the speaker, her letter to him fails in its essential purpose, which is, as Nigel Rees points out in another citation, >to bridge the gap between the two people, or to express through the written word what it is difficult to put in the spoken word.= Such amorous efforts are set against the silence of the narrator=s mother, who, after her husband=s death, was left >where words could not find her,= 2 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 >silent, paralyzed ... [i]mmobile, unable to utter a word, unable to hear a sound.= The narrator, however, is caught in a linguistic relation to her absent lover: I think every day that ... I would be over him, but what does that mean. How it=s not about prepositions, that I have been over him and under him and beside him and away from him, and the only way I would every be over him is if there were no preposition between us at all. Or just a preposition with nothing, no Aidan, on the other side of it. I am over, under, beside, against. Then it would be done. Meanwhile, he is always there, on the other side of some preposition, even when, especially when, he is not in the house and not in the café, and I am always disappointed, and relieved. The sustained interest in language, letter writing, medical etymology, and passionate love combine to make A Grammar of Endings one of the most intricate texts I have read for quite a while. Robert Finley=s The Accidental Indies also pushes apart the borders of genre in order to create fiction out of history and poetry. This carefully researched tale of Columbus=s voyage to the New World is based on a variety of documents including The Diario of Christopher Columbus= First Voyage to America, 1492B1493; Histoire Naturelle des Indies: The Drake Manuscript in the Pierpoint Morgan Library, and The Life of Admiral Christopher Columbus by his son, Ferdinand, to name only a few. With the details of seamanship and sailing culture also as authentic as possible, the book is in many respects a rigorous imaging of what it might have been like to really be there, without the knowledge and prejudices of today. Poetry is the natural vehicle for...