The Essential W. P. Kinsella by W.P. Kinsella

This career retrospective celebrates the 80th birthday of baseball’s greatest scribe, W. P. Kinsella (Shoeless Joe), as well as the 25th anniversary of Field of Dreams, the film that he inspired.

In addition to his classic baseball tales, W. P. Kinsella is also a critically-acclaimed short fiction writer. His satiric wit has been celebrated with numerous honors, including the Order of British Columbia.

Here are his notorious First Nation narratives of indigenous Canadians, and a literary homage to J. D. Salinger. Alongside the “real” story of the 1951 Giants and the afterlife of Roberto Clemente, are the legends of a pirated radio station and a hockey game rigged by tribal magic.

Eclectic, dark, and comedic by turns, The Essential W. P. Kinsella is a living tribute to an extraordinary raconteur.

Goodreads description 

Last January I reviewed W.P. Kinsella's last novel Butterfly Winter. Now Kinsella's publishers have produced this collection of his finest short stories. Kinsella will always be best known for his baseball magic-realist novel Shoeless Joe, which became the film Field of Dreams. But this collection shows that his work is more diverse than his famous opus would suggest. 

There are a number of magic-realist baseball stories including the story that started it all, Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa. Although I know nothing about baseball I really enjoyed Kinsella's stories, which are less about a sport than about questioning the human condition or exploring concepts. 

Searching for January takes the real disappearance of baseball star Roberto Clemente in an aircraft accident and explores concepts of time.  And the story The Night Manny Mota Tied the Record is actually about a man being offered the chance to save a great sportsman's life by sacrificing his own.  

"There is magic," Mr. Revere says. "It is close by. I can tell when someone feels it."

"It is the game," I say. "Not you."

"We all have to claim some game as magic," he says.

Alongside these clearly magic-realist baseball stories you will find a number of more realistic Canadian First Nation stories set on the Hobbema Indian Reservation. I had not come across these stories before, which poke fun at the Canadian authorities' and white population's attitude to the First Nations. I was firmly on the side of the narrator, the young Cree Silas Ermineskin, and his mates chuckling at their exploits and wry comments.

"Even crime wouldn't pay if the Government ran it," say our medicine lady, Mad Etta. The larger than life Mad Etta is a particularly wonderful creation. Despite the humour of these First Nation stories they also make the reader think about serious issues facing the inhabitants of the reservation. 

In addition to the baseball and Hobbema Indian stories, the collection includes a number of standalone stories. I particularly enjoyed two very different stories about mature men falling in love. Lieberman in Love is an unusual take on a man's relationship with a prostitute and The Last Surviving Member of the Japanese Victory Society is a story about intercultural love in face of opposition from the woman's mother. The latter story is probably my favourite in the collection and has such an emotional honesty about it that I was not surprised to read the author's moving dedication to his deceased wife at its end. 

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a master of the short story form.

I received this book free from the publisher via Netgalley in return for a fair review.

Butterfly Winter by W P Kinsella

The final novel from legendary Canadian author WP Kinsella.

Butterfly Winter, W.P. Kinsella's first novel in 15 years, is the story of Julio and Esteban Pimental, twins born in the Caribbean country of Courteguay, an enchanted but impoverished enclave on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic where time moves at its own pace and reality is open to question.

The brothers are born to play baseball, they even played catch in the womb, and at the age of ten they leave home for the American Major Leagues. Julio proves to be a winning pitcher who, much to the frustration of any team that signs him, will only throw to his catcher brother, who is a very weak hitter.

Amazon description

W P Kinsella's magic realist baseball novel Shoeless Joe, the book that was translated into the film Field of Dreams, was already on my to-read (and to-buy) list, when I got the opportunity to receive a review copy of this, his last book. Kinsella had given up on writing following being struck by a car but then after fifteen years at the age of 76 Kinsella published this book. 

Butterfly Winter reads like a book by someone who is overflowing with ideas and enthusiasm and enjoying the process of writing tremendously. The book revels in magic - a blanket of monarch butterflies cover the bodies of young lovers, foetuses play baseball in the womb, plants grow and flower upside down, soldiers are speared by herons - so much so that the realism plays a lesser part. Set in a fictional magical Latin American country instead of a magical USA this book is closer to the roots of magic realism.  

Although the book has baseball as a theme, it is also about writing and fiction. There are two narrators - a gringo journalist (perhaps a fictional Kinsella), investigating the story of the baseball-playing twins as well as the history and politics of Courteguay, and an old wizard, baseball guru, country's president and fraudster (perhaps also Kinsella). Kinsella has great fun with the latter narrator, whose identity shifts along with his name during the course of the book: I am what is known in literary circles as an unreliable narrator. The wizard's ironic comments allow Kinsella to explore the nature of fantasy and truth: Who's to say what is truth. People tell tales, and as the tales emerge they become as good as truth. In Courteguay, anything that can be imagined exists. The telling is the truth. Truth is spun like silk: truth is manufactured. 

All this makes for a fun and funny book, but then Kinsella ventures into the dark territory of Latin American magic realism as the pregnant partner of one of the twins is held and tortured as a political opponent of the sadistic dictator of Courteguay. The change of tone is a shock, but not nearly as shocking as the way the story then continues in a generally comic vein. 

Kinsella also plays with the chronology of the story, which moves backwards and forwards all over the place. As the wizard comments: This is Courteguay... The word chronological is not in our language, neither is sequence. Things happen. That is all there is to it.

The book isn't perfect. Kinsella has rather too much fun packing the magic realist kitchen sink into the seventy-eight short chapters. But readers of magic realism are bound to find much to enjoy.

I was given this book by the publisher via Edelweiss in return for a fair review.