Shadowy Short Stories

Kristjana Gunnars shines best in the short lyric novel. She writes less magically and musically in the short story. Although Any Day But This is a stronger collection of stories than her previous volume, The Guest House and Other Stories, written more than ten years ago, it is not the place where she exerts her fullest linguistic presence.

A dozen good Canadian writers have written stories similar in style to the ones in Any Day But This, whereas only Gunnars has written the extraordinary melodies of mood in The Prowler or The Rose Garden, where the deepest parts of the self speak to each other. The reader feels privileged to overhear this dialogue of the soul with itself, the most intimate and confessional of conversations.

For me, the essential Gunnars consists of The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust, The Substance of Forgetting, Night Train to Nykøbing and The Prowler, where there seems to be...