Reviewed by Carlyn Schellenberg
After winning an award in 2002 for “Mandala,” a story included in this book, and subsequently publishing several stories from this collection in various magazines and anthologies, it seems as though Sandy Bonny’s debut collection has been a long time coming. Holding true to that assumption, The Sometimes Lake exhibits Bonny’s fluid use of language, irony, and humour in her firm navigation through the tragic and complicated lives of her characters. The stories are comprised of an equal amount of male and female protagonists, with the majority being middle aged and young adults. Some stories are set all over the map, from India, UK, to the Arctic Circle, while the other settings are fairly unspecific but presumably in Canada.
Though each story has been given its own unique voice, they are each tied to several interconnected themes: loss that leads to no resolution, the isolation a person can feel while among others, and the application of logic and facts in an attempt to restore order to an unbalanced life. The title story is a careful examination of tragedy, and explores obvious tragedies as well as subtle, quiet ones. ‘Carys’ is about the miscommunications between a wife and her husband and the isolation of miscarriage. The story is a fresh take on miscarriage, following Michelle as she quietly mourns her unborn children. In ‘Mandala,’ a young boy with shifting parental figures memorizes random facts to stabilize what he cannot control.
‘Nogha’ is about a young teacher who comes to a northern school to teach children who are caught between their native language and culture, and the recent, post-colonial one being thrust upon them. Bonny quite possibly captures the entire concept of the story in a small passage:
Supervised by the school janitor, Martha, the students have spent the first three days of their science module producing a giant Mercator projection of the Earth. The continents are painted over a too dark shade of blue, so the ocean seeps up through Asia’s orange edges and Antarctica’s white. North America is a little off, stretched upwards by the curved lens of the overhead projector they used to trace its outline. And the Arctic islands are choppy, painted at the end of someone’s outstretched arm. Canada is a shaky lime green land, squeezed out of the pole, with a tidy red star to mark the place where this school fits into the world.
The stories in ‘The Sometimes Lake’ are either in first or third person, and with first person seeming to be her specialty, the intricacy is not lost in third person. Bonny has reached so far into the minds of her characters that readers will be surprised to jump from the end of one story to the beginning of another and find themselves in a completely different world. The most endearing example of this occurs in ‘Marrow,’ in which a mother’s separation from her daughter’s father and a grandmother’s grief over her dead husband is viewed through the lens of a seven-year-old girl. This story is also a small sample of the book’s humour:
Ryan said, ‘Chaya, shut up,’ but I said, ‘no.’ Then Ryan said, ‘Chaya, shut up,’ again and Tim said I wouldn’t shut up, I’d throw up and he’d make Ryan lick it up. Then Ryan said, ‘Tim, shut up! Chaya, look at the door,’ because I was going to go upstairs, and Tim said ‘You can’t make her do anything!’ and then it got bright suddenly because Mom and Aunty Judy opened the kitchen door and both of them shouted ‘Honestly!’
Bonny often uses the shifting of time periods as a story-telling technique, and this includes ‘Traplines’ and ‘Tango Medio.’ ‘Traplines’ tells the story of a man trying to escape a commune, with the story starting and ending in the present but switching back to the past as well. This strategy works well in ‘Tango Medio,’ when a woman does not know if she has the courage to leave a boring relationship, and the reader sees what has led her to her decision. In ‘Tell,’ a young woman straddles between madness and sanity after her best friend and her boyfriend start dating; this is a common tale in relationships, but is pushed to extreme heights for this story. Instead of simply telling the story in chronological order, Bonny provides readers with the narrator’s thoughts as the narrator goes back in time to remember the moments that lead up to the night of a storytelling event. A man’s unusual story of a monkey is carefully woven throughout the main plot.
The strength of The Sometimes Lake often lies in Sandy Bonny’s use of vivid imagery, and what’s maybe the most stunning line in her collection occurs in ‘Tell’: “I tried applying pressure, pressing my life back in, but blood seeped up, pushing red daisies through my bracelet of wadded toilet paper.”
