Sputnik Diner
In Sputnik Diner, Rick Maddocks captures the claustrophobia of small-town life through a series of five short stories whose characters and settings interlock. The newly arrived Welsh family integrating into the Ontario town of Nanticoke in the first story, "Plane People, " for instance, reappears briefly in "The Birthday Boy's Song, " just as the main characters from that story also appear in the book's centerpiece, "Lessons from the Sputnik Diner. " Indeed, all paths seem to converge on the Sputnik Diner, and by the last story, "The Blue Line Bus, " the reader fully understands the desire, captured in Maddocks's plain but vivid prose, of a former waitress at the diner to get the hell out of Dodge: "So she found a new vision, and in this vision she saw herself out west. Smoke scrolling up from a hillside campfire. People dancing in colours and swirls and shared food and clotheslines and clean water lapping, blue-green from the trees surging down out of the mountains. " Throughout the book, images of skydivers, papier-mâché dinosaurs, and a battered acoustic guitar give a further sense of continuity as the stories snowball in detail and emotion. Bleak though some of the themes are--coming to terms with death, dislocation, sundered families--there is hope here as well, and flashes of humour. Maddocks finds the fascinating humanity in those half-glimpsed towns and roadside attractions most of us pass by on the way to somewhere else, believing that somewhere else is somehow more real. --Shawn Conner Author(s): Rick Maddocks. Binding Hardcover. Publisher(s): Knopf Canada. Label: Knopf Canada.
| Fabricant: | Knopf Canada |
| Numéro de la pièce: | |
| Prix le plus bas (CAD): | 36,82 $ |
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