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THE HERALD OUTLOOK Saturday April Page 11 Book Review Next New Worlds brilliance is in the language Bob who won the American Book Award in 1985 for in the Islands a collection of short stones set in the Caribbean ranges further afield in his new book The Next New World The title indeed rich in allu sion of this book s eight stones five are set in the New World of the United States two in the still newer world of the Islands and one in the world of Shakespeare theatre 0 brave new world That has such people t The Shakespearean story The Trapdoor is the least successful of the eight which suggests that Shacochis is best at home in the very contemporary new worlds that he mostly inhabits It does however bring on stage the ghost of Hamlet father and ghosts of one kind or another are the prin cipal link in these otherwise rather disparate stories There does not seem to be much in common at first sight for in stance between the story of two ancient sisters living in a rotting mansion on St Vincent who Invest the various men who visit their plantation with sexual fantasies and the story of a family reunion in Washington DC in which two an Big sisters Big Sisters welcomes the public to its annual meeting May 16 30 at Maplehurst Board Room Milton Slides reports elections appreciation speaker refreshments Sisters needed Teens need Big Sisters in Ac ton Please call if you want to en courage and befriend a teen Cyn Una Volunteers needed There is room for your daughter Big Sister pro gram Call Lois or Kann Slide show Big Sisters has a slide show describing its program They d be glad to bring it to your organization Call Lois 8784378 cient brothers meet for the first turn in 50 years and reach back through a wilderness of senility to home kind of understanding And in between these stories deal with cannibalism cancer the worship of dead men bones and the en of Alzheimer Disease But it is ghosts perhaps visitors from a new world that is also the oldest of worlds which make the common pattern The two old Miss Parkers Creole A Fairy Tale are raking in their past for a love that was never there they hated their father and one of their visitors mistakes them for ghosts themselves In Celebration of The World a former professor of politics at Columbia a man who has influenced American foreign policy has fallen back on a pig German patois to express the thoughts he no longer has and cle Joachim his brother up from Mexico lives in a world inhabited by the ghost of Trotsky whom he knew These two stones are amongst the best in the book But everywhere in the collection peo pie are fleeing toward their ghosts like the old Southern colonel of Where Fell who has taken the bones of a detachment of Con federates and in trying to put them back together finds his reason for living and dying or else away from their ghosts like the title character of Squirrelly s Grouper a man held in contempt by tits North Carolina neighbors until he lands a fish of record size but then finds his past as a war criminal AN ECHO There is a fair emphasis on age in The Next New World Crown Publishers 224 pages 95 too as though all these characters were on the verge of another world for some there is an echo of Tennyson Ulysses Come my friends not too late to seek a newer world The least tal story here and one of the best is Stolen Kiss in which Burton Glass a man perhaps as aimless if not as alienated as J Sal inger family of the same name is painting the vacation home of a family of New Yorkers and finds on a post a kiss circled by a glossy halo of oil that seeped out from the image He drifts off into sexual fantasy with both the New York wife and the daughter ruminating was well on his own wife of 39 years who prefers to live New York Having come to terms with his past life and his pre sent the caretaker presses his lips against the mysterious kiss then paints it over While most of the haunted characters of The Next New World come to final terms with themselves Burton Glass is the on ly one who does so in a clearly healthy way At the far end of both the age scale and the health scale is the young musician of I Ate Her Heart the most disagreeable of these stones who finds his un faithful mistress murdered as a final act of love he comes to terms with himself by performing the act of the title In this story Shacochis has gone beyond metaphor to an actuality which will be to few readers tastes Perhaps the young musician is too close to his own story Of the three stones told in first person I Ate Her Heart is the least mg while the other two Celebra tions of the New World and Squir relly s Grouper are among the most Both these stones are told by narrators not quite central to the action Both narrators are sear for an answer to what has happened lo their haunted heroes That they invite the reader join the search is what makes these along with Creoles and Stolen Kiss the most satisfy yet of course ultimately satisfying stories in a brilliant col lection Much of the is in the language is a real word smith forcing us to see old ideas in new combinations and doing this through the witty art of his diction The senile mind partly HYUNDAI OWNERS For Service Call knowing its senility is captured in His eyes become the eyes of a pnest fingering through a racy magazine trying to concentrate and be casual and indifferent simultaneously An old man hands are clawed to the steering wheel The two old sisters reign over a room where once they reigned over a plantation The word reminds us again of the gap between new world and old And the world of Bob Shacochis wit is not the least of the new worlds that the reader will encounter in this very collection Barrie teaches English and Cinema Studies at the of Toronto He is a former vice president of the Popular Culture Association MM MM mom STEREO SYSTEMS J Hit mm Fashions For The Younq At Heart 115 MAM ST GEORGETOWN Across Knox en MAIN ST SOUTH DOWNTOWN GEORGETOWN 8777654 The cure for cancer is in your genes 8731818 EDUCATION LETS TALK Is here something that you d he to know about education in the Region of Or perhaps In the Province Ontario Here your chance In recognit on Education Week the Milton Family Schools is presen EDUCATION IN THE 90S A PUBLIC FORUM WHERE School Auditorium Ontario Slreel South M Hon Onlaro WHEN Monday FEATURING Pat H llhouse Chair Halton Board Educaf on Spokesperson Bob Williams Director Board of on Charles Beer M York North Assistant Minister of Educaj on RchanfJohnston NOP Scarborough West NOP Education Grille Cam Jackson Burlington South PC Education Dr Robert Parry Superintendent Halton Board So bring your written questions and your interest in public education to Milton lor a night of on and conversation No 1 PET CENTRES Moore Park Plaza Georgetown 873 2666 96 Broadway Ave 1655 Stone Mall Guelph 836 8020