I’m not a big fan of short story collections but in researching reviews on this one, as one of the books being defended in the Canada Reads competition, I have to say this one has caught my curiousity enough I may have a look at it. The only book written to date by author David Bezmozgis, this book won the 2004 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and was finalist in the Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

The book is seven loosely linked short stories narrated by Mark Berman who starts out as the six year old son of Roman Berman a former Soviet athletic trainer who immigrates to Canada in the early 80’s. Roman aspires to become a message therapist in Canada. The family are Soviet Latvian Jews which parallels Bezmozgis background.  Although some have taken his writing to be auto-biographical Bezmozgis told Barbara Carey in an interview he has a very poor memory and that he thought what did happen to him could have been shaped into much of story.

He went on to tell her that he wanted to write about the community of Soviet Jews who emmigrated at that time. He hadn’t seen anything written about them at that time and felt their stories were compelling. The short story form reflects his love of short stories rather than reading novels and that writing a novel was an intimidating concept for him.  The order of the stories reflect how the stories came to him, they aren’t chronologically arranged.

Interwoven through the stories, even if not in chronological order, is the story of Mark Berman’s growing up and his journey of reconciling his traditional upbringing with the realities of life in Canada through his funny and slightly twisted view. The author brings an array of characters into the stories starting with  Tapka, the dog that Mark and his counsin Jana care for in the first story, Dr. Kornblum who draws together Russian Jews; Soviet weightlifter Sergei Federenko; and Natasha, the Moscow teenager who becomes Mark’s guide in charting the terrain of carnal pleasure.

John over on The Book Mine says about his reading of the story:

Bezmozgis says so much with so little. His writing comes across as factual, almost void of any flowery language whatsoever. And while I love occasional similes and metaphors, I found Bezmozgis‘ style refreshing.

 He’s unsure if he would vote for the book on Canada Read’s.

Meanwhile, Fumbling in Whitehorse’s comments are:

There really was not much to this book. Maybe I’m not a critical reader. He did win a lot of awards for the ONE short story in the book “Natasha.” That story was interesting, but we are voting on a book that all of Canada should read, not just one short story. In the grand scheme of the show, this one may go second or it may make in to the final two.

We’ll know how it fares this week. It’s being defended by Steven Page.

My rating is based on my research for this entry.