The stories in Sarah Klassen’s second collection occur at intersections: between youth and age, and between rich and poor in both body and spirit. The longing of the title is often fused with grief. In stories that trace a direct line of descent from Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss,” Klassen’s characters suffer life’s small, cruel diminishments. Elsewhere she takes on sharper, more violent emotions, the agonies of loss.
Desperate for connection and trying to fill a hollowness within, these men and women turn to serving others. A grief-numbed young man teaches English in a language school; a student reluctantly befriends a girl with Down’s syndrome; a teenager feeds a woman in a nursing home. But those on the receiving end seldom accept charity with humility. Relentless, they demand what they need – money, sex, significance. Few good deeds go unpunished: a timid volunteer is bullied at a bus stop, a young girl accepts rape as her due for her naïveté.
Klassen’s settings frequently fall within her hometown of Winnipeg, but she ranges as far as Eastern Europe. In several stories she employs a stylized anonymity for her characters: “the mother,” “the daughter,” “the couple at the rear of the bus.” The distance this creates is less effective than the intimate engagement Klassen achieves elsewhere.
These 14 stories are carefully constructed and meticulously observed. Over and over the image of a church appears, a surviving relic of an earlier time. Though the explicit Christian context may be lost, spiritual thirst persists. Klassen’s people continue to hunger for the grace and meaning such institutions once supplied – a meaning, Klassen tells us, that has everything to do with love.
