Country: Canada
Genre: Literary/Magical Realism
Pages: 55
Synopsis:
Jason Lee Norman takes a trip through the Americas, or should I see HIS Americas. From north to south. Canada to Argentina. That's a rather methodical approach. What he finds in each country has nothing scientific or methodical about it. Over 22 very short stories, Norman introduces his reader to the spirit of every country of his continent.
In the United States of America, children everywhere are waiting for summer vacation. To a child in the United States, there is summer vacation and then there is everything else. Summer vacation is freedom. The United States was built on the foundation that one day we will all be on summer vacation permanently - in the sky, all year round.
There are upsides and downsides to reading such a short book. Yeah, it will probably be over about an hour after your started it. It's also spare, focused and controlled. There isn't a single line of text where Jason Lee Norman doesn't know what he's doing. You have to take AMERICAS for what it is, somewhat of an experiment with Magical Realism and conventional story structures. Once you've understood this, you will start to understand you have something special in your hands. AMERICAS is not exactly an epic, but it's something that has been thought completely outside the box. Or should I say beside that proverbial box that enslaves so many writers.
I was reminded of two writers when reading Jason Lee Norman. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The first is kind of an elephant in the room, as Norman spends most of the collection in South America, describing the magic in its people. His narrations reminded me of ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, with a constant surreal edge that Garcia Marquez didn't always have. I liked how it grew from country to country, from page to page as if he was approaching some kind of artifact. The final story, "Argentina" is quite fitting in that regard. Some will grunt at the fact I'm mentioning Lévi-Strauss in this review, but if you had the absolute displeasure of reading A WORLD ON THE WANE like me, part of your anger comes from the fact that the first chapter was awesome. Lévi-Strauss is on a boat to South America and makes fun of André Breton. The cold, factual approach contrasting to the ambient magic reminded me of Lévi-Strauss. If his South American people would've been awesome like those of Jason Lee Norman, instead of just staring at him for hours, A WORLD ON THE WANE and AMERICAS would have been a lot more similar.
Everybody in Guyana is missing something. Just like their eastern coast is missing the warmth and protection from its ancient African west coast cousin, each citizen of Guyana is missing a limb or an eye or an ear or a digit. Most were born that way. Everybody in Guyana knows what it feels to be incomplete and they long for back when they were in Pangea and dinosaurs probably walked the earth and the jungles were something more than government protected tourist areas.
The brilliance of AMERICAS as a collection lies in its structure. There are 22 seemingly unattached stories about people in different countries, but there is a beginning, a climax and an eerie ending. Not only it reads like a travel diary, but every country seems to be taking in the vibrations of the one north of them. Jason Lee Norman introduces the Americas as an homogenous being. So really, the size of this book isn't very important. In fact, this should be read in school, instead of those long novels that bore kids and turn them off from reading forever. I mean, what does a young mind crave the most? Thomas Hardy or a creative, dynamic introduction to the very land they live on? Seems like a no brainer to me. Jason Lee Norman's AMERICAS serves a purpose. It's one of those shooting stars to remind you why you love reading in the first place.
THREE STARS