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(More customer reviews)I've had this book lying by my nightstand or a year or more, for I hesitate to say I'm finished with it for I know I haven't been able to penetrate all of its mysteries and its glories. Well, there's a layer of understanding I'll never attain, for I'm an American and what do I know of Canada's Okanagan Valley? And yet to my eyes Brian Dedora has made this unknown landscape come alive for me in the same way that the moors of Wuthering Heights are alive as well, through the power of his description and what my students call "scene work," the setting off of human emotions and tempests within, and to a degree stirred up by exactly this strange and alienating surround. Whether his book is typical of "Can Lit" I don't know but I don't think so--it is too magical and poetic, and it doesn't tell a tale of redemption. In fact I've read it five or six times ever since my mentor Peter Quartermain advised me to get a copy, and as i say, I still haven't plumbed its depths.
Maybe in fact it does tell a tale of redemption? There's the miserable boy at the heart of the book, growing up in a hellish and freezing sort of Cold Comfort Farm of a family. Yes, there are some pleasant times for our lad, but no reader can come away from A Slice of Voice at the Edge of Hearing without feeling horror that any young person had to live like this. And yet he learned how to write, somewhere along the way, it is a sort of miracle. With the boy's Ukrainian and Irish background he was taught that the body was a sinful and unclean vessel, and some of the book's most stirring scenes are of the boy encountering sexual and physical abuse within the church and school system designed to protect him and assist him. It is a bitter chill of a world, and all the worse for him to dares grow up gay there. "My town is a small town rimmed with small hills under a bowl of blue. My town is a small town hidden in the long dry grass between the Columbia and the Cascade in a dry warm valley of remembrance."
The book is extremely beautiful and painful at the same time, and its sexual and romantic yearnings will bring a gulp of recognition t everyone, no matter where they hail from, who has ever tried not to be different. I have a little slim book by Dedora on my shelf, a book of poetry written with the late bp nichol, and I would have to say that the present book is maybe half poetry, half prose, and a large percentage of the whole I read as a lyric, sometimes hysteric and thaumaturgical fantasia based on the events of the "story." In one exquisite passage the author tells us that he wants "language in a swimmer's body to seduce me, roll me over and press me down, make me his mattress and touch me in the electric places, to seek with our tongues in the aureole of the assring the non-existent nipple hiding in all the wrong, forbidden but delightful places, drive me wild and aching with desire so engorged as to hurt," etc, etc, as I'm typing this out it comes to me, I know just the guy I will make a present of this book to.
Yes, it's difficult, and yes it's unresolved, but it has characters and scenes that will stick with me forever. God bless writers like Brian Dedora who have the drive and the power to change writing around, make it go from Z to A for once, to shake up an American ignorant of the charms of the Okanagan.
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