Pleasure weaver

Montrealer Saleema Nawaz’s short story
collection Mother Superioris a Can-lit must-read

by JULIET WATERS

About a month ago, on a whim, I bought myself a trade paperback copy of Harriet the Spy. I just had one of those strong urges to reconnect with one of the first novels I’d ever read. It wasn’t my intention to pass it on to my son, but after the first chapter where Harriet meets the obese, developmentally challenged mother of her housekeeper, he was hooked.

To my amazement, he became as quickly and easily engrossed as I had in the morbid curiosity of an 11-year-old girl ravenously on the hunt for any story that doesn’t fit into the Manhattan childhood she’s supposed to be having.

I felt that same hypnotic connection when I started reading “The White Dress,” the closing novella of Saleema Nawaz’s debut collection, Mother Superior. From the moment Shay discovers her adoptive mother has a journal, I couldn’t stop turning pages.

Midway into the novella, Shay gets her first Nancy Drew book. Were this any other story, one would feel a universal kinship with her. Except that Shay, it turns out, is the real tragic mystery here. Gradually what reads like a gentle coming of age story becomes the memoir of an older woman wounded enough to be locked into the incidents of events she can still retell with the seething pulse of fresh pain.

Sure our innate love of truth, beauty and art may have something to do with the drive to read and write stories, but morbid curiosity still trumps them all.

Every once in a while, you get a writer who really knows how to weave those pleasures, guilty and good for you, together. The early works of Barbara Gowdy are a great example. New York short story writer Deborah Eisenberg is also a master at this. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Nawaz makes it into those ranks someday. She has Gowdy’s acute sense of tragic strangeness, and Eisenberg’s great talent for revealing backstory in a way that makes her readers feel like visiting forensic scientists.

This year, the Montreal writer is a finalist for the Journey Prize (the award that goes to the best short story published in a given year), and a nominee for QWFs McAuslan First Book prize. Though Nawaz’s sophistication as a writer is undeniable, there’s a fragmented quality to her stories when read separately. If she gets passed over for the Journey, that may be why.

Read as a whole, however, these stories work like a solo art exhibit, each piece contributing to a synersynergy of recurring themes, personalities and plotlines: family secrets, dead or severely traumatized children and dying, disappearing, or ill-equipped parents.

“Bloodlines,” a story about two sisters whose father is the Sikh owner of a Mile-End bagel factory, might or might not draw on Nawaz’s heritage. But in other stories she’s a skilled shape-shifter, effortlessly and believably inhabiting the characters of aboriginal children, Christian fanatic single mothers, teenage boys with Down syndrome and a prostitute who moves in with a group of anarchists.

In any other year, this collection might have received more attention, but the trend in Canadian awards this year seems to lean towards honouring new and veteran mid-list male writers (Rawi Hage, Joseph Boyden, David Adams Richards, Nino Ricci etc.) And there’s already a small press surprise from Nawaz’s publisher, Freehand Books—Marina Endicott’s nomination for The Giller. To win the McAuslan Prize, Nawaz will have to beat out local non-fiction wunderkind Adam Leith Gollner, for The Fruit Hunters, which makes her a long shot.

So there’s a very good chance that this fine collection will get overlooked. This is more of a loss for general readers than Nawaz, whose obviously healthy talent will no doubt earn her attention down the road. But in a book season touting a new generation of writers, this is the book I’m most likely to recommend to early CanLit adopters.

MOTHER SUPERIOR BY SALEEMA
NAWAZ. FREEHAND BOOKS, PB,
289 PP, $23.95