Garden in the Wind by Gabrielle Roy (review)

Reviews 189 One wonders if these two seemingly disparate journeys are substantive enough to fashion a readable and cohesive book. True, both are written by Xantus but his fame as a great natural observer is not served by these accounts. He is often given to exaggeration and sarcasm as in his description of the landowners of Baja California who are, as he sees them, wholly given over to lounging about in hammocks while sipping cocoa and smoking cigars. More often than not, the narrative falters under the weight of the minutia of the logistics of travel. Knowing of Xantus’ great contribution to natural history, we, as readers, long for detailed descriptions of the wildlife and the flora. These are only occasionally forthcoming as Xantus, aware that he is writing for the layman, is more concerned with campfire tales about grizzlies and jaguars and horses that can gallop a hundred miles without rest. The structure of the book is disturbing as well, as it is equally weighted down with footnotes, a list of maps and illustrations, acknowledgements, an introduction, a superfluous note by John Hunfalvy at the end of the book about Aztec ruins that runs to six pages, a plea to Hungarian Scientific Institutions, an editor’s postscript, notes, a bibliography, and an index. All of this for so slim a volume when Xantus himself only required a foreword. There is no doubt that Xantus did much for the sciences of ornithology, botany and zoology. The fact that numerous birds in America are named after him attests to only a small part of his contribution. His drawings, some of which appear in this book, are charming and worthy of study in them­ selves. But he is not the man to tell his own story. How much better the memory and service of Janos Xantus might be served if a first rate biog­ raphy, similar to those written of Audubon, Bartram and Humboldt, could be made available. ALAN KISHBAUGH, Los Angeles Garden in the Wind. By Gabrielle Roy, trans. Alan Brown. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977. 175 pages, cloth, $10.00.) Translations of several earlier volumes, notably Where Nests the Water Hen, Street of Riches, and The Road Past Altamont, have established Gabrielle Roy among English-speaking readers as a major writer of the West. Garden in the Wind will add nothing to that reputation. It is a collection of four tales — they lack the economy and compression we expect of a modern short story— set in various places across the prairies and presumably designed to evoke poetically the spirit of the place and its people. The first tale, “A Tramp at the Door,” depicts French-Canadian settlers and retains some of the power of Roy’s earlier work. The tramp insinuates 190 Western American Literature himself into each of the lonely households by bearing tales of the settlers’ old Quebec homes and by claiming to be a lost distant relative. By the time he is exposed as an impostor, he has actually drawn the people together and served more effectively as “kin” than their blood relations. The tale evinces some of the generous acceptance of humanity which warms Roy’s earlier stories. All men are united in a vast cycle of life, and in this respect the tale is true to the genius of French-Canadian literature of the West, which tends to depict man as participating in the natural cycles of the land while the English-Canadian literature sees him as alienated and exploitive. Perhaps the word “Garden” in the title is the operative term. In spite of its isolation from Quebec and its rigorous climate, the prairie of this tale is a nurturing soil, more like Willa Cather’s Nebraska than like the prairie of English-Canadian writers. In the other three tales Roy strays further afield, portraying a Chinese restaurant operator, “Where Will You Go, Sam Lee Wong?”, a Doukhobor colony, “Hoodoo Valley,” and a Ukranian or Polish couple, “Garden in the Wind.” In these tales the reader can still find Roy’s gently humorous affection for frail humanity, but seldom the expected sharpness of insight, the inspired poetic understanding of what makes the lives of ordinary...