Threshold Stories by Carol Bruneau

“We betray each other from birth, even before our bodies betray us.”

This quote, from the end of “Turn Our Mourning into Dance,” the first story in Carol Bruneau’s excellent collection Threshold, seems to signal an underlying caveat that runs throughout the sharply-observed moments that make up this book. In the story, an adult woman — a mother who has a difficult relationship with her teenage daughter — keeps seeing her own deceased mother in public places at random moments. I think what resonates for me with the use of the word “betray” is how it suggests the struggle we have connecting to each other as being somehow indicative of our fraught relationship with time. This in turn, when I consider the collection’s title, suggests how the particular might be seen as a threshold to the universal.

The stories here are uniformly engaging, and Bruneau’s skill with language employs colloquialisms for colour and a playfulness with syntax that always keeps the reader rooted in the moment.

Carol Bruneau is an award-winning writer from Halifax and has been a key figure on the Atlantic-Canadian literary scene for many years. She is also one of the finest writers this country has produced and has published internationally. As a storyteller, she is grounded in her hometown but allows her vision to expand into the world at large. The characters in these stories are, for the most part, Haligonians of different economic and social backgrounds who are trying to negotiate their way in local settings as well as in other countries. The stories here are uniformly engaging, and Bruneau’s skill with language employs colloquialisms for colour and a playfulness with syntax that always keeps the reader rooted in the moment.

Their average length is what we normally expect in short fiction, but there are a couple of shorter stories. One of them, “More Fish in the Sea”, which clocks in at two pages and change, puts on full display her love of language, her wild imagination and a dark sense of humour. In it, a woman who has been pushed into a raging river undergoes a surprising metamorphosis as she finds herself being pulled under the current. Given the story’s brevity and descriptive prowess, it approaches prose-poem territory. “Soon knifing, spinning, tumbling along – the burble and froth laced with a wintry iciness, the cold of dead things – I grew a dorsal fin, then a tail.”

In the stark reality of Bruneau’s world, the only means of survival is an unshakeable faith in one’s ability to adapt.

The story that resonated with me the most is also the collection’s longest. “A Procession of Night Owls” alternates between the present and the past to chronicle a Haligonian middle-aged couple’s challenging love affair with Naples. In the present moment they are waiting in the very early morning for a taxi to take them to the airport. The owner of their pensione has assured them that he has arranged it all and tells them to call him if it does not show up. As the time passes with no sign of the taxi, panic sets in when the owner does not answer his phone. Intercut between this narrative is their history of returning to Naples every few years, despite deciding that they had had enough after every visit. Bruneau paints a vivid picture of their first encounter with Piazza Garibaldi, as if “we were dropkicked into a parallel universe. A circle of hell, we’d wondered.” Bruneau’s descriptive powers do not fail to evoke the place.

“A circuit-jamming sensory overload of glaring sun, stench, noise. Wild, careening traffic, migrant hawkers waggling trinkets. Faces gleamed with sweat; eyes full of desperation had mimicked how I felt. Bogged down with luggage, we dodged them and barrages of scooters, pedestrians, and kids kicking soccer balls piled with trash.”

Although the city initially tests their middle-class North American comfort levels, they find something about the gritty atmosphere gets under their skin. It’s easy to write off their attraction as a tourist’s flirtation with the wild side, which on some level it is. And yet, for me, there is a sense of betrayal, to return to the quote I cited earlier, that is evoked in the way they wash their hands of the place after each visit, only to return at a later date. Perhaps it has to do with a dissatisfaction we find with our lives when we encounter a new place, take our fill, only to find later on that it is not enough. Or is it the place itself that betrays us with its promise of renewal that is never quite fulfilled? A threshold can become a space of where we search for a self that forever exists elsewhere.

For readers who value a keen insight into the hidden corners of human interactions, Threshold Stories by Carol Bruneau will offer many rewards.

Carol Bruneau is the author of three short story collections and four novels. Her first novel, Purple for Sky, won the 2001 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Dartmouth Book Award. Her 2007 novel, Glass Voices, was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Her reviews, stories, and essays have appeared nationwide in newspapers, journals, and anthologies, and two of her novels have been published internationally. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with her husband, their dog, and their cat.

Publisher: Nimbus (April 30, 2024)
Paperback 8.5″ x 5.5″ | 288 pages
ISBN: 9781774712719

Steven Mayoff

StevenMayoff(he/him) was born inMontreal and moved to Prince Edward Island, Canada in 2001. His books include the story collection Fatted Calf Blues (Turnstone Press, 2009), the novel Our Lady of Steerage (Bunim &Bannigan, 2015), the poetry chapbook Leonard’s Flat (Grey Borders Books, 2018) and the poetry collection Swinging Between Water and Stone (Guernica Editions, 2019) and the novelThe Island Gospel According to Samson Grief(Radiant Press, 2023). As a lyricist, he has collaborated with composer Ted Dykstra onDion a Rock Opera,which will receive its world premiere at the Coal Mine Theatre in Toronto in February 2024.