The Ability To Forget: Short Stories

by Norman Levine

In "A View on the Sea," one of the finest stories included in Norman Levine's The Ability to Forget, a solitary painter explains to an unsympathetic journalist that "You have to make something particular when you paint. Things that have mattered in your life. A particular person. A particular bird. And not be too much concerned with fashion." This simple credo is the essence of Levine's art: it exemplifies the keen-eyed restraint out of which he coaxes superb fiction.

The Ability to Forget includes some of the best Levine stories not included in 2000's By a Frozen River, alongside new work that is as good as anything he has ever done. It is not easy to prepare those who don't know his writing (which is happily enjoying a quiet renaissance within Canada) for the experience of reading it. There are superficial similarities to the works of Hemingway, Philip Roth, Mavis Gallant, W.G. Sebald: Levine is a Canadian Jew who has spent most of his life in Europe (especially the artist's colony of St. Ives, Cornwall) and who writes, in a style that is at once Spartan and lavishly visual, about characters who share his own biographical predicaments. Impoverished writers and painters settled in Cornwall, young Canadian airmen leaving for the Second World War (or reflecting upon it from the vantage point of dour old age), and the Jewish community in prewar Ottawa are his favoured subjects. Through an unerring attention to the tiniest and most significant details of character and landscape he has managed to work in this limited palette for nearly all of his writing life.

While The Ability to Forget isn't quite the revelation that By a Frozen River was, it is an essential work, one that makes an ideal introduction to Levine's writing. Read it attentively and cautiously; Levine ambushes his readers on every page, but in doing so he teaches them to hear and to see. --Jack Illingworth

208 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2003

About the author

Norman Levine was a Canadian short-story writer, novelist and poet. He is perhaps best remembered for his terse prose.

Reviews

[Benjamin Kahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read short stories like this before. They seem to be more recounting of things observed than stories. When fiction seems so thinly veiled as these stories are, you always wonder "is this ficton? Or is Levine just slightly changing things to protect the innocent. There are some comes of fiction that make you think "is this fiction?" while others are like, "oh yeah, they definitely made that up." It's an interesting contrast. I don't know which is harder.

I appreciated the stories, although I did struggle with the longest one, "A View of the Sea." I felt that the shorter stories were easier for me to digest. I don't know that I'd seek our other Levine, but am glad that I read this collection.