A Canadian writer born in Northern Ireland to South African Jewish parents of Lithuanian descent, Gary Barwin is a man of many hats: poet, writer, composer, multimedia artist, performer and educator. His work has won many awards. He may be most known for his 2016 novel, Yiddish for Pirates, which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award (Fiction), and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction.
A long-time participant in the country’s small press and DIY literary (among other arts) scenes, Barwin has a broadly established reputation for innovation and all out weirdness. How are we to make sense, for example, of stories like “Slice” included in Barwin’s new career retrospective, Scandal at the Alphorn Factory, which starts like this: “My mother buried me with a handful of flour. He will rise, she said, and threw the shovel over the fence. Then she went inside to sing like a lizard”?
In short, we’re not. Stop making sense, The Talking Heads instructed us. Free your mind instead, John Lennon sang. Gary Barwin’s stories sing similar melodies. In his 2023 nonfiction collection, Imagining Imagining, Barwin provides context. Western music, he wrote, was often “conceptualized as narrative” and “evokes the hero’s journey – oh, we’ve traveled far and returned changed.”
But is that how we experience life?
No. Says Barwin: “We move through time and the ostensible forward direction of our lives, but memory and history accumulate, double back, break expected boundaries like a Möbius strip.” I had to look that up, too; it’s a loop twisted so it has only one side, existing in reality but appearing to defy it also. Such is the experience of reading many of the stories in Barwin’s new selected collection.
Such as the story about Hitler’s moustache, which a couple coaxes out of its hiding spot in their attic, which incidentally is not the only moustache-featuring story in the book. Or the story about the narrator whose brother, a foetus, is kept in a bottle in the office of their doctor father’s office. What are we to make of these tales? How do they relate to the state of the world?
In Imaging Imaging, Barwin wrote about how the so-called Hitler moustache was popular in the decades before 1939. His own grandfather sports one in photographs. He also writes of how his doctor father kept foetuses (not human!) in bottles in his office. We see here the embryos (ahem) that Barwin’s imagination took to high levels of fancy.
Barwin received a PhD in music composition and is fluent in using music metaphors to explain his storytelling. He tells of how he would go to synagogue and watch the older men pray, “mumbling passages unintelligibly and then surfacing for a moment, speak recognizable words and chant, only to sink back below the surface of intelligibility again.” This was not, he notes, “the homogenous and lucid ideal of the Western tradition.” No, it was “a complex weaving of voices, each individual part of an organic ever-changing community of voices.”
In Barwin, there is no attempt to make the centre hold. Layering, interweaving the voices is instead the point. The mystery of life is not explained, here, but it is revealed in symphonies of mind expansion. Take the journey through Barwin’s black hole; you’ll be amazed by what you’ll find.
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist. He is the author of 31 books including Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity and Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Vine Award, and was chosen for Hamilton Reads 2023. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was long listed for Canada Reads. His 2022 poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. A PhD in music composition, he has been writer-in-residence and taught at many universities, colleges and libraries. He lives in Hamilton and at garybarwin.com.
Publisher: Assembly Press (September 24, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 6″ | 304 pages
ISBN: 9781738009886
Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.
- Michael Brysonhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michaelb/
- Michael Brysonhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michaelb/
- Michael Brysonhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michaelb/
- Michael Brysonhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michaelb/
- Michael Brysonhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michaelb/
- Michael Brysonhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michaelb/
