Kasia Van Schaik

Kasia Van Schaik’s remarkable debut collection of short fiction is narrated primarily by Charlotte Ferrier, a high school student when we meet her, living with her divorced mother and younger sister, Nina, in a small town in British Columbia’s mountainous interior. Charlotte’s mother Willo has brought her daughters to Canada from South Africa, having separated from her husband years earlier, and as we progress through the stories and through Charlotte’s life, we see how Charlotte, attracted by distances and driven by her restless nature, adopts an itinerant, unstructured lifestyle, flitting from place to place, settling nowhere for long. The first story, “How Will You Prepare for Happiness?” sets a tone for the collection. Charlotte—17 years old—has found part-time work cleaning house for the Salloways, husband and wife both successful cognitive psychologists, parents of Miranda, a classmate of Charlotte’s. It is Grace Salloway (an “expert in childhood happiness”) who puts the question Charlotte—How will you prepare for happiness? But Charlotte already knows what her future holds: earlier in the story she has told us that by the time Nina starts high school, “I secretly planned to be gone. In a sudden vanishing, a sudden peeling away, I would erase myself from this particular town’s map in the interior of the province.” In “Premium Girl” it is Charlotte’s last summer at home when a forest fire encroaches on the town, ultimately leading to an evacuation and another erasure as the town is consumed by fire. And in “The Peninsula of Happiness,” Charlotte accompanies Willo to a resort in Mexico—a chance for mother and daughter to reconcile differences. But the story culminates with Charlotte assaulted while making her way back to their room—alone, in the dark—after being abandoned by her drunken mother in a salsa club. Throughout the volume, Van Schaik subtly interweaves Charlotte’s past and present, occasionally blurring the lines. “A Girl Called Helsinki” takes place a few years after Charlotte has left home. During a return to BC to visit Nina she encounters Charlie, Miranda’s younger brother, who has been transformed by his sister’s death. After learning the story of what happened, Charlotte observes, “I didn’t recognize where I was. Or what season it was. What year.” The mood of the collection is various, mingling wonder, melancholy and regret. Behind everything lurks a haunted feeling of simultaneously missing the past and being relieved it’s done with and gone. Charlotte’s journey ends with “An Ounce of Care” (shortlisted for the CBC short story prize) which describes a visit to her mother, an encounter filled with tension, but also companionable, that leaves Charlotte declaring, almost in defiance, “Death holds no interest for me.” We Have Never Lived on Earth—ruminative, poignant, elegiac—is a vividly observed voyage through the life and memories of a young woman who struggles with questions about the world and her place in it. A dazzling first book by a writer worth watching.… (more)