We Have Never Lived On Earth

by Kasia Van Schaik

Kasia Van Schaik's debut story collection follows the journey of Charlotte Ferrier, a child of divorce raised by a single mother in a small town in British Columbia after moving from South Africa. Mother and daughter wait out the end of a bad year in a Mexican hotel; a friendship is tested as forest fires demolish Charlotte's town; a childhood friend disappears while travelling through Europe; and a girl on the beach examines the memories of dying jellyfish. The stories traverse the most intimate and transforming moments of female experience in a world threatened by ecological crisis. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2023.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Canada

184 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2022

Reviews

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

We’ve never lived on earth. I point this out to him as the bus veers up the street. In the world we’re creating together, no animals exist, no seasons either. We live eight storeys up and never touch soil. We follow highways not rivers. We name our heat waves after our grandmothers. We pretend our pain is weather. We dream of houses we’ll never own. Of second homes, seventy minutes out of the city. Of well-lit rooms and comfortable chairs, of gardens, but never children. ~We Have Never Lived on Earth

Longlisted for the 2023 Giller Prize, We Have Never Lived on Earth is a series of related short stories that add up to something like a novel. Mostly told from the POV of Charlotte — the older of two girls brought from South Africa to the interior of British Columbia by their newly single mother, their dad having been left behind — these stories start off pretty slowly (mostly straightforward [what reads as autofictional] tales of an immigrant childhood), but as they go along, some of the later stories are more abstract and literary. These do add up to something all together, but as short stories (apparently, mostly previously published elsewhere), I’m left thinking they wouldn’t be very satisfying individually. Probably three and a half stars overall, not leaning towards rounding up.

Lukas said that he imagined that the moon would be a lot like Antarctica, a place he planned to travel to. It would be remote and cold, but life was certainly possible with the right equipment. If I lived there, on the moon, he meant, he promised to visit. Only if I invite you, I said. ~How to be Silent in German

After the upheaval of immigrating and a fractious teenaged relationship with her mother, Charlotte’s stories are mostly about leaving home and travelling around the world: working and writing in Germany and Crete and Amsterdam; writing a book on women artists because, as her partner Lukas accuses, she’s not brave enough to make her own art. I liked the one story from Charlotte’s father’s POV (set just after his separation from his wife and just as he learns she plans to take his kids away to Canada), and I liked the final story with a later in life visit between Charlotte and her mom, but some of the early stories set in small town B.C. were less interesting. Even the writing early on didn’t seem promising, as in House on Carbonate, about Charlotte meeting the boy with whom she’ll have her first kiss:

Kent and his friends Jake and Roy joined us and we continued south together, like the monarchs, finding security in numbers. We stopped at the 7-Eleven to buy Fuzzy Peaches and Twizzlers, which allowed me to get a better look at Kent. He was tall and thin in the effortless way of adolescent boys and supermodels. Though — Lucia often reminded me — supermodels live on diets of Coke Zero and iceberg lettuce to maintain their birdbath collarbones; teenage boys do not. His thick hair slid over his eyes making my aorta cancel all blood circulation to my head.

If the immaturity of that voice is meant to reflect Charlotte’s age at the time, it really only works as a part of this collection, where you can watch the character grow and change; on its own, it felt unaccomplished; I was never unaware I was reading a collection of short stories and considering them individually. In a later story, Cellular Memory, Charlotte makes reference to many details that occur over the course of this collection:

What have you lost?

People mostly, I tell him. Not just my parents, who are both alive, on separate continents; or Lukas, who is alive but no longer writes; not just friends, who, at one point, occupied large quadrants of my attention but now don’t seem to matter anymore. Like a film projected on water, they waver and disappear. It’s not just lovers, either, with their seed bank of memories, or the woman, sleeping in her toy tent on some lifeguard-less beach, or in her houseboat, alone, or the toddler at the train station in Montreal, or the injured octopus…

And it’s the callback details in these later stories that make this feel something like a novel, but again, I think only a few of the stories really stand on their own. I found that distracting, and in the end, while this does add up to the story of one woman's rootless life, there's neither anything particularly personal shared about her experiences or anything universal to be learned from her (so what's the point?). Good, not great.

[Penny (Literary Hoarders) · Rating 3 out of 5]

....this year is the 30th anniversary of the Giller Prize. I would have assumed something a little splashier or honorary perhaps to mark this year's Longlist (announced on September 6, 2023). Instead, it feels limp and lacklustre. We Have Never Lived on Earth confirms that feeling for me. I felt these stories lacked sophistication and failed to feel any sort of specialness towards them.

