Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A man reflects on family memories—that may or may not be true—in this novel of “sharply composed vignettes with a keen sense of timing and humor” (Publishers Weekly).
Ben is an artist closing in on forty, and it’s hard for him to be sure about the past. His parents are both dead, and his brother, who has mental issues, is a lousy source of information. So when Ben finds himself with a particularly persistent memory that keeps nagging at him, he doesn’t know where to turn to answer the question: Did his mother really assassinate a prominent neo-Nazi?
In a novel that “shows maturity of vision without sacrificing the childish sense of play and absurdity his readers expect from him,” Stuart Ross sends Ben ranging through childhood summers at an Ontario cottage, teenage alienation in a Toronto suburb, a disastrous college career, and the calamity that precipitates his brother’s institutionalization—as he tries to sort through the events of his life, both real and surreal (The Globe and Mail, Toronto).
“A writer with an original sensibility.” —The Vancouver Sun
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ross's slight first novel is composed of brief, somber, funny tales, and begins in Ontario with the narrator's memory of his mother avenging the gas chamber deaths of her Polish relatives by shooting a prominent neo-Nazi in the head. The fantasy of the victim suddenly empowered his mother killing Rolf K ber as he steps out of a Jewish-owned hardware store, his hardhat spinning "like a dreidl" becomes a mournful dirge that runs through these nostalgic and grim coming-of-age anecdotes. Both the narrator, Ben, and his mother have been bullied, she as a girl by Christian children, he by an older boy who forces him to destroy the book he's reading. As Ben destroys Black Like Me he thinks, "Now was the time to fight back," a vengeance fantasy that comforts him. Ben's parents die of cancer and his older brother, Jake, loses his memory, then his mind; Ben turns to performance art, reliving childhood traumas in acts called "Stagger" and "Nerve Endings," and often rehearsing fantasies, such as Jimmy Stewart's bell tower pursuit of Kim Novak in Vertigo. These are sharply composed vignettes with a keen sense of timing and humor.
