Knife Party at the Hotel Europa
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted, Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction, New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction, and Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
One of Canada's literary treasures, Mark Anthony Jarman returns with a book of moving and often funny tales of a man's quest for himself. A.S. Byatt says that his writing is "extraordinary, his stories gripping," and in this gorgeous new collection, Jarman delivers something new once again.
In Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, Jarman writes about losing and finding love, marriage and melancholy, the dislocation and redemptive power of travel in Italy's sensual summer.
A man travels to Italy to escape the memory of love lost, and a marriage ended. He passes through sun-drenched landscapes of cliffs and seaside paradises, while the corpses of refugees wash up on the beach; he parties with the young and beautiful Italians he meets on the train while a man bleeds to death in the hallway. A teenage thief prowls the roof of the tourist hotel at night; an embassy is bombed; holy statues come alive to roam in a gang stealing used restaurant grease.
He suffers the acute loneliness of one who has abandoned and been abandoned, and in this exquisite suffering, he finds how beautiful this life can be. In vivid, sensuous prose, Jarman's stories circle and overlap in surprising, weird, and wonderful ways. Tangents turn out to be crucial, allusions are powerful.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of linked short stories, Jarman (19 Knives) creates a dizzyingly vivid world, layering impressions of present-day Italy, with its tourists and churches and parties, with musings on its antique past and memories of the narrator s more mundane life in Canada. The unnamed protagonist spends a summer in Italy, traveling from Rome to Naples and Pompeii and back again. Alone after a recent divorce, feeling disconnected from his old life, he meditates and sometimes broods on past and present loves, and what it means to feel abandoned and lonely in a teeming landscape. Jarman s stream-of-consciousness prose circles and sweeps across encounters with hip young Italians, a man bleeding to death in the hallway after a party, romantic moonlit excursions interrupted by the corpses of refugees washing up on the beach, mysterious holy statues that transform at night into a gang of restaurant grease thieves, and the tragic end of a modern Icarus falling from a cliff. Jarman s stories are exquisite and powerful, finding beauty even within pain. They demand to be read again and again.
