Those of you who are reading here now, but not reading Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, will probably only be interested in the first couple of paragraphs after this introduction. Feel free to skip past the section that I've titled The Underneath, written with those who know the story-or other
Stories set in—and revolving around—Vietnam have appeared on BIP many times, like Marcelino Truong’s coming-of-age memoir in translation by David Homel: Such a Lovely Little War (2014; 2015) (his follow-up, Saigon Calling, brought the family to England). Also Robert Olen Butler’s Perfume River (2016) but to say much more
Earlier this year, Karen and Lizzy hosted ReadIndies and it reminded me how many years had passed since an installment of my Fiercely Reading Indie project (the most extensive was my deep-dive into House of Anansi’s backlist). Maybe I’d slipped into devotedly reading from the Big Five, I wondered.
How anxious I was, about rereading this story; I had confused it with “In the Fall”, a heart-breaking story about Scott, a horse (you know the rule about spoilers and animal stories, eh?) who was once all black but became grey around the eyes by the time that story
The laundry hangs on the clothesline in the background, while Alistair MacLeod speaks to his wife Anita about what their life was like when the kids were young. It’s there, in the film “Reading Alistair MacLeod”, that I see Anita patiently waiting, while he pulls out a small stack