Thistledown| 224 pages | $18.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1897235997
‘The Sometimes Lake’ by Sandy Bonny
Book Reviews
After winning an award in 2002 for “Mandala,” a story included in this book, and subsequently publishing several stories from this collection in various magazines and anthologies, it seems as though Sandy Bonny’s debut collection has been a long time coming. Holding true to that assumption, The Sometimes Lake exhibits Bonny’s fluid use of language, irony, and humour in her firm navigation through the tragic and complicated lives of her characters. The stories are comprised of an equal amount of male and female protagonists, with the majority being middle aged and young adults. Some stories are set all over the map, from India, UK, to the Arctic Circle, while the other settings are fairly unspecific but presumably in Canada.
Though each story has been given its own unique voice, they are each tied to several interconnected themes: loss that leads to no resolution, the isolation a person can feel while among others, and the application of logic and facts in an attempt to restore order to an unbalanced life. The title story is a careful examination of tragedy, and explores obvious tragedies as well as subtle, quiet ones. ‘Carys’ is about the miscommunications between a wife and her husband and the isolation of miscarriage. The story is a fresh take on miscarriage, following Michelle as she quietly mourns her unborn children. In ‘Mandala,’ a young boy with shifting parental figures memorizes random facts to stabilize what he cannot control.
‘Nogha’ is about a young teacher who comes to a northern school to teach children who are caught between their native language and culture, and the recent, post-colonial one being thrust upon them. Bonny quite possibly captures the entire concept of the story in a small passage:
Supervised by the school janitor, Martha, the students have spent the first three days of their science module producing a giant Mercator projection of the Earth. The continents are painted over a too dark shade of blue, so the ocean seeps up through Asia’s orange edges and Antarctica’s white. North America is a little off, stretched upwards by the curved lens of the overhead projector they used to trace its outline. And the Arctic islands are choppy, painted at the end of someone’s outstretched arm. Canada is a shaky lime green land, squeezed out of the pole, with a tidy red star to mark the place where this school fits into the world.
The stories in ‘The Sometimes Lake’ are either in first or third person, and with first person seeming to be her specialty, the intricacy is not lost in third person. Bonny has reached so far into the minds of her characters that readers will be surprised to jump from the end of one story to the beginning of another and find themselves in a completely different world. The most endearing example of this occurs in ‘Marrow,’ in which a mother’s separation from her daughter’s father and a grandmother’s grief over her dead husband is viewed through the lens of a seven-year-old girl. This story is also a small sample of the book’s humour:
Ryan said, ‘Chaya, shut up,’ but I said, ‘no.’ Then Ryan said, ‘Chaya, shut up,’ again and Tim said I wouldn’t shut up, I’d throw up and he’d make Ryan lick it up. Then Ryan said, ‘Tim, shut up! Chaya, look at the door,’ because I was going to go upstairs, and Tim said ‘You can’t make her do anything!’ and then it got bright suddenly because Mom and Aunty Judy opened the kitchen door and both of them shouted ‘Honestly!’
Bonny often uses the shifting of time periods as a story-telling technique, and this includes ‘Traplines’ and ‘Tango Medio.’ ‘Traplines’ tells the story of a man trying to escape a commune, with the story starting and ending in the present but switching back to the past as well. This strategy works well in ‘Tango Medio,’ when a woman does not know if she has the courage to leave a boring relationship, and the reader sees what has led her to her decision. In ‘Tell,’ a young woman straddles between madness and sanity after her best friend and her boyfriend start dating; this is a common tale in relationships, but is pushed to extreme heights for this story. Instead of simply telling the story in chronological order, Bonny provides readers with the narrator’s thoughts as the narrator goes back in time to remember the moments that lead up to the night of a storytelling event. A man’s unusual story of a monkey is carefully woven throughout the main plot.
The strength of The Sometimes Lake often lies in Sandy Bonny’s use of vivid imagery, and what’s maybe the most stunning line in her collection occurs in ‘Tell’: “I tried applying pressure, pressing my life back in, but blood seeped up, pushing red daisies through my bracelet of wadded toilet paper.”
Thistledown| 224 pages | $18.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1897235997