‘Up a notch from the ordinary’
Like a River Divides the Earth: Five Stories
by Dora Dueck
Calgary: Freehand Books, 2026
$22.95 / 9781997534204
Reviewed by Heidi Greco
*
The five stories in this collection span both time and space, with settings that range from twentieth-century Toronto to the Russian steppes. Each of them is filled with enough rich details and clearly drawn characters to read as if it’s a short novella.
Dueck is a born writer, a spinner of tales that often interweave historical events in such a way that they seem like personal memories.
One of the ways she accomplishes that is by embedding objects or events that seem familiar. Who of us hasn’t been caught up reading an old Nancy Drew book, following the adventures of those capable young women who were always getting themselves into and out of the unlikeliest scrapes. And can any of us forget the long months of the pandemic (“The Covid,” as the characters in one of the stories call it). Dueck refreshes my memory with details I’d long put aside when she considers four older women living together through that long ride:
One day they were going about their lives in the regular way and the next, it seemed, the four women were stuck in the house, in their “bubble,” washing their hands at great length—Lily singing Happy Birthday as she scrubbed to make sure it was long enough—and stepping outside to the street each evening at seven to hit pot lids with wooden spoons as a way to thank nurses and doctors being swamped with cases in hospitals.
It’s just such touchstones that draw us into the worlds Dueck creates, even when that world might be foreign in time or place, or both.
There’s often an element of what I can only call ‘near-horror’ in these stories. A young girl’s father suffered terrible facial injuries in World War One and, as a result, wears a custom-made mask so no one can see the extent of his scars; but one otherwise uneventful afternoon his young daughter catches a glimpse of him without his protective gear. This proves to be an incident that not only sears itself onto her memory, but has after-effects that alter her relationship with her mother and echo throughout her adult years.
Along with injury, death is a constant throughout the book, and often comes in shockingly unexpected ways that leave the survivors wondering whether that was a suicide they might have prevented, a child they may have protected better, or an encounter that might have been averted. Sometimes death is completely beyond the control of an entire group of characters, as when Russian Mennonites are arrested and marched to labour camps, some of them perishing en route.
It may well be this constant hovering presence of death that contributes to a sense of urgency in so many of the stories, as in these introductory paragraphs of a piece called “Her Own Self”:
“We have to leave this evening,” he whispered. “We can’t put it off.”
His words touched her like unexpected flame and she flinched, she was an ember already, she was anguish through and through, she was crouched against the cradle of their son. She knew what was coming.
It takes very solid writing to achieve such urgency in so few words, and word choice is really the writer’s only tool. Consider the strength of a simple word like “whispered” —how lacking in urgency his urging would have been had Dueck chosen the more common “said.” And then the concreteness of “flinched” and “anguish” and “crouched”—so much compacted into the space of so few sentences.
There were other places in the book where I was stopped in my tracks by the power of the author’s verbs, those often passed-over power words that keep the action moving along. Consider, for example, this scene, at a somewhat awkward kitchen table reunion of people who haven’t been together in a long time: “He gestures at Anna fluttering food and coffee and hospitality in their direction.” Or this, “He soothes his short blond beard, which is perfectly trimmed….” (Italics are, in both cases, mine.)
And it isn’t only Dueck’s verbs that set her writing apart, pushing it up a notch from the ordinary. She creates such visual images: “He grunts recognition as the man speaks, it’s a scene he can see, growing wider the way a view does if walking backwards….” These words create a filmic vision in print—not an easy accomplishment.
“The Regatta” presents a story within a story (and even that story contains another story or two within it). On the advice of a friend, a woman whose son has died recently visits a chaplain to help her deal with her feelings of grief. The chaplain is actually the narrator of the story, telling the woman’s story back to us, and occasionally intervening with comments like this:
I never got around to offering my usual counsel on grief. Constance seemed determined to simply talk and she talked for much of the hour, and all the while her voice was calm and uninflected, except for one time near the end, which I will get to later.
Over the course of the woman’s story, we learn about her son’s condition, one that meant he couldn’t walk, the incident that caused it, and the ripple effects it had on the rest of their lives. Interspersed with her telling we become privy to small lies that were told over the years, always with good intention it seems, but lies nonetheless. At one point she even confesses that she might have to undo some of those falsehoods. But whether she gets the chance to do so remains unsettled.
Other debts also remain unsettled, though occasionally they are forgiven in small ways. Again in the story, “Her Own Self,” Marta is torn over losing her beloved almost-twin sister, Trude, and never being sure of what might have become of her; this loss is complicated by the death of her son, David. When Marta’s husband, Hermann, spends an afternoon at the circus, she is angry at him: “The word circus riveted her like envy but she resented him and what he had seen and the money he had spent.” Yet then Hermann tells her that the greatest joy he’d had at the circus was picturing their son David, now grown enough to attend such a gala, beside him, laughing and enjoying the spectacle of it all. When he exclaims, “He’ll never see it and I could have cried,” Marta’s heart melts: “It was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. She breathed in, held the breath, felt soft. Grateful and buttery. All was forgiven.”
Yet, there is another instance in that same story where she withholds forgiveness for a wrong (that though unintended proved to have fatal consequences), and this time for someone who may not even be alive.
These are the dichotomies of human experience: keeping grudges, granting forgiveness; making up lies, trying perhaps to undo them; dealing with the miracles of new life or of death. All of them are here, encapsulated in five amazing stories, ones you may perhaps never forget.
While Tsawwassen-based Dueck (All That Belongs) has received a number of awards for her work in the past, I can’t help but think that this volume of work is likely to put her in the running for such recognition yet again.
[Editor’s note: in support of her book, Dora Dueck will be signing books in Ladner: Black Bond Books May 24, 1-3pm.]
*
Heidi Greco lives in Surrey, where some would contend she can often still be found to be tilting at windmills. [Editor’s note: Heidi has reviewed an exhibit by Douglas Coupland and books by Katie Welch, Jan DeGrass, Stein, Peat, and Adalian, Deirdre Simon Dore, M.A.C. Farrant, Michael Maitland, David Zieroth, Christine Lowther, Rhona McAdam, Richard Lemm, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Marguerite Pigeon, and John Gould for BCR. Three of her books have also been reviewed here: Glorious Birds, From the Heart of it All, and Practical Anxiety.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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