1) '''Stella,' the doctor informed him, 'will not recover. Of course she will not recover. No one with half a brain can recover, Mister Bragg. Your daughter, I'm afraid, is doomed. I'm sorry.'Before he left, the doctor turned at the door and said: 'You can come and see me any time you want -- but not today. I've just spent thirty-six hours on my feet and I'm going home, now, to die.'He was gone.Col said: 'what can I do for you?'Bragg said: 'you can take me home and let me screw you to the wall.'Later on, Bragg went into the ravine along Rosedale Valley Road and he walked in the mud. Coming to an open space, he found a fallen tree and he sat in the rain and he let the weather have its way.''2) ''Three nights running, the corpse remained in its place and every time that Everett entered the dining-room in the nightmare he was certain he would find out who it was. On the fourth night, fully expecting to discover he himself was the victim, he beheld the face and saw it was a stranger.But there are no strangers in dreams; he knew that now after twenty years of practice. There are no strangers; there are only people in disguise.''3) ''Looking down, she saw the words BRIAN BASSET written on the page before her and it occurred to her that without this person, the words were nothing more than extrapolations from the alphabet -- something fanciful we call a ''name'' in the hope that, one day, it will take on meaning.She thought of Brian Bassett with his building blocks -- pushing the letters around on the floor and coming up with more acceptable arrangements: TINA STERABBS...IAN BRETT BASS...BEST STAB the RAIN: a sentence. He had known all along, of course, that BRIAN BASSETT wasn't what he wanted because it wasn't what he was. He had come here against his will, was held here against his better judgment, fought against his captors and finally escaped.But where was here to Ian Brett Bass? Where was here to Tina Sterabbs? Like Brian Bassett, they had all been here in someone else's dreams, and had to wait for someone else to wake before they could make their getaway.Slowly, Mimi uncapped her fountain pen and drew a firm, black line through Brian Bassett's name. We dreamed him, she wrote, that's all. And then we let him go.''
I really enjoyed this collection. I felt that he managed to have a depth and broadness of narrative voice, situation and character while maintaining a similar ambiance/unspoken theme throughout the selections that united them. This ambiance is subtle enough that it can't be harnessed with a single simple word or phrase, yet strong enough to be recognizable through most if not all of the stories. The most prominent features of this ambiance, in my opinion, would be loss, discovery, reconciliation with the past, the unexpected ways that relationships manifest over time and personal change - for the worse and for the better, though it is never directly stated for any character which way their changes fall. That distinction is left to the reader, and like any writer of the Chekhov school, Findley makes it difficult to lay easy absolution or guilt at any characters' feet through his use of compassionate, balanced story crafting. I also felt that these stories have a timelessness about them, though several are obviously set within specific eras. There is a humanity there, and a constant sorrowful wit, that is undeniable and ageless.
Do You like book Stones (1988)?
It has been fifteen years since I first read these short stories by Timothy Findley and I was surprised that they are even better than I remember them being. Findley displayed a far greater range of style here than he is given credit for. For some reason he is thought do only only realism, with emphasis on the interior lives of his characters, but here he seemed very comfortable writing plot driven stories that veered off into the macabre as well. Give the man his due. Reading this collection again makes me realize what a crucial role he played in the maturation of Canadian Literature. Before Findley and other Canadian writers of the 1990's, Can-Lit was too self-conscious. It tried too hard to be liked. Findley was one of the ones who's only goal was to produce the best writing they were capable of and so wrote books that the whole world could admire.My only negative comment is that the collection includes two pieces that seem to be fragments of an unfinished novel rather than short stories. "Filler" in other words. Very good pieces, but filler nonetheless - they lack the self-containment of a good short story. Still, I would recommend without hesitation.
—Tyler Jones
