Blue Sunflower Startle

By Yasmin Ladha

In the early 1960s, a young girl and her brother move to their grandparents’ flourmill in Dodoma in newly-independent Tanzania. Her grandfather bellows his love for East Africa, where he and other Indian merchants have thrived. But the ground is shifting. President Nyerere is calling for the widespread nationalization of property. The hum of the mill has quieted. The young girl prays at the jamatkhana and spends evenings at the cinema watching cowboy films—grief and grievances, if only momentarily, disappear. Years later, the girl and her family immigrate to Calgary, Alberta and she begins a love affair with the prairies. Wary that her grandfather’s passion for his country consumed him, she is unwilling to settle for geographical monogamy. She travels to Chonju, South Korea to work as a language teacher, and Delhi, India for trysts with her Kashmiri lover. Frequently, she is startled by the appearance of things that remind her of the prairies, but show up in other countries. She aches for a home that beckons her return: the Canadian West, the hero that pulls a U-turn for its beloved. Yasmin Ladha offers readers an exquisite exploration of the ways in which one can love a country. Written in unusual, intoxicating, and poetic prose, Blue Sunflower Startle is a modern day Romance for frequent travellers and nomadic spirits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freehand Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781770480339

Yasmin Ladha

Yasmin Ladha is a Canadian fiction writer, currently working in Muscat, Oman. She completed her BA and MA in English at the University of Calgary. Her published works include the collection of short stories, Lion’s Granddaughter and Other Stories (NeWest Press, 1992); the chapbook Bridal Hands on the Maple (Second Wednesday Press, 1992); and Women Dancing on Rooftops: Bring your Belly Close, a book of short stories, documentary-fiction, personal essays and poetry (TSAR, 1997).

Reviews for Blue Sunflower Startle

[fiverivers_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It would be egregiously erroneous to fail to recognize Greg Bechtel's accomplished writing. There is no question he understands the nuance of language. His work is witty, clever, targeted for an audience looking for literature rather than escapism.Yet in this collection of short stories one has the feeling of being the stranger at a gathering of a closed order of colleagues, all sharing clever inside jokes. This exclusion of the reader reaches an uncomfortable crescendo in the trilogy of writings entitled the Smut Stories which are placed in reverse order without apparent cohesion throughout the collection. There is definitely an homage in the stories to award-winning author, Candas Jane Dorsey (Black Wine and Paradigm of Earth). There is a definite attempt to examine the concept 'being one's own pornographer'. But the entire triad remains inaccessible and irrelevant to any but those involved in that inner circle.As to the remainder of the stories in the collection, while clever, there is little by way of character or background development to snag a reader, and so despite Bechtel's attempt to illuminate the social construct around sex and sexuality, the stories, for the most part, run too deeply to the academic to elicit any emotional response.However, as I've constantly stated, art is subjective. I would by no means dissuade a person from reading this ambitious collection, for what to one is opaque, to another may be visionary.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Greg Bechtel’s narratives (some are more or less stories) sometimes feel intensely real, gritty, and typically dark. At other times they move slightly beyond the obvious, eclipsing the uncanny and heading right on over into surreal territory. But they somehow also come back to the rough ground. Whether he is walking us through the various strata of modern physics, or detailing life as car seventy-one in a Fredericton taxis service, or learning life lessons as a camp counsellor in Algonquin Park, or delivering advertising flyers under an assumed name, Bechtel’s descriptive and emotional language feels entirely earned. As though these might all be transcriptions from life. Or, more probably, so thoroughly written that nothing but the real remains. I was completely convinced.Not surprisingly for a first story collection, the writing seems to test out different modes. The three iterations of “The Smut Story” have the clinical zeal of David Foster Wallace. Whereas “Blackbird Shuffle” edges into the macabre and feels a bit like Neil Gaiman. More typically, Bechtel’s narrator is a slightly distanced observer even of himself, as in the bildungsroman-like “Boundary Problems” or the lengthy and meandering “The Everett-Wheeler Hypothesis”. Bechtel uses this technique as well to surprisingly good effect in “The Mysterious East (Fredericton, NB)”. And this one nicely dovetails his knack for writing the bones of employment (here as a taxi driver) with the tentative suspicion of the quasi-mystical. It is fascinating.I purchased this collection on a whim without previous knowledge of the author’s work. I’m glad I took a chance. Gently recommended.