Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

by Mark Anthony Jarman

Shortlisted, Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction, New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction, and Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award One of Canada's literary treasures, Mark Anthony Jarman returns with a book of moving and often funny tales of a man's quest for himself. A.S. Byatt says that his writing is "extraordinary, his stories gripping," and in this gorgeous new collection, Jarman delivers something new once again. In Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, Jarman writes about losing and finding love, marriage and melancholy, the dislocation and redemptive power of travel in Italy's sensual summer. A man travels to Italy to escape the memory of love lost, and a marriage ended. He passes through sun-drenched landscapes of cliffs and seaside paradises, while the corpses of refugees wash up on the beach; he parties with the young and beautiful Italians he meets on the train while a man bleeds to death in the hallway. A teenage thief prowls the roof of the tourist hotel at night; an embassy is bombed; holy statues come alive to roam in a gang stealing used restaurant grease. He suffers the acute loneliness of one who has abandoned and been abandoned, and in this exquisite suffering, he finds how beautiful this life can be. In vivid, sensuous prose, Jarman's stories circle and overlap in surprising, weird, and wonderful ways. Tangents turn out to be crucial, allusions are powerful.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Canada

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 3, 2015

About the author

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, My White Planet, 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. His novel, Salvage King Ya!, is on Amazon.ca’s list of 50 Essential Canadian Books and is the number one book on Amazon’s list of best hockey fiction.

He has won a Gold National Magazine Award in nonfiction, has twice won the Maclean-Hunter Endowment Award, won the Jack Hodgins Fiction Prize, and has been included in The Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories and short-listed for the O. Henry Prize and Best American Essays.

He has published in Walrus, Canadian Geographic, Hobart, The Barcelona Review, Vrij Nederland, and reviews for The Globe & Mail. He is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Yaddo fellow, has taught at the University of Victoria, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and now teaches at the University of New Brunswick, where he is fiction editor of The Fiddlehead literary journal.

A.S. BYATT on Mark Jarman:

At last. It is very irritating to discover a wonderful book published too long ago to be an official "book of the year". I was talking to a German friend, a few years ago, and we were trying to think of the greatest short story ever. We agreed enthusiastically that it was Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle". Martin then said reflectively, "Unless it is 'Burn Man on a Texas Porch'." I had never heard of that, nor of its author, Mark Anthony Jarman, a Canadian. (Canadians specialise in great short stories - Munro, Atwood.) Jarman's collection is called 19 Knives, and it is brilliant. The writing is extraordinary, the stories are gripping, it is something new. And now I can say so.

—The Guardian, November 24, 2007

Reviews

[James Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A man, let’s call him Adam (since one of the stories in this collection is called Adam and Eve Saved from Drowning, and Eve is the name of his cousin and sometime traveling companion) is trying to escape his past: a failed marriage, children grown and out of the house, and the beautiful woman that he left his wife for suddenly departs his life. Might as well go to Italy for the summer where he sweats it out, escapes a knife party (knives figures prominently throughout the book), gets drunk, takes drugs, considers becoming the next Pope and falls in love with his pretty cousin Eve. Among other things.
In a book that is reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary you will see Italy (primarily Rome and Pompeii) in a special, magical kind of travelogue while our man wrestles with his past and stumbles through the present: "I consume Italy and Italy consumes me, devours me like a woman. I love it, love the wild sea and crazy cliffs and hilltop vistas and then the smudged slums on the horizon like magic, spires vibrating over the rails like a charcoal etching and we step off the train into the tremors and treasures of each Italian city."
This book is full of such inspired thoughts and Jarman is a master at putting words on a page like a jazz musician fills the air with myriad notes for your interpretation. Five stars for a very special book, one that is definitely on my to-reread shelf.

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite a novel, but stories inhabited by the same characters, the sardonic panthiest narrator and his thwarted loves, the lost Natasha and his cousin Eve are sublimated in Irina, the Croatian cleaning lady working in one of the hotels in Italy. The reader can be forgiven for any confusion and blame it on the narrator, who seems to be in flight from a cold winter in Eastern Canada and an amicable divorce in which he has abdicated his past life and possessions.
MAJ is so deft in his interweavings and lavish with intricate detail that it is easy to overlook the stream of consciousness that manifests as running commentary, interrupted; insight surfacing and going underground in a circular journey.

I fell asleep last night on the verge of finishing this. It seems to me in all fairness, and as much delight as I found in the reading, that the Italian sections are far more vivid than the Canadian scenes. Bc and in particular Vancouver are mentioned more than New Brunswick. The sense of place that I was searching for is conjured more in opposition: cold, dim, frozen against the (mostly) endlessly blue sky and all embracing Italian sun.
I am thinking that it isn't fairly representative of NB, although the humour must be.

