02/21/2006: "2 New Reviews"

Hi all,

Two reviews; one from US-based Bloomsbury review; another by the Guardian UK.

BLOOMSBURY REVIEW:

RUST AND BONE
Stories
Norton, $23.95, cloth
By: Steve Woodward

The American release of this collection of stories by Canadian Craig Davidson sears the senses on contact: the amount of blood an injured limbs strewn about is enough to make one physically ill. It never feels gratuitous, though---the emotional payoff is always deep enough to satisfy. Davidson has whittled his prose down to bare expression, eschewing pronouns and articles for a clean, spare feel, suited to the calculated violence of the stories. Bareknuckle boxing matches, illegal dog fights and amputee support groups fill the landscape, through which wander the characters. All of the main characters seemed bruised or broken in some way---severed limbs, fractured hands---and their emotional status is no better. Still, he manages to deal with substantial issues such as infertility, loss, and addiction in a way that indicates a latent sensitivity underlying the sheen of brutality.

The supple movement of protagonists in Davidson's hands is impressive; their emotions are shown largely through their actions, which are impulsive, bizarre, and ultimately human. Though initially far different than your average person, these characters work their way into you---nowhere near the heart, but somewhere in the abdomen, uncomfortable and close to your organs. Some of the stories overlap a bit, lending continuity to the book. An unknown repo man guilty of swiping a prosthetic limb turns up as the main character who has his own set of problems to deal with. These types of shifts are at time believable, though occassionally the characters would have been better left alone than reprising their roles as minor characters.

Though his prose is at times terse and tight-lipped, Davidson fascinates us with succinct details about boxing and the settings in which it takes place. The grime of a condemned warehouse or the humid melange of smells on a Thialand street literally swarm from the page and the working knowledge of the 27 bones in a human hand becomes the key to understading the plight of a boxer. Through such careful outlining of seemingly unimportant details the small moments of these stories expand infinitely, allowing the narrator to flit between present and past in a suspended glass of time. Similarly, any surface evaluation of the turbid swarm of action in these stories misses the meaning that hangs just below consciousness, always out of reach of the characters' grasps. Controlled pacing leads to gleaming bits of hope and insight, which ultimately point to the greatest revelation of all: Davidson isn't as tough as he wants us to think. Like his character Herbert in "The Apprentice's Guide to Modern Magic," we want to believe, and Davidson makes it impossible not to.

GUARDIAN UK REVIEW:

Rust and Bone, by Craig Davidson (Picador, £10.99)

Stark oppositions often pack the punch in these gritty tales about American (?!) tough guys on the ropes. Every time the young boxer of the title story smashes an opponent's face he remembers hacking at a frozen lake to rescue his little nephew: now he fights both to pay the brain-damaged boy's medical expenses and to punish himself. In "A Mean Utility", an advertising executive describes in filmic detail the vicious dog-fights he enjoys with his wife - yet neither sees an irony in the fact that their other shared obsession is to conceive a child. In "Friction", sex-addict Sam bunks off his therapy sessions for orgies, while images of the wife and daughter he has lost float through his mind. Davidson eventually tires of being Hemingway. In "On Sleepless Roads" he sends up one of his own characters, the infertile dog-fighter, now divorced and trying to remake Tales of the Riverbank in a friend's backyard. More successful is the longest yarn, which relates a conjurer's disappearance during his own trick. This salty collection more than whets the appetite for Davidson's novel, The Pit [ed note: THE FIGHTER], due next year.

I'm happy with these reviews, except for the fact the I've NEVER, EVER tired of being Hemingway! I even dress up like him in the confort of my own apartment and pretend I'm drinking absinthe at a bullfight in Pamplona. In fact, I'm doing it right....NOW.

Salt-ily yours, Craig.