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Klassen’s stories: the illumination of the ordinary

Al Reimer

The Peony Season, Short Fiction Sarah Klassen, Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2000. 248 pp. $16.95.

Well-known as a gifted poet, Sarah Klassen proves with this collection of 15 short stories that she is equally adept at short fiction. A poet’s precise way with words can be carried over to short fiction, where every word counts as well. Like the renowned Alice Munro, Klassen knows how to find significance in small effects. Instead of high dramatics or stagy epiphanies, these stories reveal the subtle insights of a writer who truly understands and values the everyday experience of ordinary people. It is this illumination of the ordinary, the grace to be found in the commonplace, which makes these stories so satisfying to read.

Klassen is that rare Mennonite writer who has learned how to transcend ethnic limitations while retaining her Mennonite identity without shame or prejudice. She uses her own background as naturally in her fiction as other writers use theirs. Given her own teaching career, one is not surprised to find that several stories have teachers as leading characters. “Murder” is a superb example of a “teacher-student” story, a moving account of the nature of tragedy – both literary and actual – and how they intertwine in life and explain each other. There are also several excellent stories in which the leading characters explore their family origins in Ukraine. In “The Barvenkovo Factory”, a descendent of Mennonite factory owners discovers to her utter dismay that her grandfather and father had not been the benevolent factory owners they pretended to be in Canada, but had maltreated their Russian workers to a brutal degree.

The theme of faith shines through these stories like a kaleidoscope – in personal and family relationships as well as in the transcendence of human experience that provides glimpses of the eternal and offers solace for the burdens of the present. This is fiction lovingly crafted by a writer who cares deeply about the human condition.

Al Reimer is emeritus professor of English at the University of Winnipeg.

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Last modified November 21, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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