Alistair MacLeod: a man of musicality of language

A week ago, on a slightly rainy Sunday evening, the sad news broke that the great Canadian writer, Alistair MacLeod, had died.

Alistair came onto the radar of most serious readers in 2001 when his only novel, No Great Mischief, a quietly towering, multi-generational treatise on tradition and family ties, won the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. By then, though, he was already one of my small obsessions, had been from the day, several years earlier, I happened across a collection of his short stories while browsing the shelves of the city library.

It was the title, a six-word poem: As Birds Bring Forth The Sun, that knocked the breath from my body. Knowing nothing about its author, I sat, started to read, and happily lost an entire afternoon of my life. Then I took the book home and read it again and again, peeling back layers, pouring over the seamless sentences and losing myself within their rhythms. Two qualities stood out: a sense of place that was absolute, and an utterly authentic voice. No one can read Alistair MacLeod’s stories and not believe them.