Bill GastonReviews

Some really beautiful stories, The Kite Trick and The Gods Take Off Their Shirts in particular. Still wishing I could go back in time and not read Honouring Honey though. Shudder.

Though it took me a long time to read this, that's not to say this was a horrible book. Actually, it's quite a good one, if a touch overlong. There's four stories intertwined here, between Stuart, who burned down his own house the day he paid it off, Mel who's dying of cancer, her father Hal, who suffers from Alzheimer's, and finally the book within the book, The World, written by Hal years earlier.

The characters, though well-drawn, still somehow feel a bit superficial. And the various stories do seem a touch drawn out. Though I liked the book and loved the twist at the end, I felt I would have enjoyed it much more if it had been a solid 100 pages shorter.

Still worth the read, though.

This is story of three people who are linked by blood and friendship. Stuart Price has just retired, and as the story opens, his house has just gone up in flames -- the result of Stuart burning his just-paid-off mortgage. With no home, and his insurance coverage in serious doubt, he decides to drive from Victoria to Toronto to visit a dying friend, Melody, whom he hasn't seen for over 25 years. In Toronto, he becomes acquainted with Melody's father, Hal, who is institutionalized with Altzheimers. Hal wrote a book years ago about a professor who falls in love with a translator he hired -- a book which may be autobiographical. We learn the story of this novel-within-the-novel by Stuart and Melody reading it to Hal hoping to spark some memory.

This is a book of deep emotions, dealing with issues of loss...loss of possessions, dreams, memory and even life. Yet, the author writes his characters with a sense of humour and optimism that reflects the hope that keeps us going and allows us to find pleasure in life. It's a good story.½

Gaston is able to describe elements of the human condition in this book that seem to exist of the periphery of our day-to-day observations yet remain unnoticed until now. His prose is simple and easy to understand. Yet the scenes he creates are both familiar and surreal which makes his stories fascinating to read.

http://pacifictranquility.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/not-all-the-colours-of-a-huma...

It's like watching an afternoon rain in the mountains through a big picture window. A beautiful view grows gray, then frighteningly dark, but as the rain clears the air and allows rays of sunshine through the shrinking clouds, the view becomes luminous, vivid, sharply defined. An occasional droplet captures and lenses the whole world in a tiny space for a moment, then slips away. Afterward, the world appears renewed.

The book is fantastically good. The interweaving of the historical and contemporary settings, the poignant but not pointed-at contrasts and similarities providing a richness for the careful reader, even as the adventures and the personal hopes of all the characters keep the pace engaging. There are sentences worth reading aloud for poetic quality, characterizations as real as life, and whimsies woven tightly with despairs. Above all, the narratives capture something lacking in so much fiction: the understanding that joy and pain are inextricable.Conscience and volition are here too, rising now in one character and falling in another, points between which to navigate like Scylla and Charybdis, so lifelike. And this author doesn't settle for the popular endings of the day (cliffhanger, everybody changes and goes away, guy/girl gets guy/girl, saccharine moral) - he convincingly portrays people at the brink of decision, stronger than they were, ready to live. It's so good to read a book that ends on a note of genuine hope.

The real Sointula is a failed Utopian community off the coast of northern Vancouver Island. It was founded in the early 20th century by a group of Finnish settlers, and its name means “harmony.” The Sointula of the novel, I suppose, has more of a symbolic meaning that anything else. In some ways, it is about a search for harmony, or inner peace. Or maybe not. Either way, not much of the book is actually set there, and it certainly isn’t a piece of historical fiction retelling the village’s story.

Instead it is the story of Tom Poole, a 26 year old with a dodgy past,who lives on a beach near Sointula working as a whale researcher. He may or may not be a sociopath, autistic, or a drug dealer. And it’s the story of Evelyn, his mother, who abandons her comfortable life in Ontario to be at the deathbed of Tom’s father, Claude. Her story begins 460 km south, at the other end of Vancouver Island, where she suddenly decides to drop her depression medication, live like a homeless person, and steal a kayak. And finally, it’s the story of British-American ex-high school biology teacher Peter, who wants to travel the Island and write a book about the experience (despite his frequent gall bladder attacks). He soon meets up with Evelyn and they decide to kayak to Sointula to find Tom, a journey for which they are in no way prepared.

What I didn’t like: None of the characters are particularly likeable, although they are sympathetic. Just when I was warming to one of them, they’d do something dumb, or selfish, or morally questionable. They were all a bit too quick to act like hobos. I found the frequent discussion of their dirty, smelly, starving bodies a bit tiresome---after all, like George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London, they could make it all go away in a phone call. I often felt trapped in the kayak , tent, or isolated beach right along with them, but then I think this feeling of being trapped is one of the author’s points. However, at times I found it made me feel a bit too claustrophobic.

What I liked: A lot. The writing is excellent and the book is well structured. The characters and situations were different, and right to the end there was nothing predictable or too coincidental. I appreciate that there is a map, even though I know the Island quite well and would have had a good idea where they were without it, I found myself flipping to it frequently. Gaston is one of those writers who weaves in bits of history, biology, and geography, and I love to learn while I read. But my favourite thing about the book is the author’s excellent sense of place—I personally love Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, and I can tell he does too.

