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This All Happened

by Michael Winter

It’s amazing how the most mundane tasks can be elevated to an artform when you know you should be doing something else. The mere act of folding laundry becomes a form of terry-cloth origami in the procastinator’s hands; ballets are choreographed while cleaning out overstuffed closets. And for Gabriel English, busy at everything but fulfilling a New Year’s resolution to write his first novel, a daily journal is transformed into 365 meditations on the conflicting demands of art and life.

Gabriel, the narrator of Michael Winter’s autobiographical journal à clef This All Happened, wants to write a novel. He has a great idea – a fictional relationship between a 14-year-old-boy, painter Rockwell Kent, and northern explorer Bob Bartlett, set circa 1914 in Brigus, Newfoundland, where Kent and Bartlett briefly lived – and all the esthetic tools to fashion his masterpiece. Unfortunately, Gabriel has also resolved to finally “decide on Lydia,” his long-time lover, a passionate actress whose decisiveness extends to everything but her feelings for Gabriel.

Hence the daily journal. As Gabriel’s relationship with Lydia degenerates into peevishness and jealousy, and the proposed novel is pushed further onto the back burner, Gabriel retreats into the solitude of journal writing. Luckily for the reader, Winter never allows the journal to become a surrogate therapist’s couch or philosopher’s pedestal. This is a very funny, wry book, alive to the sensuous details of St. John’s and the surrounding countryside. Winter’s sparse prose style reveals layers of emotional subtext, and while he playfully alludes to the book’s autobiographical elements in the frontmatter, he’s also genuinely interested in capturing the nuances of other people’s lives.

At times the book’s entry-a-day format seems forced, a kind of quota system to fill up a manuscript, but these instances are rare. Winter chooses his subject matter with a fiction writer’s discriminating eye, threading several themes and recurring imagery into what “all happened.” I can’t wait to read the novel Gabriel English – sorry, Michael Winter – is going to write one day.

 

Reviewer: James Grainger

Publisher: House of Anansi

DETAILS

Price: $24.95

Page Count: 288 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-88784-651-3

Released: May

Issue Date: 2000-5

Categories: Fiction: Novels

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