Burn Man

September 1, 2023
A collection of short stories that push frighteningly into the psyches of the troubled and cast-aside in a language of microscopic precision. In these 21 selected tales by Jarman--a Canadian writer who, if there were any literary justice, would be much better known in the U.S.--marginalized men are on the road, on the run, failing to figure out how to stay in one place, how to stay sane, how to pin life down and make sense of it. Amid a welter of sensory impressions and a decided lack of the steadying machinations of traditional plot, narrators imagine alternate outcomes to their meager existences, their common language a heady, often surreal stream-of-consciousness. In their hands they tilt bottles, hold steering wheels, lug corpses of their fellow soldiers; on their lips they spit venom, self-pity, bursts of allusive quotation (Shakespeare, ads, songs spun on 45s in beat-up Wurlitzers). These are the stories of a bricklayer father who inadvertently harms his young son; of a hockey talent scout drowning in the game's violence (on ice and off); of a team of North Pole scientists finding a young woman on their frozen shores; of aging sailors, junkies, fishermen, jailbirds inside for bird-brained crimes, men approaching death. Broken soldiers march in nighttime retreat, a traveler stumbles down the history-haunted streets of Pompeii and, in the story from which the book takes its title, a man awakens from deep sleep to find himself on fire (camper, propane tank), instantly transformed into a sickening new being, Burn Man. "I am becoming a lunatic who loves tragedy..." says one doomed character; the tragic reality, says Jarman, is that chaos sits only a stone's throw away at any given time, ready to laugh at our claims of expertise, our self-serving expectations, to flick a finger in our direction and burn down all we know. Literature at the highest level: heartrending, disquieting, fascinating.

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