The Breakdown So Far

Description

The Jonathan Swift of the bingo hall and elder-care, the Alexander Pope of pet-care and the dinner parties of the liberal intelligentsia, Marion Farrant continues her assault on the unaccountably disaffected and disillusioned of the Western world with The Breakdown So Far, her eighth volume of extremely short stories for those of us who seem to have lost both our way and our attention span. Unsparing in her critique of the New Age syncretism the mall culture has substituted for authentic emotion and belief, our adoption of Buddhism appears in her work as a rationalization for our ubiquitous materialism of the soul, Zen as our guiltless doctrine of neglect. Yet as in all such relentlessly dystopian social parodies, there resides behind each of these brief entertainments a stifled scream for help, a trapped yearning for genuine human contact and sympathy, an arrested existential lust for meaning. Where has our sense of order, propriety, history and community gone, Farrant's stories beg to wonder stories that span the stylistic range of personal journal, objective reportage, fiction, fantasy and writers' workshop exercise? In order to answer these questions, Farrant's new stories meticulously trace the breakdown of our language by ridding it of everything unnecessary and excessive: the breakdown of the post- Kierkegaard, post-Sartre existential position through its extension into the absurd; the breakdown of sense and sensibility through its alienation from perception; and the breakdown of discourse in literary craft, the social occasion and the commoditization of the individual and its attendant merchandizing of desire. Each of these stories is a new instance of the author's ongoing attempt at understanding language ironically through itself a willingness to let the deadly serious be as playful as it wants to be, a courageous shedding of what Tom Robbins called "the tyranny of the dull mind."

M.A.C. Farrant is the author of ten collections of satirical and philosophical short fiction; a novel-length memoir, My Turquoise Years; a book of humorous essays, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs; and the stage adaptation of My Turquoise Years, which premiered at Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre in 2013. A full-time writer currently residing in North Saanich, British Columbia, Farrant's work as been nominated for many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, The Van City Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the Gemini Award (for the Bravo short-film adaptation of her story "Rob's Guns & Ammo"), the Victoria Book Prize, and two Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards for her play My Turquoise Years, among others. She is a regular book reviewer for the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post. Farrant has taught writing at the University of Victoria, the Victoria School of Writing, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and was Writer-in-Residence at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

"A brave iconoclast ..." -- Publishers Weekly "The Breakdown So Far is a fantastic and whimsical challenge to the intellectual doom of everyday life. [Farrant] is an elegant and spare writer, whipping up a foam of visionary ideas with a few short strokes of language." -- Ottawa Xpress "The Breakdown So Far is challenging, unnerving, unforgettable and very unlikely. If, as Nabokov advises, the monster of grim common sense must be 'shot dead,' then Farrant is, indeed, a crack shot." -- Globe and Mail "Farrant is a master of the literary equivalent of a waking dream, creating subtle insurrections disguised as prose. The Breakdown So Far, her latest collection of absurd short stories, is a minivan crammed full of weird." -- Toronto Star "[Farrant] manages to make these stories feel very whole and rounded, despite their brevity--no small task." -- Herizons