Alistair MacLeodRecensioni

Alistair MacLeod entered my life one day in 2007 via a read recommended by a young colleague, who I thought was but a child.

The book proved almost to change my life. I don't know why MacLeod moves me, but he does.

I grew up simple, in a small New England town, not quite as remote or parochial as the times and places that MacLeod scribes.

But it was as if suddenly reading a book by an elder, a distant sibling, or a mystic, someone who got how I experienced the world and how I viewed it.

If I could write a story half as good as 'IN THE FALL,' I would consider my life complete.

My current efforts are nowhere near that beautiful short, but I strive.

Touching story. Wonderful storyteller. Genuine characters. Vivid surroundings.

Excellent

These beautiful, but sad stories, mostly set in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia seem almost Gaelic ballads in prose. A lot of the stories are written in the first person singular, which makes the reader feel immediately connected to the action. Add to that the detailed lyrical description of nature, people, their homes and animals and you can see it all happening before you. The text is interspersed by Gaelic expressions and and lyrics of songs. Despite the gloominess of the stories I very much enjoyed reading this book.

Had never heard of this book till a friend said it was her favourite read ever...I see what she means.
A 50-something dentist goes to visit his alcoholic brother in an insalubrious Toronto boarding house. In succeeding chapters, he recalls incidents in their shared life. Moving back and forth through time...a conversation here, an event there....going back even further to the family mythology of their first Scottish forebears to migrate to Canada...this is the most tremendously moving novel.
The thing that stood out for me was how the writing is SO superb that he can wring your heart, even for characters who have barely appeared. Brother Colin is hardly mentioned until...an event occurs....yet that doesnt stop the reader being completely caught up in the trauma. Subsequent references to him just add to it.
Although a family memoir, Macleod is also aware of the experience of immigrants...from the Mexican fruit-pickers to the Vietnamese facing US aggression and the Masai...encountered on an African holiday...being pushed out. He links these to his own family, fleeing the problems in Scotland for more difficulties in the harsh new life. The first Highland soldiers, serving under a sceptical General Wolfe, were seen as without value, it being, in his view, "no great mischief if they fall". And as the Gaelic-speaking clan in Canada come to face death, jail, violence,antipathy, maybe they feel the modern world views them similarly.
One of best books I've ever read. Got it from library but will order my own copy to keep..Superb writing.

Strong, poignant, memorable prose. Some pieces, such as "The Boat" and the title piece stand out with their calmness and boldness of expression that permeate the consciousness of the reader. These stories are a valuable rarity in the literary world.

No Great Mischief comes from a letter from General Wolfe about the Highlanders fighting with him to take Quebec. The full quote is "no great mischief if they fall" as he didn't regard the Scots highly. The book by Alistair MacLeod tells the story of a MacDonald family branch that comes to Cape Breton to settle. Living off the land and sea, it is a hard life. They follow their customs, speak Gaelic, and play the music of the Highlands.
Alexander MacDonald is a twin with his sister who are the youngest of a family that undergoes a terrible tragedy. Raised by his grandparents, he tells the story of his family with frequent flashbacks from his current life as a well-to-do dentist.
It is a story about family and tradition. There's a quote repeated throughout the book: 'All of us are better when we're loved.' No matter their difficulties, these people stuck together through good times and bad.
Mr. MacLeod's writing is lovely. He has a style of writing much like a tone poem. Each paragraph is a new painting set before the reader to savor and absorb. I'm usually a fast reader, but I found myself taking my time through this story, sometimes only reading a page and putting the book aside, the better to reflect.
One of the classics of Canadian literature, No Great Mischief is a book to be cherished and reread.

Oh, I love to read original editions from the library stacks and see how an established - indeed, revered - Canadian writer was viewed before (s)he was known!

From the blurb of this first edition:
An exciting new discovery in Canadian fiction . . .
Born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Alistair MacLeod grew up in the coal-mining areas of Alberta and the farming areas of Dunvegan and Inverness, Nova Scotia.
Educated at St. Francis Xavier University, the University of New Brunswick and Notre Dame University, he has worked as a school teacher, miner, logger and, most recently, as Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. His short stories have appeared in magazines and journals . . . The present volume is the first full-length collection devoted to his work.

Back cover: To an outsider the stories in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood seem to belong to Cape Breton because they are stubborn, reflective, melancholy, and overflowing with the energies of family life. There are seven stories in the book; it took seven years to write them: a good part of the life of a young writer. But with this superb collection, as anyone will know who reads it, Al MacLeod’s career is just beginning. (My note, one story is set in Newfoundland and another concerns a family from Kentucky living in Indiana.)

