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Savage Love

by Douglas Glover

There are familiar reasons why more people don’t recognize Douglas Glover as one of Canada’s best writers – chief among them the fact that he mainly writes experimental short fiction published by small presses. One hopes these prejudices won’t dog his latest collection. Savage Love is an accomplished, funny, and inventive book that readers should rejoice in.

The theme, announced in the title, is indeed a savage, perverse kind of desire – reminiscent, at times, of Barbara Gowdy’s We So Seldom Look on Love. One of Glover’s narrators describes a particularly torrid affair as being such a compulsive “wallow of resentment, hatred, lust, rage and envy … that to this day I think all of those emotions are love.” In another story we hear of the terror and “inhuman endlessness of desire, our inability to contain it, the dark tide on which we ride unwitting and unprepared.” Love as we find it here is ruinous, bestial, and passionate, with “passion” involving not just emotional peaks but also the depths of spiritual suffering.

An emphasis on rutting and physicality nicely complements Glover’s display of technical proficiency and formal experimentation. A favourite word is “ineffable,” but his writing embodies a different spirit, full of cerebral grip and grit. Glover is a smart writer of precisely measured effects, but it never seems like he’s showing off.

He’s also a master of shifting between moods and modes (he calls some of the stories “fugues”), and the collection moves fluidly from a brilliant parody of Cormac McCarthy’s demonic early style in the opening story, “Tristiana” (which shows how gentle a nudge is required to tip some texts into the absurd), to the psychosexual terror of “Crown of Thorns.”

Then there are the spare microfictions of the book’s Intermezzo section and the bawdy humour of the concluding comedies. Through it all, the timing (so essential to comic writing), point of view, and diversity of language is near perfect. Only one story, “A Flame, a Burst of Light,” seems out of place, but it’s still a good read on its own merits. By any measure, Savage Love deserves to be recognized as one of the best Canadian books published this year.

 

Reviewer: Alex Good

Publisher: Goose Lane Editions

DETAILS

Price: $29.95

Page Count: 264 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-86492-901-3

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2013-10

Categories: Fiction: Short