Steven HeightonReseñas

PEARL RULED @ 10%

The author died last month of cancer. He was sixty.

This story opens with consensual (or as consensual as heterosex ever can be) sex turning into a shooting and a melodramatic follow-up crime committed by crazed-by-hate Turkish Muslim men in divided Cyprus.

I quit caring fairly quickly. This kind of crime isn't immediately interesting to me because it's using violence against a woman as an excuse to cause trouble for a man. And to be extremely clear, the violence isn't the sex. Which, yes, it was icky but it wasn't coerced or compelled. The violence was some Muslim men taking umbrage that a white guy was going to have sex with a Turkish secular woman.

Great. What the world needs now. However it was going to end, the beginning was pretty crappy by my lights and I don't need this. So Vale Author Heighton, we will not meet again.

In the late fall of 2015 Steven Heighton impulsively left home and offered his services as an aid worker on the Greek island of Lesvos. This was during the worst moments of a humanitarian crisis of staggering proportions, when hundreds of thousands of desperate people were fleeing the Syrian Civil War. Lesvos, located a mere ten kilometers from Turkey’s western coast, is a natural landing point for refugees being smuggled into Europe. Then, as now, traffickers were taking full advantage of that proximity. In Reaching Mithymna, Heighton’s memoir of a month spent among the volunteers and refugees, he arrives with little notion of what he will be doing and who he’ll be doing it with. It is not an easy transition, from naïve Canadian writer insulated from much of the world’s turmoil to front-line aid worker rolling up his sleeves and trying to convince himself he’s ready for anything that comes his way. But Heighton jumps headlong into the fray, making plenty of mistakes but learning as he goes, about himself as much as the situation unfolding before his eyes. The book is a clear-eyed chronicle that places its focus squarely on the people the author encounters: exhausted volunteers approaching burnout, anxious and despairing refugees—families, men and women of all ages—who have left behind the ruins of their lives and risked everything for an uncertain future. Heighton’s narrative takes an even-handed approach. He makes no arguments or moral judgments in these pages. He does not try to convince us of anything. He lets the facts speak for themselves, and some of those facts are more than simply harrowing. In many respects the book is concerned with belonging—Heighton’s own mother was Greek and he is haunted by the remnants of a heritage that he has neglected. The flow of refugees on their way to other places is ceaseless, and he can’t help but wonder what will become of them and how they will be received when they reach their various destinations. In the end, as he approaches his return to Canada, the author is frazzled by his experience and more than a little disillusioned by yet another example of human willingness to inflict horrific suffering on other humans. He finishes by telling us, “Nobody ever changes until they have to.” Hopefully the change, when it comes, will empower those who care to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

A collection of stories mostly revolving around Kingston. Some of the references hit home and the writing style that Heighton expresses is simple yet longing. Overall, a good starter for more of Heighton's oeuvre.

3.5

I wish I had read this earlier. Gripping story of a mountain climb gone wrong set on the border of China and Nepal. A group of strangers are drawn together when they see refugees being chased by Chinese soldiers and the decision is made to intercede. What follows is a beautiful, brutal, honest story of the true measure of these people as they struggle to survive and escape; set against the egotistical character of Wade, the climber determined to scale Kyatruk at any cost.
The author's writing is gorgeous and rich, his characters flawed, interesting and so well developed that they come alive.
I didn't want to put this book down and can't wait to read his other books.

I really wanted to like this novel but I had a hard time getting through. At first, I was intrigued with the action and Elias's discovery of Varosha. I sympathized with him and enjoyed learning about the people living in this town. I liked that the story switched perspectives and the reader was able to glimpse the life of Colonel Kaya. However, none of this was enough to get me to push through the rest of the novel. I could feel my interest waning as each new character was introduced. It felt like the story wasn't moving at all, and after a while I didn't care about Elias's healing time. Because of this, I stopped reading at about 128 pages. I hope this doesn't deter other people from reading this novel; it has received strong positive reviews from other readers.

I received this novel as an advanced copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Dead Are More Visible by Steven Heighton is a collection of short stories by an author who has received three gold National Magazine Awards and has been anthologized in two editions of Best English Stories and six editions of Best Canadian Stories. Heighton has also been nominated for the Trillium Award, the Journey Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award.

Whew! That’s a lot of acclaim for one person, but after reading his collection of short stories, The Dead Are More Visible, I can understand why.

Each story, though different in plot, are all written in a direct and honest narrative where the essence of the story is hidden beneath the surface of point-blank facts.

Heighton will never raise a white flag and holler, “This is what the story means!”

He will, instead, place his characters in almost absurd situations, ones that pose a raw tension and an environment in which his characters’ vulnerabilities are squeezed out of them—just not with a jarring hand or reading.

It is almost as if the characters are placed in strange, tense, and almost absurd situations so that the question of their true natures found in their needs and visceral responses can be honestly tested and tried—to be revealed for our sake, the reader, if not for their own.

And yet, the absurdity of each story’s plot or setting somehow resonates into a vivid visualization and ultimate believability. The ease of Steven Heighton’s writing style ensures this.

To read the rest of this review, you can visit the blog, "The Bibliotaphe's Closet" here: http://zaraalexis.wordpress.com/2012/06/17/the-dead-are-more-visible-a-review/

Thanks,
Zara

Awesome. Strong tight stories all the way through. The first half of the title story was already excellent, and then it slid sharply into an unexpectedly powerful development. In Noughts and Crosses the story cleverly unfolded across the scaffolding of an annotated email. Swallow took us into the world of damaged souls numbing their pains and plumping their wallets by participating in pharmaceutical research trials.
Masterfully done. Several of the stories were re-reads, having been previously published in The Walrus or Geist, but they were just as great the next time around.

