 A Quiet Night & a Perfect End
AUTHOR: Denise Roig ISBN: 0921833407
The days of which Denise Roig writes in A Quiet Night and a Perfect End are filled with Chinese-cooking lessons, wedding preparations, and day trips to the Laurentian mountains. They're peopled by fundamentalist fishermen, mothers, daughters, fathers and sons, the kind of people who seek quiet nights and perfect ends to the turmoil of their long days and shaky beginnings. In short, these are stories about ordinary people's extraordinary ability to cope with the unexpected tragedies, large and small, that befall everyone. Roig takes her characters, and her readers, on Munro-like passages through miscarriages, infidelities, and disappointments through the motions of everyday life. It may be coping with the feeling of academic failure or coming to terms with the loss of a child who has died too young, an unexpected pregnancy or the intrusion of house guests who are no longer friends. What is uplifting, finally, is the achievement of forgiveness, the small, daily victories over despair. These are stories that remind us why our days and nights are so worth living. Excerpts from A Quiet Night and a Perfect End will be heard this year on CBC Radio One's Between the Covers.
REVIEWS: "Roig's first short story collection, the wonderfully titled A Quiet Night and a Perfect End, is invested with the kind of compassion for its characters and honesty about their actions that is not just rare but unheard of in a first collection." —Quill & Quire
"These are delicate but solid, weight-bearing stories."—Grace Paley
"A Quiet Night and a Perfect End is anything but predictable. In story after story, Roig avoids easy drama and through apparently simple narratives, reaches deep into the human psyche, probing with refreshing delicacy the fragile balance of the human condition. She has also avoided the bête noire of first books by keeping coming-of-age angst to a minimum. Instead, most of these stories focus on distinctly adult dilemmas: the constancy of matrimonial love, the subtle power plays between partners, the unbearable pain of losing a child, physically or metaphorically, and the complex joy of intimacy. At this stage of life, there are few quiet nights and no prospect of a perfect end, but somehow, in Roig's version of things, that doesn't seem so bad. In fact, it makes a precious kind of sense." —The Montreal Gazette
"These wonderful
stories are about distance and loss: children move away, husbands leave,
babies die. There is such quiet pain here and yet, and yet, there is a
sense that the searching and seeking, the pain and bewilderment are worth
it, in the end, the price one pays for letting love in, whether it is
love of a man for a woman, a woman for a man, a parent for a child. And
then, they take us beyond despair into moments of what we could almost
call joy, or if not joy, a deeply shared courage that makes us gasp and
say, 'Yes, that's how it happened, that's how it was.'" Other
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