As the subtitle, “Or the Intermingling of Life and Literature,” suggests, this is not a mere collection of fictions and essays. The fictions, themselves set off in a section entitled, “Echoes,” are highly personal pastiches, of a sort, of such luminaries as Maupassant, Cocteau, Henry James and Carlos Fuentes, and Kawabata. Some are tours de force as Alexis captures the essence of an earlier writer’s style. But each are also very clearly Alexis-stories. Here you find the calm, poised prose, the delicate turn of phrase, the artful exercise. And ghosts. Because each of these writers with whom Alexis chooses to engage have themselves also peopled their prose with spirits. And the state of ghostliness, Alexis notes in his introduction, is not unlike his own state as an immigrant in Canada, not entirely present, but rather haunting the present.

The second part of the collection consists in two essays or engagements or reconciliations with Tolstoy’s Ivan Illych and the works of Samuel Beckett, plus a loose memoir of Alexis’ writing life from the time he moved to Toronto to what was the present at the time of writing. In these, as in the fiction pieces, Alexis is very present. And to some extent we gain an impression of André Alexis, the writer.

The writing throughout is never less than clear and concise, and characteristically distanced from emotion even in emotional scenes (both fictive and real). Alexis is a thinking writer, as you might expect for someone who aligns himself with the Oulipo group. He is also, perhaps surprisingly, harshly critical of some other writers and critics in the Canadian literary establishment. But he often undercuts his own harsh opinions, at times second-guessing himself. I found the whole to be interesting and well worth reading even if not wholly persuasive.

Gently recommended. ( )