Book Review: Other Worlds by André Alexis

I finally got around to a Canadian author I’ve been meaning to read, wanting to read, feeling like I was the only book lover who hadn’t read him yet: André Alexis. His latest collection of short stories Other Worlds was released just a few weeks ago, and as May is short story month, I dove right in. He is best known for his award-winning novel Fifteen Dogs which won a TON of awards. It’s about a bunch of dogs who talk and live in their own world, so Alexis is no stranger to including the supernatural or magical in his work. Other Worlds is about just that; worlds like ours but incorporating an unexpected element of whimsical difference. And more talking animals, in this case, a horse.

Book Summary

There are 9 stories spread over 276 pages in this collection, so some are quite long. The stories aren’t linked, however the first and second last story seem to reference the same family, but they are told from such different perspectives that I can’t quite say that it’s the exact same people for certain. Regardless, both “Contrition: An Isekai” and “Consolation” are powerful stories on their own, the first following the rebirth of an old man into a young boy’s body 100 years later, while the second details a man’s musings about his parents’ marriage after his father dies. “Winter, or A Town Near Palgrave” is my favourite, but also the creepiest; it’s about a writer who is invited to take on a caretaking job in a town where all its inhabitants hibernate over the winter in burlap sacks hung up in their homes. “The Bridle Path” also has an uneasy atmosphere to it, where the protagonist is excited to be meeting new and very wealthy friends, but he missteps socially when he questions whether his hosts are cannibals. “Pu Songling: An Appreciation” is the strangest of the bunch, following a medicine man desperate to find an apprentice, but instead he discovers a young woman who he learns just as much from as they discuss their experiences with people returning from the dead.

My Thoughts

The very last story in the collection, “Elegy”, reads much like an analysis of what the author’s intentions were with the collection. The speaker is an author himself, and the life experiences he speaks about match of those of Alexis quite closely, so I’m assuming this character is meant to be a mouthpiece of sorts. In it he writes:

“Predictably, much of my work is a re-creation of the bewilderment that was a dominant emotion of my childhood self – bewilderment and resentment. Rather than directly expressing this bewilderment, however, I have tried to create worlds in which a sympathetic reader will feel a familiarity while struggling to interpret the appearance of certain things, certain signs, certain utterances” (p. 273 of Other Worlds by André Alexis, ARC edition)

I’m strangely desperate to think of myself as a sympathetic reader, but I wholeheartedly agree with what he set out to do, and I believe he accomplishes it. For example, “Houyhnhnm” is the story that incorporates the aforementioned talking horse, and although that is something that we would never recognize as part of our world, (or at least my current reality), the story isn’t about how weird this horse is. The story is about grief; it’s about the connection between the protagonist, the horse, and the protagonist’s parents. And as the story continues we discover it’s actually about the manifestation of grief, and how this grief looks different to all three characters.

Alexis uses these odd circumstances to capture the reader’s attention; the hanging bags of humans for instance. It’s an uncomfortable image, it begins to feel more like a work of horror as he interacts with this bags, even begins to ‘tend’ to them like a Queen Bee or something similar. And yet, it never crosses into the horrific, it leaves lingering questions about our tendency to hibernate in the colder months (at least up here in Canada) but it also addresses this question of creativity, and the distractions we create or focus on when avoiding doing our work, as the author does in this story.

I understand why Alexis’s work is so highly lauded now. There’s so many layers to his writing, and I suspect that if I re-read these stories, I’d continue to find threads I didn’t pick up on my first pass through. These magical elements may not appeal to some, but if you’re willing to just go with it, I think there’s lots to appeal to a wide range of readers here.