Arvida

November 2, 2015
First published in French in 2011, Archibald’s (Le sel de la terre) collection of 14 stories mostly paints a loose portrait of the author’s hometown of Arvida, Quebec, accented by gothic, sometimes surreal individuals and events. “In the Midst of Spiders” follows a corporate executioner (whose job is telling people they are losing their’s) who knows his own turn on the chopping block will come. In the visually evocative “Jigai,” two women in Hokkaido embark on body scarring and dismemberment, for pleasure and for power. “The Last-Born” follows Raisin, a blunt, unintelligent man, one of the town’s “last-borns,” who doesn’t know how to live his own life or interact competently with others. The strongest story, “House Bound,” is a haunted house narrative about the horrors of existing within a broken family. Like the other strong stories in the collection, it focuses on the nature of things—nature itself, and human nature and the systems constructed by and around it. Though Archibald’s writing is clean and his imagery strong, the two trilogies that intersect with the other stories—“Blood Sisters” and “Arvida”—are more focused on crafting a tone representative of a place and time, and they are not inhabited by fully fleshed-out characters, which detracts from the impact of the other narratives.

September 1, 2015
Ghost stories, fables, and childhood memories from the great white north. Perhaps the personal nature of these stories combined with their specific geographic setting will make them more meaningful to readers in Francophone Canada. Unfortunately, this translated collection's purposeful ambiguity and painterly writing style make the entries feel more like impressions of scenes rather than solid stories. Most of the tales are set in the title village, a small industrial community north of Quebec City. The opener, "My Father and Proust," and its companion piece, "The Centre of Leisure and Forgetfulness," are generic memoirs about childhood. Others are anomalies like "America," a crime caper about an attempt to smuggle a woman over the border, and "Jigai," an eerie portrait of a self-mutilating refugee. Much of the collection attempts to mimic classical gothicism. "Cryptozoology" portrays a strange creature in the woods from the point of view of an adolescent boy. "A Mirror in the Mirror" is a slight tale about a woman who pines away for an absent playwright and ultimately becomes the ghost that haunts him. A triptych of stories labeled "Blood Sisters" concern themselves with the monsters that roam the lives of girls. In the final sequence of the trilogy, "Paris in the Rain," a woman is left alone in a morgue with the dismembered body of a man. "God is love and that's why he's terrible," she says. "You can't live, knowing that. You can just destroy your life and destroy your body and push others away and hurt others. You can just be evil and I was evil all the time and it's your fault and the fault of the stupid God who loved you like he loved me, of God who loved you, big dirty dog, and who loved me, damaged little girl." An uneven collection of stories about cruel men, enigmatic women, and frightened children.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.