Death in Vancouver

Since the debut of Garry Thomas Morse's first collection deemed "experimental fiction,? Death in Vancouver has drawn fervid enthusiasm from many West Coast writers and artists. Set in Vancouver, B.C., this gathering of stories superimposes aspects of literary classics on local urban space to express increasing dissonance and alienation in the groaning "necropolis? that is the contemporary global city.

"One Helen? is a woman subject to poetic idealization who reveals her own interior monologue on Bloomsday in "Another Helen? in this two-part romantic comedy where love may arrive too late. In "Nailed,? an incident from The Book of Judges becomes zagadka without razgadka, or one of Gogol's riddles without resolution. "Salt Chip Boy? presents homogenized global jargon from an Orwellian vision of a future Vancouver where denizens controlled by implanted desiccants enter virtual worlds to enjoy vintage language and scenarios. In "Two Scoops,? an attractive reporter investigates a government-funded project that involves supermarket products and sexual hallucinations. In "The Book,? a Dostoyevskian drunkard contemplates Mallarmé's suggestion that everything exists to end up in a book while en route to "the stone that drives men mad? as described in Pauline Johnson's Legends of Vancouver. "Dry Gray,? who takes his name from a burger chain receipt while trying to stay sober, grapples with lingering questions from an Asperger's test.

These stories culminate in the title novella, a restatement of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice in which a retired ballet dancer called Padam falls under the spell of a young man in the lounge of the Istoria (fictional double to the Sylvia Hotel). When a hotel renovation leads Padam to believe that cosmetic injections will resolve his unrequited passion, he finds himself suddenly face to face with an unslaked desire for historical vengeance in the beak of a First Nations bird monster.

Autorentext

Garry Thomas Morse's poetry books with LINEBooks include sonic riffs on Rainer Maria Rilke's sonnets in Transversals for Orpheus and a tribute to David McFadden's poetic prose in Streams. His poetry books with Talonbooks include a homage to San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer in After Jack, and an exploration of his mother's Kwakwaka'wakw First Nations ancestry in Discovery Passages (finalist for the Governor General's Award for Poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, also voted One of the Top Ten Poetry Collections of 2011 by the Globe and Mail and One of the Best Ten Aboriginal Books from the past decade by CBC's 8th Fire), and Prairie Harbour and Safety Sand.

Morse's books of fiction include his collection Death in Vancouver, and the three books in The Chaos! Quincunx series, including Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus (2013 ReLit Award finalist), Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour (2014 ReLit Award finalist), and Minor Expectations, all published by Talonbooks.

Morse is a casual commentator for Jacket2 and his work continues to appear in a variety of publications and is studied at various Canadian universities, including UBC. He currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Klappentext

Garry Thomas Morse deploys his prodigious classical repertoire to compose the edgy new voices that reflect the cultural simultaneity of our everyday-a transnational, ahistoric cosmopolitanism: an idealized Helen is confounded by Molly Bloom's monologue from Joyce's Ulysses; a Dostoyevskian character parodies the libidinal excesses of William Burroughs with "the stone that drives men mad" from Pauline Johnson's Tales of Stanley Park; an incident from The Book of Judges answers one of Gogol's riddles; an acidic response to the recent fascination with "speculative fiction" introduces a punch card system from the year 2088 in which future language facilitates only business transactions in a completely monetized world; and F. Scott Fitzgerald's alcoholism hits rock bottom in the unfulfilled desires of a dry pub crawl.

All of these stories seem to sketch the details of immediately recognizable places, but reveal a luminous interiority we never dreamed might be (re)discovered there. Transparently rooted in the work of other authors, including Garry Thomas Morse's contemporaries, they nevertheless defy critical terms such as "intertextuality" and "authenticity." Since his mother's people (the Kwakwaka'wakw) became disconnected from their traditions there has been a great deal of forgetfulness of the "dream-time" that used to exist in our everyday lives-this forgotten "theatrical madness" of the human condition is what Morse seeks to re-present.

The title story of this brilliant collection of avant-garde fiction, loosely based on The Picture of Dorian Gray, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, and the film Death in Venice inverts the post-modern textual convention that only the author's voice can be considered authentic. Its main character-the artist Padam, who is no more "fictional" than the author-constantly interrogates the accuracy of his representations, whereas we know almost nothing about the narrator, who exists merely as the "subject" of the Padam's portrait and an "object" of his reflection.