Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster by Damian Tarnopolsky

This book of 15 interrelated short fictions by an often-nominated writer for literary prizes should be of interest to any reader of contemporary fiction who favours something a little different from the realism that dominates CanLit, but not so different that it disrupts what some think fiction is able to accomplish. It featured on the lists of various writers as an anticipated title in 2024, and it’s easy to see why it received good reviews. It’s on the safe side of daring, for CanLit, it’s literary fiction that’s unlikely to be the pick of a staffer at Chapters. It’s not as dazzling as some reviewers make it out to be (hardly the author’s fault); their reading of international literature stopped somewhere short of Mark Danielewski, Joseph McElroy, Matthew McIntosh, Nichola Barker, Christine Brooke-Rose or any Oulipian. If you were raised on a diet of U.S. minimalists it might seem rich.

Monk has a rounded character named Mark Ferguson who’s filled with conflict, has a mental condition that leads him to attempt suicide, and is a writer to boot (that could also be a mental condition, if you prefer). His conflicts in life and art are scattered throughout the collection, and he possesses a great boon for any writer: a messed-up family. One of his sisters dies (or does she?), one is a loose cannon, and the father is an oddball who lives in fear of penury for much of his unremarkable life. To Ferguson’s mother, in Ferguson’s eyes, children are objects: “To her, a child was something you moved around.”

The stories are told through first- and third-person narratives, in a quasi-Expressionist play format, and in a pastiche of that CanLit staple, historical fiction using a religious order. At least, I hope it’s a pastiche, because it’s as dreary as the real thing. Characters have arcs, they speak in neat turns of phrase, and they are designed to be identifiable. However, as Harold Jacobson said about such figures, that they appeal to readers on those grounds means “it isn’t really art we’re interested in. It’s still ourselves.”

What, then, does Tarnopolsky do that is worth attention? First, he enjoys ambiguity, even if that is short-lived, and leaving things out for readers to work at deciphering. He likes failed attempts at alternative living, as in “Bed,” where Joe Ferguson tries not to do anything, to remove himself from the world of work and duty but is, so to speak, snookered by his own cue stick. “Big Fuzzy Sweater” has a lot of good family dialogue in the service of a dull story, but that doesn’t detract from the believable way that Tarnopolsky, with humour and with little exaggeration, shows how family members speak with each other, and as I read it recalled a line from the song “Beyond Belief” by Elvis Costello, “The glib replies, the same defeats.” Family conversation is more repetitive, more like Absurdist plays, than anyone dares admit. “They loved Mark Ferguson, whoever the fuck that is,” says Ferguson about himself in “Like Triumph,” an admission of his own, in what is probably the best piece here, that casts everything we’ve read and that’s left to read in a new light. There is at the end, in “My Idea of Perfection,” a self-reference Tarnopolsky makes to himself as “instructor” of a writing course. It’s expected that he’d step out from the shadows in this kind of fiction. Not too far out, not like how Blaise Cendrars uses his own self in his devastating novel Moravagine; more in a Hitchcockian sense of a cameo.

All of that is earnest and admirable for the effort required to craft each of these pieces over many years, but every story, worthy as it may appear to be (the historical pastiche excepted), falls short of achieving grandness. Let me be clear that the contents are very well-written. The vocabulary is fine. The sentences are solid and true to the character they’re coming from or about. However, everything suffers from the lack of a pulse and from not being daring enough. Some reviewers have seen this. Here’s Emily Weedon in The Seaboard Review: “The prose is dense, tightly curled in on itself like the petals of an unbloomed flower, whorled around its inner secrets and logic…” In a way she doesn’t intend, that about sums up Monk: it’s a 15-stemmed bouquet of flowers that never gasp open and don’t allow for pollination. Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster has an intellectual dynamo running underneath the words, and I respect that for what it is, but it isn’t enough for me to feel that here is something new and exciting.

The Harold Jacobson quotation comes from “Why the novel matters,” TLS, July 6, 2018, p22.

Damian Tarnopolsky is a Toronto-based writer, editor, and teacher. His novel Goya’s Dog was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada/Caribbean). His short fiction has appeared in The Puritan, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, subTerrain, Audeamus, among others. Tarnopolsky has twice been nominated for the Journey Prize.

Publisher: Freehand Books (September 3rd, 2024)
Paperback: 8″x 6″ | 272 pp
ISBN: 9781990601804