André Alexis’ new collection, Other Worlds, is a standout, a title in conversation with such diverse influences as Caribbean history, Jonathan Swift, and alternate world anime. How strange this book is, how insightful, and how generous.
Alexis, a Trinidad-born Canadian writer, is probably best known for his short novel Fifteen Dogs, which follows the fate of fifteen dogs granted language and human intelligence by two Greek gods who happen to be at large and at loose ends in Canada. The novel won the Giller Prize when it was still universally recognized as Canada’s premier literary award; a tenth-anniversary hardback is set to appear later this year. Dogs was only one installment of Alexis’s “Quincunx” sequence of five interrelated books, though “sequence” may not be quite the correct word, since all can be read as standalones and the books’ publication order and their “series” order don’t match.
The first and longest story in Other Worlds is “Contrition: An Isekai,” which follows the life and afterlife of Tam Modeste, an obeah in Trinidad during the mid-nineteenth century. Seventy-odd years old, Tam can commune with birds and snakes; he can predict the weather and command swarms of flesh-eating ants. When due to his better angels and against his better judgment, he saves the life of a priggish young British officer, disaster ensues. The Englishman and the obeah share neither a language nor a worldview, and the officer’s attempt to show gratitude drives Tam to suicide by snake venom. When Tam awakes, he finds himself in a new world, and in a new body: He has, somehow, occupied the frame of Paul Williams, a Black child in nineteen-fifties Canada. Why has Tam found himself in this incomprehensible place? What must he do? And will Paul’s consciousness ever return to his body?
The Japanese term “isekai” and its modern usage is naturally unknown to either Tam or Paul; neither has had the opportunity to watch an anime or read a novel about a person magically sent to another world. But Alexis’s well-chosen anachronism accurately describes the protagonists’ dual experience: Tam, translated to a world that seems cold, sterile, and incomprehensible; Paul, granted knowledge beyond his years and supernatural gifts that defy the rational ethos of nineteen-fifties Canada.
The second story, “Houyhnhnm,” concerns a college instructor whose dying father, a lifelong skeptic and rationalist, asks his son to look after his horse, Xan. The father, in his later years, had grown eccentric: converting Xan’s stable into a sort of house, installing bookshelves, reading poetry and scientific papers to the horse, and boring his wife to tears with talk of Xan. After some months of caring for his father’s bequest, the narrator discovers that Xan can reason and talk; the narrator soon shares his late parent’s equine enthusiasm. “Houyhnhnm” originally appeared in The New Yorker and, like some other fantastic stories in that magazine, perhaps makes the nonrealistic too clearly metaphorical. The next story, “Winter, or a Town Near Palgrave,” is like something a more optimistic Robert Aickman might write.
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Other Worlds
Not every story contains supernatural elements, though all surprise and unsettle. “A Certain Likeness” is the story of Kisasi O’Hara, a curator who falls into a relationship with a famous painter, Misha, who loved and left Kisasi’s late mother, Kika. Misha’s most famous paintings are of Kika, who always resented the painter’s fame, loathed him for his abandonment, and wished that her daughter, whose name means “revenge” in Swahili, might somehow deliver a reprisal against him. Depending on how you read it, “The Bridle Path” is either a comedy of status envy with a twinge of horror, or horror with a dash of comedy.
“Pu Songling: An Appreciation” is a story of medicine and the supernatural, as well as a disquisition on the relative virtues of knowledge and ignorance. Its forty pages somehow comprise set pieces with a trained rat and a comatose parrot, a macabre resurrection in hospital’s moldering nineteenth-century morgue, a poisoning, “a freezer full of human remains,” and a woman followed by flocks of ravens wheresoever she travels. And then there’s “the woman whose sister-in-law’s corpse had climbed a tree.”
“A Misfortune” is a dark comedy of self-definition. Amara is in her late forties, and she has grounded her entire life and personality on the fact that she accidentally shot and killed her loving father when she was six. After her mother’s death, Amara learns that she might have been innocent of her father’s death and that, indeed, that death might have been a blessing. This news, which should be assuaging, threatens to upend her life, and Amara sets about suppressing her new knowledge. The last conventional story, “Consolation,” offers a sort of rhyming perspective on the collection’s opener. As in “Contrition,” a child, the only son of the only Black doctor in a Canadian town in the nineteen-sixties, accompanies his father on a house call, where he hears, but does not directly witness, his father having sex with a female patient.
In the last piece in Other Worlds, “An Elegy,” André Alexis speaks to us in what seems to be his own voice. We learn that, yes, Alexis’s father was the sole Black doctor in an almost solely white Canadian town; whether that primal scene of the house call derives from memory, he doesn’t say. Alexis talks of the disruptions and distortions of his childhood: a move from Trinidad to Canada, from parents’ house to grandparents’ house, from English to French. Some of those grandparents, incidentally, were from the Modest family; the Tam Modeste of “Contrition,” is, presumably, a relation. He describes the ways that moving between genres allows him to simultaneously fulfill and confound both himself and his readers: “The reader’s expectation can be subverted or met,” and Alexis has the invigorating sense that “I don’t know what I’m doing, that I’m poaching on foreign ground.” “An Elegy” explains or suggests a great deal, but is it entirely trustworthy? This volume is subtitled Stories, not Stories and an Essay, and “An Elegy” is dedicated to Harry Mathews, a writer known for spinning plausible untruths from the facts of his life. No matter: It’s a moving end to a fine collection.
In “An Elegy,” Alexis claims that “from time to time, I regret—resent even—the collection of mannerisms and awkwardness that, according to Hemingway, is what critics will call a writer’s style.” I hope any regrets and resentments are fleeting, as Alexis is a first-rate stylist; those critics, when they quote him, are apt to wish they could write half so well. Here is a man at the center of attention, managing a crowd: “It was strange, and strangely interesting, to vicariously experience celebrity. Misha smiled. He stood up straight. He was polite and friendly while, at the same time, being neither of those things, since you could feel the way the room reinterpreted his qualities, which (to Kisasi) was like watching a man being fitted for quotation marks.” Anyone who can coin “being fitted for quotation marks” has an enviable way with words.
Alexis chooses a quote from Blaise Pascal for his epigraph, but as I turned the pages of this collection, which ranges across continents and genres, which encompasses the quotidian and the fantastic, the past and the present, humor and horror, my mind returned again and again to a quote attributed to Paul Éluard: “There is another world, but it is in this one.”
Other Worlds is published by FSG Originals.