We are not always pleasant but we all have our tiny hopes. p203

[Michael Bryson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to call this short stories, but it seems often like a novel.

Here's a recommendation you're unlikely to get anywhere else: read this back to back with Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi.

This book gutted me, and also reminded me of the dense diversity of living.

On the surface, a story of a Canadian who has been dumped by his girlfriend (and his wife), who is living as an ex-pat in Italy (seems more than a visit). Italy is sense-dense and Jarman fills all spaces with language up to the challenge (as usual).

So much is on display here, it's impossible to summarize, though the key line may be: "Youth is wasted on the wasted." During a visit to the Sistine Chapel, the hung-over youth in tow and looking at the floor and their phones.

Don't do the same with this book!

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I first began to read these stories about a man heading to Europe after having been dumped by his girlfriend and divorced by his wife...I really wasn't into it but I kept going.

This book is a combination of short stories that all fit together...so it some ways it becomes a novel.

I thought that most of the stories were a little repetitive. They all seemed to follow the same path. I'm not saying that the writing was poor (it was actually amazing), it's just that it was a little predictable a few stories in.

It also didn't help that I didn't enjoy the narrator of the stories. He was well written but I began to dislike his personality more and more as I continued to read through the stories.

This was a Goodreads Giveaway.

[Ryan Lottermoser · Rating 1 out of 5]

Easily the worst book I have ever read.

[John Hanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knife Party at the Hotel Europa is a bearable overdose of literary style and technique, the modern short story form in the purest sense. It dabs metaphor, image, and theme on you like a Neiman Marcus perfume purveyor trying to sell you that bottle of Clive Christian, working you up with the faults of Atelier and Bottega Veneta. They are all beyond your palette, and you merely nod and mutter, a shooting duck ready and willing to have your wallet or purse lifted. When you get home, the last thing you want to do is sniff that $500 crap. This collection is like taking a bath in it.

My main complaint is the character. He is narcissistic and solipsistic. Early in the stories I felt I was reading of Updike’s Dick Maple, a loathsome womanizer. The world revolves around him, and though he can navigate foreign streets as a tourist without being mugged or lifted of his money, he cannot find a keeper of a woman. I found a disconnect between the voices, the creator of this fantastic prose and this womanizing knuckle-dragger. How can a person have such deep thoughts and be such a loser?

These stories are character driven. Even the plot-heavy ones are weighed down in reflection, theme, imagery, repetition, and subtle conflict. Jarman fills us so thoroughly, that after a dozen pages you’ve lost all touch with the real world. You need devoted time and space to consume this book; 15-20 pages was a good day for me. It is probably a book one needs to read more than twice.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite paragraphs:

God is irritable, God recently gave up cigarettes. At our subway stop I let Eve and Tamika step out first, and the doors close hard on my arms as I step out. Why do the subway doors attack me when I am so chivalrous? Perhaps the gears and sensors know something of my true nature, gods alive in our machines and devices. I must have offended the elders of the internet, a major disappointment to YouTube. I need to learn to love technology, must dab data on me like cologne from a dollar store.

[Mary Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this a chapter at a time to prolong the magic of his writing. His writing is filled with poetic imagery, told with philosophical angst and existential wonder. The compassion of the narrative shines, despite his self-centred navel gazing, in his interaction with refugees and workers in the hotels and restaurants that he frequents. His is a mix of Buddhist resignation to life's woes and vicissitudes and child like wonder at the magic in the world.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Evocative of time and place. But each story felt kind of the same.

[Kees Kapteyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily the best writing Jarman has done since Salvage King,Ya! It has that glorious mix of introspection with a breadth of vision, along with that lyrical, poetic narrative voice that makes Jarman such a treat to read. Against the backdrop of the Italian urban landscape, his main character soaks up his experiences for all they're worth, bitter, sour or sweet and logs them in as a rambling travelogue, definitive and inconclusive all at once. Ranks as one of my favourite books now of all time.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Characters 4 stars
Plot 3 stars
Style 5 stars

Jarman was my writing professor and he is awesome but the story lacks spark! It's hard to care! Could have been awesome but misses the mark but still worth reading !!

[Lee Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Review online at Numero Cinq Magazine: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2015/05...

[Justine Teplycky · Rating 1 out of 5]

Check out my review: http://www.newstalk1010.com/blog/just...