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“Beside
a beached canoe stood a man, smiling. He was very tall and
thin, his skin and hair so fair, his teeth so large and white
he seemed to have been bleached like linen in the sun. She
had never seen a man so blond, a face so homely in quite that
way: the bulging teeth, the shy delight, the cotton whiteness
of his skin, the frolic in his eyes. And he was clapping.
It was a formal clap, his long fingers faintly, nervously
tapping the palm of his left hand reminding her of words she
never used, like virtuoso, concerto. She stared at the man
in search of a category: clown? giant child? albino? All those
strange words had nowhere to go.”
Winner
of the Descant National Novella Competition, The Ketzer
has just been released by Hagios in a special limited hardback
edition. Ketzer is the German word for heretic. This novella
is about a young woman named Flora, a farm girl, who returns
home to her family and is invited on a deer hunt by her father
and brothers. She goes along, if only to show the men in her
life that she can do it. When the hunters run across the trail
of a buck as big as a legend, they get far more than they
bargained for. This is a classic hunting story, a love story,
a wilderness adventure, a German romantic novella, and a cautionary
tale about hunters and their quarry.
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 Reading
Excerpt
(10:29Min/7.4MB)
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| Critical
Response
Perhaps
all creation is an act of remembering, an intersection between
the present and the past....The Ketzer is such an
activity, transporting a figure from German folklore forward
through time and space, from mountain meadow to the flats
of Saskatchewan. “Only connect,” said E.M. Forster.
The Ketzer [dramatizes] the human capacity to connect,
and the heroine, Flora, is its embodimant....Flora is an embarrassment
and a threat both to herself and the men who surround her.
The story traces her gradual acknowledgement and acceptance
of her own gift. In the process, others come to understand
its importance as well.
-
Karen Mulhallen, Descant
My
favourite works of fiction [this year, 2004] were ... by Saskatchewan
writers. There should be an award given for best writing in
Canada, Regional Division. This year, from Saskatchewan, there
was David Carpenter’s The Ketzer....
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Andre Alexis, Globe & Mail
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