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A review by adamz24
Man Descending: Selected Stories by Guy Vanderhaeghe
4.0
There's no better way to put the major 'problem' with Vanderhaeghe than to say that he is sort of, in theory, um... lame. He writes about rural life, about really fucking white members of Canada's previously existent 'liberal class,' about Canadian suburbia before it really had any sort of tension to it, and uses a lot of what I call 'oh shucks'-isms. Dude writes like what he is, like a university educated white guy from small town Saskatchewan.
The great thing about Vanderhaeghe is that I've seen his fiction eagerly consumed by your young urban dwelling types who hang out at city bars and smoke Meharis outside said bars. The guy writes this sort of good old-fashioned fiction that's totally great and has that timeless (or whatever you want to call it) quality that people I hate claim all good fiction has.
Vanderhaeghe, I'm trying to say, is the one dude who epitomizes everything I find boring and shitty about establishment CanLit and a lot of establishment lit in general, but manages to totally rock my world with something like "Going to Russia" or "What I Learned from Caesar," the latter, about a Belgian immigrant, seems to me one of the most important Canadian stories ever written, but nobody fucking teaches it. Nooo; let's have another Wiebe...
The great thing about Vanderhaeghe is that I've seen his fiction eagerly consumed by your young urban dwelling types who hang out at city bars and smoke Meharis outside said bars. The guy writes this sort of good old-fashioned fiction that's totally great and has that timeless (or whatever you want to call it) quality that people I hate claim all good fiction has.
Vanderhaeghe, I'm trying to say, is the one dude who epitomizes everything I find boring and shitty about establishment CanLit and a lot of establishment lit in general, but manages to totally rock my world with something like "Going to Russia" or "What I Learned from Caesar," the latter, about a Belgian immigrant, seems to me one of the most important Canadian stories ever written, but nobody fucking teaches it. Nooo; let's have another Wiebe...