Canada has produced some fine short fiction writers: John Metcalf, Diane Schomperlen, and the late Alice Munro, to name a few contemporary ones. I wish to include Carol Bruneau in that select group as her story writing is, in my opinion, exemplary.
It was in 2017 that I first came into contact with Carol Bruneau's writing. I had read her novel Glass Voices, then delved into A Bird on Every Tree, a collection of her short stories. Since then, I have read several of her novels, and now, Threshold is a new collection of short fiction.
There are fifteen stories in Threshold, from some that are only a few pages to those of about 20 or so. While some deal with serious subjects, I often find in Ms. Bruneau’s writing that no matter how overcast the mood may be, there’s always a bit of blue sky on the horizon.
In her epigraph, Ms. Bruneau uses a quote by John O’Donohue:
“A threshold is not a simple boundary: it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres.”1
These types of divisions are evident throughout the stories in Thresholds. Thresholds are crossed and territories, whether physical ones in Italy or Nova Scotia, or metaphysical ones such as between the seen and the unseen, and even between what is public and what is private.
One of my favourite stories is “This Talk of Trees” which could be considered speculative non-fiction as it is based on a 2022 incident in the Halifax Public Gardens when many of its trees were defaced.2 Ms. Bruneau crafts a story around a narcissistic man, who is jealous of his girlfriend’s affection for sitting under the trees in the Public Gardens and vows to do something about it. He follows her:
Now, as I crept nonchalantly toward her, some jackass loitering on a bench was practising notes on a saxophone a mournful bleating that did nothing to enhance my mood. Keeping to the curving path between two gloriously monochromatic perennial beds, I spied her seated on our bench under that sprawling, monstrous tree. Its canopy was too dense to allow the tiniest birds to flit through it let alone admit sunlight. Mel was on her phone, probably texting work - some pushy colleague - or, it struck me like a thunderclap, scrolling through Tinder or one of those other sites. These days there was a site for every perversion and predilection. Why not Hook-ups for Birders? For Tree-Huggers? For Custom Content Creators? I'm sure those existed too.
When I saw her smile, something sliced through me A feeling like hot metal severing things inside, looping tissue cut asunder, cut adrift.
I knew then I was being made a fool of, you will understand, And I had no recourse but to do the very least that my abilities warranted
Mel has crossed a threshold in her man’s eyes and he in turn crosses his threshold to commit a crime, attempting to kill Mel’s beloved trees by girdling them, causing their slow death3. The story is told from three different viewpoints: the trees and then by the couple themselves, alternating back and forth.
If you are not familiar with Carol Bruneau’s writing, I urge you to consider picking up a copy of Threshold. You will be rewarded with a generous assortment of characters and places (her descriptions of travelling in Palermo and Napoli are not to be missed), moods and attitudes. And, of course, many thresholds to be crossed.
Carol Bruneau is the author of eleven books: four short story collections, including Threshold, one work of nonfiction, No Ordinary Magic: the Art of Laurie Swim, and six novels. These include Purple for Sky, A Circle on the Surface, and These Good Hands, a novel based on the life and art of sculptor Camille Claudel, and most recently, Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis, longlisted for the 2022 International Dublin Literary Award. Her fiction has been published internationally. A past winner of the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and two Dartmouth Book Awards, Bruneau lives and writes in Halifax/Kjipuktuk, Nova Scotia/Mi'kmaki.
Publisher : Nimbus Publishing Limited (April 30 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 288 pages
ISBN-10 : 1774712717
ISBN-13 : 978-1774712719
To Bless the Space Between Us (Doubleday; March 4, 2008)
Girdling a tree refers to the method of removal where the tree is severed from the vascular systems that give it life, meaning the internal nutrient and water channels otherwise known as the phloem and xylem. This leads to the tree dying a slower death than if you had just chopped it down to begin with. Read More: https://www.housedigest.com/1456670/girdle-vs-cut-down-tree/