The Sound of All Flesh is a volume of apocalyptic stories full of loud sounds and bright colours. Daily life becomes infused with a hallucinatory brightness and Rabelaisian energy and excess. In Barry Webster's unique stories, earthquakes happen when people go too long without sex, a grand piano becomes a sailboat crossing the ocean and clowns hiding in the Canadian Shield suddenly invade the suburbs of Toronto. We meet a sexually-impotent gay fashionista, a travel writer terrified of being photographed, a suddenly hydrophobic competitive swimmer and an opera singer who finds inspiration by bathing in tubs of margarine. These stories, which meander from Switzerland's imaginary avenues of cash to the streets of Toronto and Berlin, are musical scores, full of unexpected crescendoes and sudden fortissimos.
Webster humanizes his bizarre tales with humour and and unexpected moments of pathos. Readers will find unforgettable characters among the sound and fury of Webster's language, characters who struggle to overthrow their obsessions.
The Sound of All Flesh brings us into another world, at once hilarious, disturbing and poignant. Stories in the collection have been shortlisted for the National Magazine Award and the CBC-Quebec prize.
Review
This is a 2005 book, from a Canadian publisher, but I didn't come across it until last month, when the author read at Wilde About Sappho, an annual literary do in Ottawa. His short stories, about piano music and nudity and other dissimilar stuff, are gems of dazzling wordplay and quiet humo(u)r, some gritty and realistic and some fantastical and hallucinatory.
