Sally Blundell
A Good Winter by Gigi Fenster (Text Publishing, 2021), 272 pp, $38
By the end of the first paragraph of Gigi Fenster’s gripping novel, we know something is amiss. ‘It was a good winter’, her narrator, Olga, tells us. ‘For me it was a good winter. For Lara even. I don’t care what anyone says. The facts spoke for themselves.’ But as with Dickens, after the memorable opening of A Tale of Two Cities, the spring of hope turns into a winter of, if not despair, then foolishness and darkness. Relentlessly, inexorably, the tension implicit in this first defensive statement builds into a portrait of obsessive neediness (‘I’m not needy’, Olga says repeatedly) that drives the plot to its horrific ending on the very last page. That Fenster never slackens the pace or signposts exactly who will pay the price for her narrator’s deranged thinking is a credit to the author’s hold on the storyline and an indication of her unflagging allegiance to the manipulative, delusional and utterly awful nature of her main character. [Read more…]
Melanie Dixon
Jordan Hamel
‘Female, nude’, the opening poem of Joanna Preston’s sophomore collection tumble, makes itself known with steely assuredness:
‘If I could turn back time,’ sang Cher in her 1989 smash hit. ‘If I could find a way,’ she says, she would unsay all the hurtful words that had brought a sad end to her relationship. We can’t, of course, take back ‘all those words that have hurt’. Mere mortals and insomniacs especially are condemned instead to endlessly revisit the mistakes of our own history, impotent to avoid or undo the damage done by our younger selves. But what if we could? Just how far would we be willing to go to alter the fabric of the past, and therefore the present and future, of ourselves and those we love?