This is my first read from the Longlist, I own one from the list and have many others coming in from the library. Let's hope my enthusiasm for this year's Prize nominees climbs as I read through the other finalists.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning--it starts in a sort of quiet, unassuming way (a set of small vignettes about a girlhood) and becomes more and more haunting and strange, surreal and dream-like with distinct feminist themes. Highly recommend.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

A solid collection of connected short stories with one very strong offering and several slighter ones that felt like vignettes.

[Bel]

I'm glad I stuck with this one. The beginning stories were underwhelming, and I almost gave up after two in a row in the middle that were not good. But the last third was good, and I quite liked the story "Swimming Upright," and the one with the houseboat.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kasia Van Schaik’s remarkable debut collection of short fiction is narrated primarily by Charlotte Ferrier, a high school student when we meet her, living with her divorced mother and younger sister, Nina, in a small town in British Columbia’s mountainous interior. Charlotte’s mother Willo has brought her daughters to Canada from South Africa, having separated from her husband years earlier, and as we progress through the stories and through Charlotte’s life, we see how Charlotte, attracted by distances and driven by her restless nature, adopts an itinerant, unstructured lifestyle, flitting from place to place, settling nowhere for long. The first story, “How Will You Prepare for Happiness?” sets a tone for the collection. Charlotte—17 years old—has found part-time work cleaning house for the Salloways, husband and wife both successful cognitive psychologists, parents of Miranda, a classmate of Charlotte’s. It is Grace Salloway (an “expert in childhood happiness”) who puts the question to Charlotte—How will you prepare for happiness? But Charlotte already knows what her future holds: earlier in the story she has told us that by the time Nina starts high school, “I secretly planned to be gone. In a sudden vanishing, a sudden peeling away, I would erase myself from this particular town’s map in the interior of the province.” In “Premium Girl” it is Charlotte’s last summer at home when a forest fire encroaches on the town, ultimately leading to an evacuation and another erasure as the town is consumed by fire. And in “The Peninsula of Happiness,” Charlotte accompanies Willo to a resort in Mexico—a chance for mother and daughter to reconcile differences. But the story culminates with Charlotte assaulted while making her way back to their room—alone, in the dark—after being abandoned by her drunken mother in a salsa club. Throughout the volume, Van Schaik subtly interweaves Charlotte’s past and present, occasionally blurring the lines. “A Girl Called Helsinki” takes place a few years after Charlotte has left home. During a return to BC to visit Nina she encounters Charlie, Miranda’s younger brother, who has been transformed by his sister’s death. After learning the story of what happened, Charlotte observes, “I didn’t recognize where I was. Or what season it was. What year.” The mood of the collection is various, mingling wonder, melancholy and regret. Behind everything lurks a haunted feeling of simultaneously missing the past and being relieved it’s done with and gone. Charlotte’s journey ends with “An Ounce of Care” (shortlisted for the CBC short story prize) which describes a visit to her mother, an encounter filled with tension, but also companionable, that leaves Charlotte declaring, almost in defiance, “Death holds no interest for me.” We Have Never Lived on Earth—ruminative, poignant, elegiac—is a vividly observed voyage through the life and memories of a young woman who struggles with questions about the world and her place in it. A dazzling first book by a writer worth watching.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a wonderful interconnected short story collection! This is definitely the type of book that needs to be binge read. I feel like I need to go back and reread a few of these stories for sure. Beautiful writing!

[Laurie Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have had “We Have Never Lived on Earth” by Kasia Van Schaik on my to be read shelf for a few months now, on no fault of its own. The unassuming thin volume just didn’t jump out at me. But don’t let that fool you! Once the book was listed on the long list for the @gillerprize I made a point to read it. And I am glad I did! This short story collection is all interconnected around Charlotte, a lonely woman of South Africa heritage who immigrated to Canada while she was a teenager. These snippets take her through many times and places and is a beautiful, moving piece on loneliness and belonging. And it has gorgeous writing to boot! Published by the University of Alberta Press.

[Jacquelyn D'Eall Sundberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stories and prose that stay with you, long after the covers close.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked it overall! Some of the chapters hit more than others, and I think I appreciated the latter half of the book. Thought the idea of telling someone's story through a bunch of disconnected chapters was interesting and unique.

