The Blurb
From the tangled threads of a messed-up family to the timeless themes of consciousness, love, art, and death, Damian Tarnopolsky’s narrative journey takes readers through past, present, and future, with stories ranging from 1980s England to present-day Canada alongside visions of Renaissance France and worlds yet to come.
Each tale stands alone and takes its own stylistic direction, but they connect and reflect back on each other in unexpected, touching, and sometimes jarring ways. As characters from different times and places converge, the result is a mosaic of emotions and insights that mirror the complexities of a self in time.
With echoes of Chekhov, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jennifer Egan, this is a collection that transcends the boundaries of traditional storytelling, offering a glimpse into the workings of human relationships, inheritance, and experience.
My Review
Damian Tarnopolsky’s “Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster” is brilliant – it is my first exposure to seemingly independent pieces of fiction masquerading as a short story collection. It took me quite a while to figure out this clever deception, but once I did, there was nothing for me to do but to go back and read every story again. It was the Habsburg cup that did it for me – it appears again and again in different stories and that’s when I knew something intriguing was afoot.
These are complex, interconnected life stories with Mark Ferguson’s being the central one. It is through him – by following him as he muddles his way through a life fraught with emotional, physical, and psychological complications – that the reader is introduced to the other members of the Ferguson family. Different perspectives, as we are taught in medicine, give a more balanced picture, and that this collection does in good measure. As the title promises, the characters, richly layered, are Monks and Monsters, both, at different times in their lives. Even the genres are varied – the author certainly flexed his creative muscles, writing the Ferguson life stories in the form of a play, a sci-fi slash horror story, several romances, and fantasy, among others.
The narration is non-linear, and each story has clues embedded in it that may make little sense in that location, but, I assure you that everything falls into place in spectacular style once you do notice and join the dots. I strongly recommend a quick second read. Do not go into this book lightly. It is a puzzle, and I can personally vouch that my delight in the stories magnified manifold once I figured out where the pieces went.
About the Author
Damian Tarnopolsky is a writer, editor and a teacher. He teaches at the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab at the University of Toronto. His work, Goya’s Dog, was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada/Caribbean). He won the Voaden Prize for Playwriting in 2019. His short fiction has appeared in The Puritan, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, subTerrain, Audeamus, and elsewhere, and has twice been nominated for the Journey Prize, as well as the CBC Literary Award.
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