Fiction 2

26 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 iA....... u.v'.....;;>. and a witchcraft before away from the modem face of Nigeria and settling down again in her compound. While a line of humour runs through the novel, as in the father's to substitute vulture meat for chicken at his Fadimatu is informed by a serious theme and a tragic vision. The lives of Facti and her two schoolfriends show the difficulties a woman faces as Africa to move into a Sexual official incompetence, nepotism, and the ubiquitous male domination oppress the women's efforts to break out of the in and find fulfilment and A OV~"\IA"'o.c the options open to before like the plot, is densely detailed and realistic; the author has taken the time to develop except motivations - which the novel makes a virtue of in the confusion of and bureaucratic leave ov..... ""I"'I-~ Hons dampened if not destroyed. The blank area of Fadimatu's minimized motivation in gives a effect to Mitton's prose that wen reflects the protagonist's confusions. The language of Fadimatu is spiced with Hausa phrases and the peculiar and distorted vocabulary common in 'friend' used as and the inevitable 'this I Conversation is with sensibly , with notorious slogans such as Condition is Permanent.' The whole and visual of northern from of Education to common is caned up by Mitton in remarkable and fascinating depth. Fadimatu is an artful fiction and a broadening, engrossing read. 2/ ARITHA VAN HERK The year 1992 can considered one of the most stellar for Canadian with Michael The English Patient (M:cCleBand and Stewart} winning not only the Governor-General's award for fiction but also the coveted and contested British Booker Prize first Canadian so and the Commonwealth Prize for region. As a lead title for this year's literature, novel epitomizes the best of the that is through it is and At same it offers an in~depth of bomb disposai, desert exploration, and the contingencies of triangular love. Bringing back two characters, Hana and Caravaggio, from 1987's In the Skin a Lion, succeeds in a historically world where the and the are drawn together at the end of the Second FICfION 27 World War. In a remote and ruined but romantic ItaHan San four characters to read lives in the pages of an unpredictable book. Hana, now grown, is a nurse who refuses to leave her last a burned aviator crashed in the desert and who to no recollection of who he are by Hana's father's old friend, CaravaggioJ who has turned his stealth into but lost his hands. And by a Sikh in the lsanneal:ea ne()DI,e. effaced from a world has in the ruin of the haunted try to reconstruct what rituals can, in that recreation , to heal themselves. These characters represent a meeting of COll1O'nell1ts that goes far the emblematic to an of of and of Full textual evocation , of desire and The English Patient is a work of pure as paradoxical as the characters it unleaves. Ondaatje's I.JV'''-U.'_CI intricate and even embedded in the task of have the ability to stop the reader to make every reader with recognition and pleasure. This is both a" novel of sensation and a a in that it achieves brilliance, Creek and Creek is a commulocked in the cleft dry the next. It is a CmnrrlUl1l1ty line, new face 'cloth for imagination to heat cold must endure edge fabrication and Stella's entrance, as becomes a site of contention and disturbance in a place where there is little to occupy people's attenlnOln; at the same she the landscape, unable to manage a universe that will not to school rule. When Stella decides that she will rent a cabin on her own, instead of boarding with Sam Rose the is horrified at the and when she brings a friend with her as 'social insurance' are doubly corruption 'that women were not made God to alone in with what is natural and what Watson's evocation of and her ....l"\~':lIH.. a young schoolteacher is a charcoal sketch 28 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992...