Review | Creation, discovery focus of Ottawa writer Jennifer Falkner’s ‘exquisite’ debut short story collection ‘Above Discovery’

“The heartbreak of archeology,” writes Jennifer Falkner in her story “Lion in the Desert,” “is that every act of discovery must also be an act of destruction. … Discoveries shift in importance, significance wavers, meanings blur as you try to translate field notes into conclusions.”

Falkner, a writer in Ottawa, might easily be describing her own technique in her debut collection, a group of strange, slippery stories that traverse continents and eras, shuffling between history, metaphor, and myth. Like the sculptor in “The Stonecutter’s Masterpiece,” the closing story in the volume and one of its finest, Falkner chisels away at her material, gradually teasing out something esthetically pleasing and surprising, only to find that recognizable figure morph into something even more unexpected.

This secondary metamorphosis is often as startling to the creator as it is to an audience, or so the story seems to imply. Tinged with elements of fable, “The Stonecutter’s Masterpiece” features a woman coming to the home of a former sculptor who now passes his remaining years doing journeyman work carving gravestones. The woman has an odd request: she is turning into stone herself and wants the sculptor to carve out of her encroaching granite “shell” the image of her true nature. He complies, creating his masterpiece: a granite statue of the most beautiful female figure imaginable. But this, he discovers, is not what the woman had in mind.

The idea of discovery is resonant throughout the collection, beginning with its title, which derives from the opening story. “Nineteen above Discovery” is about a brother and sister during the 19th-century Klondike gold rush in the Yukon. In the frigid north, the pair “live worse than tramps” and work themselves to the point of exhaustion in the hope of finding their fortune, though all they have dug up is “an enormous quantity of black mud.”

Falkner structures the story as diary entries written by the distaff part of the sibling pair, named Alma, who has also worked as a professional writer; her “little potboilers” kept the family afloat during their late father’s illness. In her pursuit of artistic creation, Alma is aligned with numerous other characters across these stories: Richard Burbage, whose travelling theatre company strives to make a living while performing the work of its star playwright, William Shakespeare; the sculptor in “The Stonecutter’s Masterpiece”; and Lark, the puppeteer in the uncanny story “Columbina.”

The eponymous figure in that piece, a broken marionette fashioned after an Italian commedia dell’arte character and lovingly restored to “life” by Lark and her companion, a more experienced puppeteer named Gillespie, becomes a touchstone for another pattern of metaphor that runs throughout the collection: that of metamorphosis. Figures in successive stories change their essential natures, transforming from trees into women (in “Sometimes a Tree”) or women into statues (in “The Stonecutter’s Masterpiece”) or larvae into moths (in “The Inventory,” which juxtaposes a woman who has just had an abortion with the notion of potential new life in the moth collection of a recently deceased lepidopterist).

Each of these transformations works simultaneously on a metaphorical and a literal level in the stories; each offers an element of baroque strangeness that belies the relatively straightforward prose Falkner employs. (For example, from the opener, “Snow squalls have made it almost impossible to go outside. I am reduced to reading the labels on tins for diversion. Armour’s Extract of Beef has never been so eloquent.”) The unadorned language in the stories, coupled with their relative brevity, can be deceptive, disguising the depths of meaning and implication that the author has managed to infuse into her work. This is frequently effected by way of juxtaposition or indirection, keeping a reader off balance and challenging preconceptions about how a particular piece might be expected to unfold.

The twelve exquisite, elegant stories that make up “Above Discovery” navigate the liminal territory between reality and dream, life and death, the past and the present in a way that feels utterly fresh and enchanting. “The thing about flying,” Falkner writes, “it’s really just a more complicated way of falling.” These stories demonstrate the truth of this observation, in a literary performance that soars.

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