Awesome. Strong tight stories all the way through. The first half of the title story was already excellent, and then it slid sharply into an unexpectedly powerful development. In Noughts and Crosses the story cleverly unfolded across the scaffolding of an annotated email. Swallow took us into the world of damaged souls numbing their pains and plumping their wallets by participating in pharmaceutical research trials.
Masterfully done. Several of the stories were re-reads, having been previously published in The Walrus or Geist, but they were just as great the next time around.

This was okay. The prose was certainly capable but I love strong voice and this book just didn't have it for me.

Few would argue with the assertion that Steven Heighton is one of Canada's best writers. Anything he publishes is worth reading. His poetry is graceful and vivid and fiercely intelligent. As an essayist he is insightful and adventurous. But it is with his fiction that Heighton fully hits his stride. In three superb novels and now three collections of short fiction, Steven Heighton provides a master class in the kind of audacious, spellbinding storytelling that captures the reader's attention from the outset. The best of the stories collected in The Dead are More Visible give us further reason to admire this very talented writer, who wields his pen like a precision instrument. These are stories about people groping toward a decision, re-connecting with themselves, or struggling in the aftermath of trauma. Almost all of the characters we meet in these pages are coping with some sort of disappointment. A few are grieving a loss. The narrator of "Those Who Would Be More," leaving behind a teaching job in Japan, learns to accept the stoicism of his Japanese lover, whom he is also leaving behind. The couple in "Shared Room on Union" successfully defuse the trauma of surviving the nightmare scenario of a carjacking gone wrong by retelling the story of that terrifying night every chance they get. And in "Swallow" a young woman named Ariadne (who goes by Roddy), deals with the emotional fallout of a betrayal perpetrated by her boyfriend and her best friend by hiring herself out to a drug trial where she will stay sedated until she can figure out what to do next with her life. These stories involve the reader at a visceral level while impressing with the sheer artistry of the writing. Throughout, Heighton's prose is understated and full of surprising, felicitous and memorable observations. Collections of short fiction rarely win novelists new readers. But anyone not already familiar with Steven Heighton's earlier work should seek out this book. It's more than worth the effort.

Heighton has fashioned a rapid-fire, suspense-filled narrative based on an actual event. This is the remote, mountainous country where Nepal borders Tibet. Wade Lawson wants to be the first climber to scale the dangerous peak of Kyatruk and has assembled an expedition that includes Dr. Lewis Book and filmmaker Amaris McRae. His plans are disrupted when Chinese soldiers fire on a group of Tibetan refugees fleeing for the Nepali border and Book and McRae, crossing into Chinese territory to help the wounded, are taken prisoner. Despite these losses, Lawson pushes forward with his climb. Meanwhile, Book and McRae engage in a life and death struggle to care for the wounded Tibetans while in Chinese custody. Unavoidably, the novel makes a political statement, but this is a human drama that unfolds with the emotional urgency and riveting immediacy of cinema.

A collection of short stories stretching from Canada to Japan, Flight Paths of the Emperor began for me as a jumbled puddlejump between time, place, and narrator. Though the stories were all delightful character and culture studies, I was often confused as to exactly what was going on--who was telling the story, what year it was, and sometimes even what part of the world we were in. After reading for a while, I learned that almost every story was somehow based (loosely or otherwise) around the life of a middle-age Canadian English teacher living in Osaka. The narratives move back and forth between honestly flawed cultural comparisons and historical snapshots, between intense and realistic character studies and the effects of loneliness, family and change on any human. Though it took a long time to come around (more than half of the book), I finally began to see the collection not as a confusing mess, but rather as a sort of map--the web of characters' flights crisscrossing over seas and across time. The stories as a whole are generally somber and muted, yet they are punctuated by one or two fully awe-inspiring works. Don't give up on this short-story novel too easily. By the time I was finished, I was glad I had stuck around to see the final picture.½

I love novels that draw on historical facts. This one is a rich tale following the incident of Arctic survival of the Polaris in 1817; crewmembers and passengers were stranded on an ice flow for six months and the book is about not only what goes on then, but also what takes place in their lives later on. Beautiful, suspenseful, harsh at times; lots of imagery.

Since I have more interest in polar exploration, & none at all in the Spanish-American war, which is what the majority of this book pertains to, I did not even finish reading this book. I found the title, cover, & marketing of this book very misleading, & the book itself extremely boring.

An interesting collection of short stories that examines the human elements of love and relationships. Well written and unique in style, Heighton's use of language highlights distinctive perspectives, forcing the reader to stop, recognize and reconsider ordinary relationships in new ways. Sharp reading.

From: Publisher

Acclaimed fiction writer and poet Steven Heighton confronts our society's growing preference for the virtual - in the media, in our modes of communication, in art, in war - as opposed to the visceral.

Heighton explores ways of remaining authentically creative and passionately engaged with life in an increasingly artificial world.

http://anansi.ca/titles.cfm?pub_id=13

A strange novel grasping after something that it knows it cannot catch: history, the suppressed voice of an indigenous woman surrounded by white culture, things that melt like ice floes. The strangeness of life on the floe, laid down in wrought language, stays with me.