[Hollo Vest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning stunning stunning. We follow Charlotte as she grows up, loves, fractures, and remakes herself, not an easy feat when the world is burning. Characters often bring up icebergs in casual conversation and we, the readers, are certain they are melting, in Charlotte’s world as well as ours. The clock is cyclical and therefore misleading; what happens after the bath water turns cold, after the wrinkles around our eyes become hard and final, after there is no more iceberg under the ocean’s waterline left for us to use as metaphor? « Time has run out. Time has run out. »

Van Schaik’s disorientation of Charlotte’s environment is astute: the wind is dry but there is liquid in it; there is a vast emptiness beneath Charlotte’s apartment balcony; raindrops push shadows across windowpanes instead of drag them. One could say there’s a « climate weirding » at the level of the prose. We Have Never Lived on Earth is an example of how to narrate our ecologically confounding present, how to speculate about the climate in our not-so-distant future. And Van Schaik does so beautifully.

[Jane Mulkewich · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was on the Giller long list this year, and my first reaction while partway through reading the book is that I was surprised it did not make it to the short list, as I enjoyed the writing. The book is actually a series of short stories but after a story or two the reader slowly begins to realize that these are all the same person's story... so it is like a novel, but told in a series of vignettes or pieces of a life that altogether make something like a whole. I was tempted to grab a notepad and start mapping out the connections between the stories more closely, but instead I just allowed myself to be immersed in the writing and get carried along with the flow. We follow the protagonist and her sister from their childhood days in British Columbia (with roots in South Africa), to various travels and sojourns in Europe and through relationships where we wonder about her mental health, to an ending that is a reunification with her mother. I think I will have to re-read this book to write a better review. The title comes from this passage: "We’ve never lived on earth. I point this out to him as the bus veers up the street. In the world we’re creating together, no animals exist, no seasons either. We live eight storeys up and never touch soil. We follow highways not rivers. We name our heat waves after our grandmothers. We pretend our pain is weather. We dream of houses we’ll never own. Of second homes, seventy minutes out of the city. Of well-lit rooms and comfortable chairs, of gardens, but never children".

[Wanda Baxter · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excerpt from my review for The Miramichi Reader:

"What makes We Have Never Lived On Earth stand out most, is how the collection of linked though disconnected stories feels as rewarding as a novel. The stories are complete on their own, but read together they tell a story of a life – the pieces of a life that reveal her the most."

Van Schaik is a writer to watch, and to read. I can't wait to read what she writes next.

https://miramichireader.ca/2023/03/we...

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed We Have Never Lived on Earth by Kasia Van Schaik! These are great stories! I listened to the audiobook narrated by Marysia Bucholc and she did a great job. I loved how the first story made me laugh. The humour was unexpected. I loved the Canadian setting. It’s interesting that these stories all are told from the same point of view the protagonist Charlotte as she grows up. This is a strong debut collection and I’d be interested to read more from this author.

Thank you to University of Alberta Press and ECW Audio via NetGalley for me ALC!

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Describing this book is a bit of a challenge. A series of vignettes about a young, and later not so young, woman. Her relationships with her parents (divorced and living on different continents), various friends and lovers. Her wanderings and instabilities. The writing is somewhat airy and poetic, and depressing. It feels like a memoir but you can never be sure.

[Ginny · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poetic prose is very moving at times, but oh so sad. If you are not depressed already, you will be by the time you finish these stories. The narrator has no humour in her at all. Once in a while I did find the pathos so extreme that it was funny, but I don't think that was the intention.

[Mel]

Not sure about anything that was going on here. Are we in the present or future? Is this a novel or anthology? Is it Zombies or a disease? Actually, it wasn’t even interesting enough to ponder to ponder the last one.

[Roxanne Bedard-Saucier · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5*

[Anick Berger · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for school

[Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75⭐

[Poptart19 (the name’s ren) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, RTC

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Elizabeth D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, this book presents a number of short glimpses into the life of the main character Beatrice at different moments from her life.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good short story debut.

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought it started out great but the last third of the book turned too abstract for my tastes.

[Ivy T]

⁰

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these stories are excellent, and a few of the sentences are wonderful alive.

[Cara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads like poetry with a deep sense of melancholy and searching for what she needs in life.

[Mystic Faerie ✨️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5⭐, rounded up)

[Carter Elise Key · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded up

rtc; read for short story collection presentation in Professor Courtney Sender's Advanced Fiction Workshop @ Seton Hall University