Journal Gazette from Mattoon, Illinois • Page 19

C5 Thursday, December 3, 1992 Mattoon (111.) Journal Gazette Books and authors: Digging in with 'Marine Life' Entertainment I -i'l i Anthology of black women writers printed her characters change. There are stories of one half-sister's unhappy marriage, another half-sister's nervous breakdown. In "White Shoulders," Adele's niece regresses from an outgoing, athletic girl to a shy, overweight adolescent. Svendsen cites a variety of influences: the film "28 Up," the British documentary that follows the lives of a cross section of people from age 7 on; the stories of John Cheever; John Updike's collection "Too Far to Go," in which a couple's relationship is traced from early marriage to divorce. "I felt I had to go somewhere in the book," Svendsen said.

"I wanted a feeling of progression. I look at relationships and who your demons are. If you know your demons, you can make something stronger." Besides the characters, what links these stories is the image of water, flowing around and sometimes over this family. In "Klin-gons," it offers protection: young Adele and her stepsister go to the beach and immerse themselves, womblike, in the sea. In the title story, it means a lot of things, as a pregnant Adele watches her aging mother take a swimming NEW YORK (AP) Now that Linda Svendsen has finished her first collection of stories, she's eager to read a good book by some-one else.

"It's like a sense of going through life with other people, a way of saying, 'I know how you the Canadian author explained. "In a way, sitting down with a like sitting down with a friend. I don't think it's an escape at all. I think it's really a connection." For would-be page pals, Svendsen offers "Marine Life," eight interlinked stories about a working-class Vancouver family that begins in the 1950s and leads up to the present. The book runs 165 pages, just a couple ofhours of reading time, the equivalent of a nice, long phone call.

Before digging in, however, be advised: Svendsen is the kind of friend who likes to tell you her troubles. (The cover provides a clue: a woman lying stiff as a corpse on a diving board). You will read about illness and divorce, a teen-ager's suicide, a wife beaten black and blue, an incident in which a woman applies a vacuum cleaner to a bird cage. "I wasn't thinking anyone was going to read it other than the people in the workshop," said the author, who began working on "Marine Life" in the 1970s as a writing student at Columbia University. "I was 20 at the time and far away from home.

I was thinking about the work, to do a story, looking for where I was still carrying sadness. "But I actually like a happy ending. I did a film adaptation awhile ago, and there was a divorced couple and I brought them back together at end of it, and it wasn't supposed to be that way." Like the book's narrator, Adele, she was born in 1954 in Vancouver, where she still lives. Her parents divorced, just as they do in the book, and the author has three older half siblings. Like Adele, Svendsen herself is divorced.

But she insisted "Marine Life" paints a far more negative picture than what really happened. No one in her family has committed suicide. Unlike in the book, her two half sisters are both happily married. While the first story, "Who He Slept By," depicts Adele's half brother as an alcoholic incapable of maintaining a job or a relationship, Svendsen says imagination was her primary source. "I was thinking about things that happened with my brother, but as things went along they changed quite a bit," she said.

"If you just write what happened, it's interesting, but you could call it a "As I was sitting, I saw a fool coming, "He came dragging his coat on the ground "And his trousers were made of khaki. "I said to him, Tool, where do you come "He replied, 'I am your "I gave the dog a chair and his tail hung down." On a recent morning over a mug of instant coffee at her north London house, Busby said she was partly attracted to the project because it'didn't exist. "There are plenty of anthologies but they are divided regionally, like African, Caribbean collections, or by genre, like fiction or poetry. I wanted to do everything in one book." APPhoto Linda Svendsen memoir. In this case, it's like a big collage.

A lot of people said, 'Did someone vacuum a Someone vacuumed a bird, but it wasn't someone in the family." With the same curiosity a person might spot a child on a train and wonder how he would look as an old man, Svendsen considers the passage of time and the way LONDON (AP) As editor of "Daughters of Africa," Margaret Busby's goal was to assemble an inclusive anthology that she wahted to read. It wasn't aimed at being an academic book," she said. "It was meant to be a useful book. But it will probably be used by academics, but also read by ordinary people. I hope they will be able to find things to enjoy." The handsome book, arranged chronologically, begins with traditional African poems, which were passed orally from mother to child, such as this one from the Kgatla tribe in Botswana: "I heard it said that I was betrothed "And one afternoon when I was at home, Horoscope I nUlll V.LUD DINNER SPECIAL T-Bones I20z I fifty.

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