The Porcupine's Quill

If I Were Me is the culmination of Clark Blaise’s career as a geographer of the human heart. In the character of Gerald Lander he has created a modern Faust who carries the world within him, but must travel to learn its meaning. At the age of fifty, Gerald Lander is granted a vision. He reads his future, resolves his past and for ten luminous years applies himself to the mysteries of language, Alzheimer’s and consciousness itself.

Clark Blaise was born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1940 to French and Anglo-Canadian parents. He moved often during his childhood years as the family followed the usually disastrous fortunes of his furniture salesman father which have been chronicled in the author’s ‘post-modern’ autobiography I Had a Father. Blaise graduated from Denison University in Granville, Ohio in 1961 and then went to Harvard to study writing with Bernard Malamud. In 1962 he moved to attend the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, where he met and married the well-known American novelist, Bharati Mukherjee. He emigrated to Montreal in 1966 in search of his French-Canadian roots and taught for the next twelve years at Sir George Williams University where he established what is now Concordia’s creative writing workshop. After a brief period at York University, Clark and Bharati moved back to the United States where Clark took up the position of Director of the prestigious International Writing School at Iowa.

Blaise’s brilliance was immediately obvious in his first two books of stories A North American Education and Tribal Justice. After more than twenty years they remain monumental in the world of the Canadian Short Story. The stories that make up the novel If I Were Me are written in a different style and cadence, sombre and demanding work which will enlarge Blaise’s already stellar reputation.

Barry Cameron writing in Canadian Writers and Their Works concludes his article with the following words: ‘Blaise has given us, in my judgement, some of the most rewarding books of fiction ever produced in Canada.’

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‘If I Were Me is an intriguing and rewarding book. Only 120 pages long, it is packed with fascinating speculation about any number of subjects, from Japanese cults to the value of waste and corruption in human society. Blaise’s plot -- such as it is -- develops almost imperceptibly through a series of ostensibly unrelated chapters. A blockbuster commercial page-turner this ain’t, and the penultimate chapter offers up a couple of whopping great coincidences of the sort that can happen only in real life. But the slow unfolding of Lander’s very literal voyage of discovery is satisfying indeed. This slender volume is meaty, and entirely fat-free.’

—The Globe & Mail

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‘I still can’t say with certainty what this little book is about, but I am certain that it’s Blaise’s masterpiece, and that I’ll return to it often.’

—Books in Canada

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‘Those who have read Blaise will likely be familiar with his non-fiction bestseller Time Lord, not the four volumes of his Collected Stories that have sold somewhere in the low hundreds. Though he became a member of the Order of Canada in 2009, Blaise has never won a GG. And yet his body of work -- and one can speak of it as a coherent body -- is an entertaining and profound monument to the craft of the short story.’

—Alex Good & Steven W. Beattie, The Afterword