Recommended for: Readers who like unusual literary fiction, anyone who is interested in Vancouver Island or the great outdoors of the Pacific Northwest. Not recommended for people who are uncomfortable when reading about bodily functions.½

“Fog disgorges a yacht, which overtakes and passes their kayak. A monstrous kitchen applicance, too-white fibreglass and chrome. In a fog-held world, nature quietly pure, here comes a fat plastic condo. An outsize American flag hangs off its wide-ass end, which rumbles and farts and bubbles.” (P 175)
Aaaahhh, what a pleasure….

“Fog disgorges a yacht, which overtakes and passes their kayak. A monstrous kitchen applicance, too-white fibreglass and chrome. In a fog-held world, nature quietly pure, here comes a fat plastic condo. An outsize American flag hangs off its wide-ass end, which rumbles and farts and bubbles.” (P 175)Aaaahhh, what a pleasure….

Quite a good despite the smut. The difference between Modern fiction and Classic fiction being you get to follow people into the bathroom and bedroom, not an improvement.

"She can quiet a man like this. He wants only entertainment. He lacks eyes to see what's in the fire: faces hideous or godlike or mirroring any possible mood. He can't hear the tiny marimba of pebbles in waves, or the silence that is their aching measure. Can't parse the accents of smoke, or smell the beach as a charnel ground of clams, the non-stop enormity of this." p31

"Mount Appetite" by Bill Gaston is a collection of stories, tied together by the protagonists' search for something unseen or unknowable. Readers will meet a faith healer who lives in a trailer with a donation box outside; a professional taste-tester who's dying and can't stand his neighbours carrots; a graduate who researches fish, stays with her unfertilized charges while suspecting her husband of infidelity; a brother encounters tragedy on a baseball field.

Gaston's style has a natural, organic flow. This easily lends itself to the description of the landscape, an important aspect of his stories. The stories are diverse, the voices varied, giving the book a freshness that short story collections often lack. He pulls the reader in, almost drowns them in waves of original diction, never letting go until the last page. Each story is a universe, cupped in the hand.

There are so many great lines within this collection "her mouth shaped like a complaint", "fingers tooling in flesh and oil", "The dutiful tides of Indian Arm, the rich, fish-rank croaks of gulls and herons, the smell of shattered cedar, the sacred light in a dewdrop reflecting the sun, the mysterious light in a dewdrop reflecting the moon."

The only frustrating aspect of Gaston's writing is what feels like a lack of resolution. "The Angel's Share" involves Evelyn, a young woman running from the death of her father. While the story has an otherworldly west coast feel to it, the ending feels incomplete. We only dip into the relationship between Evelyn and her father whereas a full swig would have been more helpful in understanding her character. This truncation, this lack of closure occurs in several other stories and is frustrating as the rest of Gaston's works are entirely satisfying.½

I found three of the twelve stories quite incredible, "Gargoyles" being one of the most imaginative and compelling contemporary stories I have ever read. I was quite certain that Richard's father was nuts, then brilliant, then cruel, then someone deserving sympathy. Not even in a novel have I gone through such a variety of strong (and what I thought to be certain) feelings for a single character. I found the middle section of the collection a bit weaker and less polished, but the last few stories were good. Overall, a recommended reading.

There are two parallel stories told in this book. One is of a winter Samuel de Champlain and his compatriots spent in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, battling sickness and scurvy, based on some journals they kept at the time. The other is a modern story of Andy in Prince Rupert, and his thoughts and worries about his high school sweetheart returning to Prince Rupert after 20 years, to care for her mother who has Alzheimers. Andy's life captivated me completely - I was not as keen on the historical story, but it is a story Andy was reading during his boring shifts of work, and forms the basis for an unusual New Year's Eve party he decides to throw. This is an excellent and unusual book, as was the other book of Bill Gaston's which I loved, Sointula.

Minor-league hockey goon Bobby Bonaduce discovers he has MS and returns to Fredericton, hoping for one last chance to play hockey with the son he abandoned. His son plays for UNB; to get on the team, Bonaduce (now a more dignified "Robert") cheats his way into the creative writing MFA program. Complications ensue.

Bonaduce is a likable goofball surrounded by good, clearly drawn characters, and The Good Body is funny and engaging throughout. But the ending is unsatisfying.

This novel could easily slide into sentimentality, and one of its great strengths is that it does not. But, probably because Gaston refuses sentiment, the conclusion seems to leave everything unresolved.

Mixed feelings on this book. It's the sort that you can either read a few pages at a time (bathroom book) or sit with for an hour, but I have limited time to read and I never had the 'Yes, I can read some more of this' feeling. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but it was a fairly whiny book while one of his frequent criticisms of his "current" team was that they were too whiny. But it is a somewhat different voice than most books - you don't have farts mentioned that frequently in most and while I don't play, I do spend time around players and it is a frequent subject and I have unfortunately learned how some guys get their fart-related nicknames :-P.

If you just read the above and said ewwww, why would you put this in a review - do NOT pick up this book!!!! Otherwise, I wouldn't put it on the top of a stack unless it was for a player that I felt it fit, but I'd include it in the stack. (Note - when I was first looking for a copy, I kept finding it at over the list price. Don't do that.)½

I don't know that I would want to spend time with any of the characters but I was cheering for each of them to find some kind of peace. Full review: http://www.canadianauthors.net/g/gaston_bill/sointula.php

I plodded through the first half of this book trying to figure out if these well fleshed-out characters actually had any substance. It's only in the second half when the plot thickens that I started to see how prophetic this book (written in 1994) is: announcing reality TV. The ending asks more questions than it gives answers, but it is interestingly philosophical and mysteriously finishes on a happy note. I would recommend it if simply for the questions it raises in the end.½