Review: Literary Review of Canada

Received this wonderful review today from the Literary Review of Canada. It's glowing and affirming and stunning, and left me a little shook. I thought: When you're young, the accolades go to your head. But when you're older they go right to your heart.

Leila Marshy’s 2018 debut novel, The Philistine, follows a Palestinian Canadian woman’s journey to Egypt in the hope of finding her father. The Montreal author’s latest collection of short stories finds characters who are similarly searching — for purpose, connection, or a better understanding of their paths and choices. With My Thievery of the People, Marshy establishes herself as a masterful writer of intricate, intergenerational plots.

The book opens with “Blink Twice,” a two-page scene that touches on the way trauma informs even the smallest interactions. Two nervous strangers meet at an undefined gathering while loading their paper plates with “tasteless” tomatoes and “terrible cheese.” One tells the other to “blink twice,” riffing on “Blink twice if you need to be rescued,” but the joke is lost on the “unknowable” woman with an “unrelenting” gaze. The pair get stuck in a staring contest; the narrator laughs uncontrollably while the woman, who “was in a permanent state of self-protection, which meant she smiled a lot,” grins nervously. An awkward interaction becomes an extended consideration of social veneers, defence mechanisms, and “armour.” In the final line, Marshy zooms out to reveal another layer to the facades at play: “Anyone watching us would think we were having the time of our lives.”

In “Evidence of My Thievery of the People,” a young man works for his father, a temperamental and demanding businessman. The narrator, whose “long fingers counted money with a reptilian finesse,” develops a strange relationship with a woman at the office. He describes her as an apparition who appears to him daily, always wearing the same dress: “She seemed to live in the cupboard, preparing coffee after coffee for my father.” The mundane narrative becomes increasingly surreal and tense as unsettling details emerge. “She sometimes secretly hit me on the head,” he admits. “It was the only time she allowed herself to touch me. I took pleasure in these encounters.” Omission and suspense drive Marshy’s clipped style. Toward the end, the dynamic between the two is revealed to be far more complicated than a workplace crush. In a tale that recalls the harrowing familial betrayals in Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies (which Denis Villeneuve adapted for the screen), Marshy skillfully unravels complex family secrets, disturbing the assumptions of both her characters and her readers.

Throughout the collection, domestic spaces are both claustrophobic and generative. In “Ramadan,” an overworked mother spends an afternoon kneading dough, washing laundry, and performing other tedious tasks, all on an empty stomach. As she works in anticipation of sundown, when she can break her fast, sounds from the street —“the clip of donkey hooves and the scrape of wooden wheels”— drift into her ears. “She is rolling and pushing and heaving the dough and the dogs are groaning go, go, go,” Marshy writes, her sentences mirroring the repetitive labour. When night falls and the woman finally eats, her exhaustion intervenes. “The food,” which her husband and children have already indulged in, “is cold to her dark lips.” She eventually falls asleep alone on a pile of sheets, isolated from her family.

In “How To: Your Very Own Life,” a woman considers leaving her husband with the help of seven steps. Some have innocuous headings, such as “3. Parenting: Record the milestones” and “5. Healthy living: Cook simple meals,” but they devolve into unhappy images. “The kids don’t listen,” she writes. “The sink is overflowing with suds, the table still needs clearing.” Finally she confesses to her spouse that she’s moving to Ottawa and taking their children with her. As with many of these stories, the closing sentences bring the protagonist’s emotional state into question. “What do you think you’re doing, he asks, separating? Yes, I am separating, you say, I am separating,” she recounts in the second person. “Then you laugh and laugh and laugh. It’s the funniest thing you’ve said in a long, long time.” Marshy has a penchant for endings poised between pain and absurdity. With dark humour, she disorients readers while providing profound insight into her characters’ thinking.

“The Beauty of Disaster” begins “on a long stretch of the highway” into Cairo. A fortysomething biologist with the Ministry of Agriculture watches a Mercedes weave in and out of traffic until it loses control and comes “to a screeching stop” inches from her own bumper. The other driver turns out to be a twenty-one-year-old from Maadi, a wealthy “Western-style suburb,” who immediately demands a ride. Although irritated —“Does she think I am her servant now?”— the scientist pities the young woman and brings her home in her old Suzuki. By the time they arrive at the “large villa behind a short stone wall,” their staggering wealth disparity has come to the surface, leaving the narrator feeling uncertain and self-conscious as she tries to ask for compensation. In the end, exposure to extreme privilege unmoors her: “I was pierced by hope and longing with such a violence that it made me collapse with sadness.”

In settings across Canada and Egypt, Marshy attends to the most quotidian situations of our lives to extract the layered stories within. She considers the human desire for authenticity amid all that feels predestined by class and citizenship. By turns cynical and tender, My Thievery of the People breaks the complacency of the everyday through shock, satire, and the gravitas of subtext.