In The Road to Rankin’s Point pg 181
“It does not matter that some things are difficult. No one has ever said that life is to be easy. Only that it is to be lived.” (90-something grandmother)

Lovely, just lovely!

A beautiful book about a family in/from the Canadian Maritimes, their hard lives, their loves and the land itself. This man can WRITE! Every sentence is a poem. You feel what they feel, smell what they smell and love what/who they love!

I loved these stories because they tell of a particular place and time in beautiful language. MacLeod is know more for books like "Guns of Navarone" but this volume includes his heart. Highly recommended, but read (please) one story at a time to get the most complete satisfaction.

Wow, what a great book this was. I am still processing parts of it so I will leave my final comments until after my book club has discussed it. My initial thoughts are that MacLeod must have had a very interesting family life himself to be able to write something like this. It made me wish I knew more of my family history but I never heard any stories beyond my grandparents' generation. I think there must be something about that Celtic blood that connects people with their roots.

I also found the relationships between the people and their animals interesting. I can just see that little brown dog swimming out to the boat as it was leaving Scotland. Then there was the other dog who guarded the lighthouse island after calamity claimed the parents and one brother. Calum had his devoted Christy who pulled his boat up above the waterline every evening. And there was even a mention of a cat that was thrown out of a car that was saved by the brothers and brought home to Cape Breton. There can't be much wrong with a family that cares for animals like that!

Until I read some of the comments on line about this book I didn't realize how few names of the family were actually given. Only Calum and Alexander had their names explicitly mentioned and of course those names are held by multiple people. I'll be interested to see what my book club thinks of that.

I have mixed feelings about this collection. It is a remarkably coherent body of work: even though these stories were written years apart and published in a variety of books and magazines, they all retain the classic MacLeod "flavour" and share a strong sense of place. The themes are similar as well: the struggle between retaining tradition and moving forward into the future, going away for work and worrying about the family you've left behind, reconciling your desires with the realities of your family's situation, and so on.

However, there were some elements of these stories I found difficult to grapple with. A couple feature animals being killed -- it is for farming purposes, rather than hunting or sport, but the description is graphic and may be a turn-off for some. Another turn-off is the preoccupation several stories in the collection have with sex, whether it be human sex or animal copulation. There were WAY too many members of the male anatomy, and their associated fluids and characteristics and activities, for my liking in these stories. I was especially put off by this preponderance of penises because I was reading the whole collection in just a few days, rather than reading one story at a time over a longer period.

If you like short stories or Canlit, you may find this interesting. It has vivid writing going for it, and the Gaelic songs lend beauty and grace to the stories in which they are quoted. It is a collection that is best read one story at a time over a longer period of time, during which you can think about the recurring themes. I would maybe also suggest reading No Great Mischief, MacLeod's novel, first, especially if you prefer long fiction over short stories.½

absolutely wonderful. he loves cape breton, the land, the people, the language, and misses the old ways.

Varying in quality but repetitious in content and atmosphere these stories portray the hardships of life as a miner or fisher on the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. The better stories bring in some fictional drama instead of being mere biographical tales.

Totally my cup of tea - Cape Breton family, clannish, told from the pov of an adult remembering his childhood, the loss of his parents, his grandparents, and older brothers. Really really beautiful novel.

I had to read the ending about 3 times. Perfect stuff.

Took me longer to read than I was expecting. I got a little lost in the middle and was a little unsure who the narrator was, but generally enjoyed the story, once I got all the MacDonalds sorted out. It's full of some big characters and the lovely, long thread of family history.

"The ‘lamp of the poor’ is hardly visible in urban southwestern Ontario, although there are many poor who move disjointedly beneath it. And the stars are seldom clearly seen above the pollution of prosperity."

This, in short, is what I liked about the book. Yes, I do mean that particular quote.

I know this is one of those books that a lot of people seem to really like, and I can understand why, but for me this was a frustrating and really annoying read. To the extent that I even got annoyed with things I would not usually pay much attention to, like "Why is the guy's Gaelic name spelled in two different ways?".

To paraphrase the author himself:

"She could not help it, I suppose. Sometimes it is hard to choose or not to choose those things which bother us at the most inappropriate of times."

Anyway, No Great Mischief tells the stories of a family from when they first left Scotland for Canada in 1779 up to late 1970s/1980s (it's not really clear). There are plenty of colourful characters, plenty of stories of hardship, and an abundance of nostalgic references to Scotland - or rather one single event in Scottish history. For the most part, the references were limited to the Battle of Culloden and the Jacobite Uprising (around 1745/46).

