Indelible Marks

In “An Elegy,” the final entry in André Alexis’s latest collection of stories, an autofictional narrator traces the origins of his literary preoccupations. “I had, without realizing it, become obsessed with the unhomely, with the strange,” he admits, while contemplating how immigration to Canada informs his art. Writing about the loss of his childhood — of how slippery memories of “my Trinidad” manifest in his work — he arrives at unheimlich, which he explains is “a German word that is literally ‘un‑home-like’ and means ‘scary,’ ‘sinister,’ ‘weird.’ ”

Although “unhomely” and “unhomelike” are indeed accurate translations, the decorated novelist fails to mention that unheimlich is perhaps best rendered in English as “uncanny.” In his essay “Das Unheimliche,” from 1919, Sigmund Freud expounded on the complexity of this concept and its role in both literature and life. “The ‘uncanny,’ ” according to Alix Strachey’s translation, “is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” For Freud, “uncanniness” expressed the intimate, inextricable relationship between unheimlich and its supposed opposite, heimlich; it gestured to the unique terror of finding one’s home — whether country, house, family, or body — turning strange. Freud invoked the ominous figure of the double, or doppelgänger, as a powerful example.

Alexis’s Other Worlds is full of keyholes into the uncanny. The title itself alludes to the off-kilter realities that lurk beneath all that seems normal and benign. Characters in the book drop swiftly from their worlds — physical, emotional, and spiritual — into inexplicable and claustrophobic environments.

This terror pervades the opening novella, “Contrition: An Isekai.” Beginning in Trinidad, in 1857, it follows Tam Modeste, a practitioner of obeah and other forms of magic, who spent his “life on the edge of a Carib village” avoiding the creeping insidiousness of colonization. While walking through the forest, he reluctantly rescues an unconscious man, James Fernby, an incompetent and obnoxious British captain, who has strayed from his soldiers and gotten “lost in a country he hated.” A dramatic miscommunication between the two men leaves Tam “retreating to the depths of himself” and calling to the nearest snake to “empty its poison in his arm.”

When he wakes up from his suicide attempt, Tam is in the embrace of a wailing “extremely tall woman.” He begins speaking to her in his native Kari’nja and quickly realizes, between her bewilderment and the sound of his own voice, that he has been reborn into the body of a seven-year-old, Paul, who has died moments prior. The year is now 1957. As Tam navigates his new life in Petrolia, Ontario — which consists of mitigating Paul’s parents’ confusion, attending elementary school, and learning some English — he senses that the boy’s soul still inhabits the body he is in. “Tam was aware of Paul’s emotions and, gradually, of his consciousness,” Alexis writes. Eventually Tam pieces things together: Paul was a patrilineal descendant of his, and, as fate would have it, Captain Fernby also has a family member in the same small town.

The longest entry in the collection, this densely layered five-part novella lays much of the thematic groundwork for the eight stories that follow. Across generations, characters face the darkest corners of themselves through disturbing confrontations with others — especially family members and sexual partners — and with their own otherness.

In “A Certain Likeness,” a young archivist, Kisasi, seeks out Misha van Zandt, a celebrated artist and former lover of her late mother, Kika. Kisasi is determined to find out more about the man whose name “seemed to precede her mother’s bouts of depression” and came to be “a harbinger of pain.” As Kika’s mental health worsened, which ultimately led to her death by suicide, her “poisonous” hatred of the painter took over her consciousness.

When Kisasi first encounters Misha, who is still “beguiling” in middle age, he asks her to begin posing for him. After a few meetings at his Toronto studio, they fall into a creative and sexual relationship although he doesn’t know who she is (despite the striking resemblance and the suggestively similar names of Kisasi and her mother). After a few weeks of intense physical intimacy, Kisasi becomes “jealous of her mother, almost resentful that Kika had been with Misha before her.” This disturbing line of thinking festers until she finds out that he is likely her biological father and leaves him.

A decade later, Kisasi inherits Misha’s multi-million-dollar estate. “The past preys on the present, but it does no harm, unless you let it,” the narrator says as a train carries newly rich Kisasi and her husband from Toronto back to their Montreal home. Although “shame and humiliation struck her” for the first time since the affair — and a posthumous message from Misha further disturbs her vision of the past — she casts off the complexity of what has happened. Instead, she decides to feel “entirely innocent.”

Fraught inheritances come up again and again throughout Other Worlds, often from the perspective of children who are left to decipher the emotional traces and memories of their parents. “A Misfortune” begins: “At the age of six, Amara McNeil shot and killed her father.” Amara’s remorse about an accidental discharge has “covertly steered her circumstances” and shaped her life until age forty-seven. After the death of her mother, Ada, which was “in almost every sense more devastating than her father’s had been,” Amara learns that her “father didn’t die from the flesh wound he got from the gunshot” but at the hands of his physician. “Dr. Olson,” her mother’s letter discloses, “did this because we couldn’t see any other way to stop your father from hurting us.”

Amara digests the baffling information — that her father was abusive and that she had been forced to live as a guilt-stricken alibi — with a certain detachedness. As the weeks pass, memories emerge that make her question the nature of Ada’s relationship to their family — but also with the murderous doctor. Ultimately, she decides to burn the note, even though it “would be a burning of her mother.” Without any physical evidence of the truth, she allows her thoughts of the revelation to fade and, much like Kisasi, shirks any responsibility for what happened. Eventually, she’s able to tell herself her story “as she always had before, and with almost as much confidence: at the age of six, Amara McNeil shot and killed her father.”

Other Worlds is rife with recurring and mirrored images that create an ominous atmosphere. Petrolia, where Alexis’s debut novel was set, appears throughout — as do letters, trysts, untrustworthy doctors, rebirths, and broken families. Together, these stories can be read as sketches of that which has left an indelible mark on Alexis’s emotional landscape: salient variables and scenes that constitute the author’s interior sense of what makes life strange. At the centre of these explorations is the vexing, shadowy chasm between generations. As the narrator of “Consolation” says, remembering the painful discovery of his father’s infidelity, “I think of this moment as the first one in my professional life, if for no other reason than that I’ve spent decades litigating it.”