First Fiction Fridays: You Can’t Stay Here

What:You Can’t Stay Here (Thistledown Press)Who: Jasmina Odor is a Croatian-born Canadian writer and teacher of writing, whose fiction has been widely published in Canadian magazines and anthologies, including in The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, and Eighteen Bridges. Her work has won the Howard O’Hagan Award and a Silver Alberta Magazine Award, and been nominated for the Journey Prize and the CBC Short Story Prize, among others. She lives in Edmonton.Why you need to read this now: At a time when huge numbers of people across the world are migrating, this collection offers contemplations of the complex psychological and social effects of place and displacement. If Miranda July’s 2007 collection has the happy title of No One Belongs Here More than You, You Can’t Stay Here is rather humorously the opposite: You Don’t Belong Here!, it shouts, making its characters work hard to get out of limbo and find where there might, possibly, be a place for them.The book opens with hilarious awkwardness involving a character secretly drinking Scotch in the bathroom during her boyfriend’s parents’ Christmas party with a flirtatious elderly neighbour – and ends with a scene of an immigrant man, shrapnel embedded in his thigh, on a mad impromptu jog with his Canadian girlfriend through Toronto’s Rexdale. But these two stories, like all in this collection, are coloured by the book’s central concern: migration – whether forced or desired, whether through exile, or return, or travel – and its possibilities.The stories show us those left behind, those newly arrived, and those seemingly long-adapted to new places. These are stories of new immigrants working in restaurants in Canadian cities, stuck with their past lives and traumas but also eager for change. They show us pains of war and violence: a man’s traumatic war guilt complicates his ability to open up to his new Canadian family in “The Lesser Animal,” an old man’s brief and tragic bond with an enemy soldier calls up mixed emotions over his own children, all living abroad. There are the more subtle pains of transition: loneliness and confusion and yearning, the changes in families and friendships. “Skin Like Almonds,” set on the Adriatic coast, explores women’s sexuality and friendship, and the ways in which war and emigration have threatened the characters’ bonds. But new places also promise new knowledge and pleasures, the potential for getting unstuck – as Barcelona does, in the story “Barcelona,” for a deadened young woman who breaks with her family to try to bring herself back to life.The stories explore complexities of love and conflicted, uncertain desires, often made more complicated by ambiguous belonging. The result is sometimes psychological paralysis, sometimes strange acting out. Jasmina Odor creates unique characters and situations, and unconventional family attachments. Normality in this book is a surface illusion, and when you get close you find pain, neurosis, and vulnerability. Characters do bizarre things – like opening doors to strangers and making them sandwiches while those strangers check their Facebook accounts.But whether the action is as languid as a day on the beach or as frenetic as an unpredictable boyfriend threatening to break down the door, the stories’ primary direction is always the emotional depth and truth of a situation, and an attempt to understand why humans do what they do. This collection mixes situational absurdity with a serious contemplation of loss, alienation, suffering, and the deep relationship between belonging and the possibility of love.Alissa York calls the stories “possessed of a fierce intelligence and a warrior’s heart,” by a writer “who pays attention” and “has both the gift and the guts to report back faithfully on what she finds.”X plus Y:You Can’t Stay Here brings the psychological and emotional complexity of Tamas Dobozy’s Last Notes and reveals the same truth in everyday life that Lisa Moore’s Open does.

* * *Our thanks to Nicole for sharing You Can’t Stay Here with us! For more debut fiction, click here.