Damian Tarnopolsky (Diego Altamira Olvera)

With his new short story collection Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster, Toronto writer Damian Tarnopolsky (Goya’s Dog) explores the full potential of the form, pressing to the limits of the genre. It’s a heady experiment, and a powerful reading experience.

The collection begins relatively straightforwardly. “Turtles,” the collection’s first story, begins with a flat declaration: “I was playing on the computer past my bedtime, because they were fighting.” The voice is simple, that of a child, Mark, who is witnessing the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, although he is not entirely sure what is happening as his mother removes him from the home. The story is familiar in terms of approach and material: a contemporary realist slice-of-life. But the simple past tense is actually indicative of a memory; the child’s voice is a recollection. The story is being told in retrospect by an older Mark.

Fractured details begin to emerge. “You might as well ask yourself if this moment is a dream, now,” Mark narrates. “Dream of being understood. Dream of feeding the ducks in the park. But why bother? Dream that Bella, my sister, survived and didn’t fracture her skull somewhere deep in the South Pacific and lives still. Dream that my daughter will speak to me again.” The terrain shifts beneath the reader, almost without the reader realizing.

That shift is sharper with the second story, “In the Parlour,” an examination of power and class through the lens of a tragic love story set in the period after the First World War. Tarnopolsky demonstrates both emotional acuity and a command of historical fiction here, and when the third story, “Henry’s Baize Suit,” reveals itself as a simple conversation between two brothers negotiating their inheritance (and their grievances) following the death of their father, the volume begins to appear as a series of experiments with various modes of the short story. “Henry’s Baize Suit,” however, concludes with an annotation:

Submitted to the Hart House Annual Literary Contest, April 1st, 1999
Word count: 2,855 words
Author: Mark Ferguson.

It is at this point that the scale of Tarnopolsky’s ambition begins to reveal itself: Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster is more than a straightforward collection of stories, more complex than a standard set of linked stories. The book shifts between stories of Mark and his family (especially his beloved sister Bella), and the stories Mark is writing, with each set of narratives referencing and informing the other.

But it becomes even more complex than that: for example, we learn of crucial developments in Mark’s life through how he addresses them in his fiction, rather than directly. In “A Whole Fresh Carapace,” Bella annotates and line-edits one of Mark’s stories, and through her notes we learn of, among many other things, a breakup that continues to haunt him: “Come on Mark change her name at least. I mean how many times is this girl going to break up with you? sorry.” The fiction folds in on itself, doubling and redoubling, creating an entire universe.

The refraction between the stories – the “fictions” and the “real stories” – creates a kaleidoscope of interlinked layers of meaning, an understated – virtually subtextual – examination of the nature of fiction itself, and the creation of fiction. What could be, in lesser hands, an academic or experimental exercise, however, never loses sight of its emotional core. With Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster, Damian Tarnopolsky has crafted one of the most intriguing, original pieces of fiction you are liable to read this year.