BOOKS: The Sound of All Flesh
Andrea Paré
The Link (Concordia University)
Barry Webster
Porcupine’s Quill Publishers
MONTREAL (CUP) — When I first picked up the psychedelic novel In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan, I was by a roadside where some aged hippies were selling books out of their VW Beetle van. I was about 15, on a family trip in New Brunswick, and I inhaled the nonsensical wordplay like it was part of the ocean air. It was an artificial, albeit healthy high that kept me inspired, despite the uncool confines of a family minivan. Since then, I have often looked for this type of weirdo dialect in books, but for the most part, have found it only in poetry.
Every so often though, there are books like The Sound of All Flesh that are reminders of the fact that literature can — when injected with the proper dosage of words — heighten your senses. A collection of short stories by Canuck wordsmith Barry Webster, The Sound of All Flesh manages to be as contemporary as you would expect to find in a magazine like Maisonneuve or Matrix — the latter which has indeed published Webster’s stories — but never dry or cynical.
Rather, it paints a rose-coloured hope on its subjects who, for the most part, are everyday people whose internal and external geographies are often juxtaposed. His best stories hold a breathing life in them, describing people who feel alienated in the landscapes they have travelled to, as in “The Modesty Wrap,” where a Brooklynite experiences Turkish culture. In this story, the protagonist suffers from gastric intestinitis after eating local cuisine, but it seems convenient, given his inability to digest the local culture. Throughout, he is fixated on climbing tourist destination Mount Ararat, and in doing so somewhat misses the true essence of the place he is in.
In “Earthquakes,” which features a Canadian geologist visiting Switzerland, the alienation is experienced as the character must leave his tourist destination and return to Canada, “a country nobody has heard of and for some doesn’t exist.” On a large scale it represents his own life there, which consists of playing pin the tail on the mastodon with the old lady next door.
Of course, all this flowery penmanship is seductive, but it can often accompany a lack of storyline. Fortunately, Webster steers clear of this for the most part, not omitting structure but using it to cushion and prop up his surrealist word play. Perhaps the only exception to that rule is in the first story, “The Royal Conservatory,” which has a lot of fascinating sentences like, “the clarinets dissolved like mercury that made a loud hissing sound as it dribbled down the students’ legs,” but is difficult for those of us who need some kind of narrative lattice to stand on. This is no easy feat either, since most of the dialogue describes the inner landscapes of the mind, which often involve abstract, one-track conversation.
As Webster’s characters attempt to make sense of themselves, their bodies physically collide with the surroundings, literally giving us a sound of their flesh. Complemented by Webster’s alien-like narrative, these short literary pieces are like trips, both inside the mind of the interesting characters he describes and in the countries they find themselves in. Like a good vacation, this book is like a creative muse; it provides a vicarious peek into the places you have never gone — or perhaps never will outside the pages of this novel.