And this, together with the nostalgia for anything Gaelic just really got on my nerves rather quickly.
Don't get me wrong I have rather a soft spot for Gaelic and I delight in watching BBC Alba sometimes just to hear it while reading the subtitles, but we're talking about a story relying on a few overused phrases and pretending as if everyone with the last name of MacDonald is fluent in it.

As for the Jacobite Uprising...Really, there is more to Scottish history and not everything that happened to the MacDonalds of Cape Breton in the 20th century can be blamed on or explained by a reference to an event in 1745/46.

Let me illustrate...

One of the MacDonald's relatives living in California is being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War and his parents send him to the branch of the family in Cape Breton to escape the draft. And the discussion is as follows:

" ‘From what I understand of this war,’ he continued, ‘those people are only fighting for their own country and their own way of being. It’s hard to say they should be killed for that.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Wars touch all of us in different ways. I suppose we have been influenced by lots of wars ourselves. We are probably what we are because of the ’45. We are, ourselves , directly or indirectly the children of Culloden Moor, and what happened in its aftermath.’
‘Yes,’ he said with a smile, ‘the old men at home, the seanaichies, always used to say, “If only the ships had come from France …”
’‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘We’ll never know. Perhaps it was all questionable from the start. Talking about history is not like living it, I guess. Some people have more choice than others.’ "

Aha, yup. Culloden. Of course. Everything can be traced back to Culloden. No mention of the Union of Crowns, the bribery surrounding the Darien scheme, and the resulting Act of Union. Or why not go back further to the wars of Scottish independence?

Incidentally, I do get that part of the book's message is how people might be held back by living in the past - or as MacLeod puts it:

" ‘Living in the past is not living up to our potential.’ "

It's just that this message - conveyed as a joke - is rather muddled by a lot sentimental illusion.

This is the story of three generations of David Macdonalds. It is a very Alistair MacLeod story in terms of setting (Nova Scotia), style (great descriptions, quiet thoughts and flashes of humour), and subject matter (the past and its impact on the present, and the pull of tradition and family). Possibly better appreciated after reading one of Macleod's short story collections or his novel, No Great Mischief.

wonderful book with short stories with a Scottish background from Canada's east coast.

Magical, sorrowful, lyrical, short stories, some with a Scottish flavour.

A good but not great book. If the reader is familiar with Mr. Macleod's short stories he will see a lot of echoes in this work. One could almost choose one and you'll get both. The title is what the reader might feel after finishing this book.

A good not great series of short stories. Really gets into life and culture of Cape Breton, the fishing and the mining and the changing dynamic of this region. The writing varies from great to flat, but still manages to convey the stories adequately.

I liked certain parts of the story, but not others. The opening with alcoholism and defeat did not draw me in. But eventually the history of the family's emigration, the dogs, the ice tragedy, the mines, a lot of it was very well formed as a story for this family.

Even when writing about everyday topics, MacLeod is lyrical and poetic. These are stories about people on the Atlantic coast of Canada, the ties between generations, and the often spartan way of life. They all present emotion that is reserved, or held at bay simply by the nature of the characters. Although I enjoyed all of the stories, my favourite was the first one, The Boat.

(It's a short novel, you may find it quicker just to read it)

On a sunny golden September Saturday Alexander MacDonald sets off to drive to Toronto. Rather than take the fast Highway 3, which runs flat and straight from the border with the States to the border of Quebec, he prefers to take the leisurely old roads that meander through the opulent farmland of southern Ontario. For him "there is something almost comforting in passing houses where the dogs still run down to the roadside to bark at the wheels of passing cars - as if, for them, it were a real event". It is the time of harvest, and the roadside is lined with baskets of produce and 'Pick Your Own' signs. The Pick Your Own fields are dotted with local families trying to make a day of it despite mounting opposition from their children, but the commercial fields contain other families, - West Indians, Mexicans, French Canadians - people who have left their homes for the duration of the harvest to work long hours for low wages. Such is the richness of the land that food is wasted as it grows. Alexander's grandmother wept to see rejected and overripe tomatoes being plowed under. Each tomato that she had grown in the rocky soil of Cape Breton had been carefully tended, green ones placed on window ledges and turned daily in the hope they would ripen, and all produce carefully bottled for the long winter ahead.

Alexander is driving to town to see his brother, Calum, a wasted alcoholic living in gloomy rundown accommodation catering for the desperately poor and broken.

