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Angel
Wing Splash Pattern also explores the healing going
on in Indian country. There is pain in these stories
and there is loss. There is death, but there is also
rebirth, and there is always the search from each of
the narrators for personal truth. Readers will recognize
Larry Sole from The Lesser Blessed in his story "How
I Saved Christmas", but there are new voices here,
new secrets, from new characters in communities across
the north and the south, yet they are all linked by
themes of hope, the spirit of friendship, and hunger.
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REVIEWS
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"Van Camp has a real respect for
the sacred and the profane in these close-to-the-bone
stories. People take on their difficult lives with spunk
and a sense of humour, and, perhaps more importantly,
he engenders an irrepressible sense of hope where the
prognosis might otherwise be bleak."
Malahat Review Fall 2002 issue by Lucy Bashford.
"A superb collection"
Angel Wing Splash Pattern has received
a glowing review by Matthew Firth in latest issue of
The Danforth Review.
"Angel Wing Splash Pattern is a
superb collection and such a welcome relief from the
usual, middle of the road, CanLit crapola. There is
no middle class, Toronto-centric mewling going on here.
And thank Christ for that! Van Camp's fiction is stripped
down, yes, but also thoughtful, wise and compassionate."
For
the full review go to: http://www.danforthreview.com/reviews/fiction/vancamp.htm
Reviewed
by Elizabeth Johnston
If a dream catcher could talk, it would
say Angel Wing Splash Pattern. In this short story collection,
Richard Van Camp's northern Canadian stories are as
visceral as nightmares, yet beautifully wrought with
shiny baubles glinting from their webs.
In Mermaids, the opening story, Van
Camp throws us right into the melee: Drunk and beaten,
Torchy stumbles from a tavern into the company of a
little native girl, waiting hours in the cold for her
mother. Something about her abandonment touches him,
and he finds himself telling her the story of why God
killed the mermaids. This modern allegory deepens into
Torchy's personal pain at losing his brother, which
becomes a motif throughout the book: How, in the context
of an idealized past, contemporary life rips away the
precious and replaces it with lesser jewels.
In the one Edmonton story, Sky Burial,
elder Icabus eats doughnuts to sop up the blood leaking
inside him. It's all he can do to keep from crying at
havng no one to pass his medicine on to. When a native
child, adopted by a white woman, comes to him, he thinks
maybe he's found that person. Nearby, a tropical bird
hangs upside-down from its perch, trying to bite its
way out of a metal leghold. The pathos of the situation
floats in the air like the dull echoes of people hanging
around in a large, decaying mall.
There's more hanging-around in Let's
Beat the Shit Out of Herman Rosko!, in which Grant and
Clarence stand across the street from Herman's house,
shivering in the snow, smoking cigarettes, trying to
talk themselves into beating up the town's first marriage
and sex counsellor, someone they used to harass as kids.
In a surprisingly adept and graceful turn, Van Camp
gently unmasks male bravado; in the space of a few pages,
you not only understand these guys, but like them too.
Van Camp demonstrates this particular
talent at much greater length in his novel, The Lesser
Blessed, for which he won the 2001 Jugendliteraturpreis,
a German literary award.
In Angel Wing Splash Pattern, Richard
Van Camp lures you so close to the heat of his characters,
yet always with an ice-bit of pain glinting through.
Enmeshed in his stories, you come face to face with
faceted flashes of the universal struggle to cope with
a dazzling, dismaying world.
Elizabeth
Johnston teaches creative writing at Concordia University
in Montreal.
"Richard Van Camp uncovers truths
in his fiction, his work so electric alive with human
experience it sings and hollers, whispers seductively,
cries, moans, chuckles. His voice is young and old at
the same time, the double vision of a deep talent, a
fearless intellect. His stories are a new territory
of his own making, a powerful place of sex and love
and compassion and forgiveness."
Susan
Power
"Richard Van Camp is a storyteller.
It seems to be a part of his blood.
Sometimes English, the English words
we use, take away from how we can feel as Aboriginal
people. Our stories often are weighted down with English
translations of Aboriginal expression. I know it's one
of the ways we can relate experience to each other but
sometimes, most times, the English words master the
heart involved. Luckily, though, every so often, there
is someone who can break through these clouds and share
all of who they are through the words they choose. I
think Richard Van Camp is one of these people. A storyteller
of the most ancient kind, I think he can hear the words
flow throughout his blood. Angel Wing Splash Pattern
is stories about moving past those clouds. The stories
are about Indian experience; Indian stories written
with a Dogrib voice, with a proud voice. These are different
stories, different than the usual stories about Indians,
and to me, even different than the usual stories written
by Indians about Indians, because of the amount of truth
inside of them. While I was reading them I couldn't
help but read them aloud and I got so caught up in the
power of these words that I think they wanted to make
me Dogrib so I could hear them better. Frenchy recommends
this book to everyone looking for the right words, inspiration
and beauty, and to everyone looking for something entertaining.
Amazing stories told by an amazing storyteller, but
that would be the
easiest description. .."
Frenchy,
Redwire Magazine
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