But Alexander is not really 'Alexander', though that is his christened name, he is 'ille bhig ruaidh - the little red (haired) boy- and a member of clann Chalum Ruaidh, the family of Red Calum, and together with his black haired twin sister, the youngest of his immediate family.

MacLeod was descended from the gaelic speaking Scots of Cape Breton, whose ancestors' only hope had been to leave Scotland for Canada, "leaving a land of too few trees for a land of, perhaps, too many", and if their life in Scotland had been hard, life in Cape Breton was not much easier. The title of the book comes from a comment by General Wolfe, who sent the Highlanders in first against the French at the Battle of Quebec, saying it would be no great mischief if they were lost. (It was not many years before that Wolfe had been fighting the Scots on their own land.) Wolfe's comment makes a considerable difference to the perception of the place of the Highlanders in that battle.

'No Great Mischief', although a modern first person narrative, has many elements of the mythic, particularly in the recurrence of ages and seasons, and of twos and threes. Things and people repeat or are the complements of one another.

The founder of clann Chalum Ruaidh was Calum MacDonald. By his first wife MacDonald had six children, three boys and three girls, and by his second, her sister, he had a further three boys and three girls. In 1779, aged fifty-five, he left Scotland with his twelve children, his wife, and the husband of his eldest daughter. They had left their brown dog with neighbours, but she broke away and threw herself into the sea, swimming after the boat despite being ordered back until, seeing she would drown rather than be left behind, Calum pulled her in, promising not to forsake her. During the crossing Calum's second wife died and was buried at sea, and his eldest daughter gave birth. On arriving in Pictou Calum wept for two days, and then after two weeks the family moved up to Cape Breton to join other gaelic speaking Scots. When told this tale as a small boy Alexander, appalled by the idea of a grown man crying, and conditioned to the idea that everyone was glad when they arrived in the New World, exclaimed to his grandfather 'What in the world would he cry for?' His grandfather, tempering his anger at the boy's lack of comprehension, replied "He was crying for his history. He had left his country and lost his wife and spoke a foreign language. He had left as a husband and arrived as a widower and a grandfather, and he was responsible for those who clustered around him. He was like the goose who points the V, and he temporarily wavered and lost his courage."

Calum lived another fifty-five years in Cape Breton, his life in the New World being as long as his life in the old. At one point the narrator muses that, if he lives, he will himself be fifty-five at the turn of the century.

Red Calum passed on a strong genetic legacy - a high frequency of twins, more often than not fraternal, and a distinctive colouring: fair skin with either jet black or bright red hair, frequently with eyes so dark brown as to be almost black. Their colouring is so distinctive as to make their identity immediately recognizable. When the narrator's sister visits Scotland she is immediately spotted and taken in by gaelic speaking Scots who remember the tale of Red Calum's departure, and who keep dogs related to his. With no portrait of their ancestor, the members of clann Chalum Ruaidh look at one another to try to deduce his image.

The dog also founded a dynasty, passing on the tendency "to care too much and to try too hard", faithful to the clann Chalum Ruaidh. Glencoe, where members of clan Donald were famously murdered in their homes by the soldiers to whom they had given hospitality, is said to derive its name from the gaelic Glen cu, meaning dogs' glen, a reference to the mythological hounds that once ran there.

Although the present day narrative begins in September and ends six months later in March, the third month of the year, it is the personal and almost mythological history of the family which gives it meaning. The narrator and his sister have prosperous lives, he is an orthodondist living in southern Ontario, she became an actress and is married to a well to do engineer. She, and by implication he, lives in expensive, tastefully minimalist surroundings, far removed in so many senses from their roots. Although they would be regarded as successful they seem dislocated, spending their time together thinking of the past, looking for their history. They are isolated, beached, while their relations carry on the old hard llfe together, keeping with tradition.

MacLeod's characters have a strong sense of personal and cultural history, and with it obligation. "Always look after your own blood". They also have a visceral love of their land, and they have a love and respect for other life. Even as adults they worry about their possible responsibility in childhood for the beaching of a whale to whom they had been singing.

I don't know why some people love the land and the life that surrounds them and others don't. Perhaps it is just, as 'ille bhig ruaigh's grandmother says, "All of us are better when we're loved". And MacLeod loved his people.

The one weakness I found in it was the conversations between Alexander and his sister. Although she is his fraternal twin, she really only appears in his adult life, and then only as an extension of himself. There may be some justification for this in that she is his twin, but she is not after all his identical twin, and so is really only another sibling. She was the only character who seemed lifeless, just a device to add additional material.