![]() ![]() How Should a Person Be? was turned down by Heti's U.S. In truth, Heti resistance was never exclusively Canadian. Besides, she asks, "Who expects to be loved at home?" "That didn't happen at all here."īut that doesn't bother Heti. "Even though the book was published here first, the response – the real chorus – came first from the States," she says. Rejected by literary journals across Canada, her first stories found print in McSweeney's out of San Francisco, beginning the pattern that recurred a decade later with How Should a Person Be?, her second novel. Munro's question reverberates even in the publication history of Heti's poppish, "pseudo-autobiographical" anti-novel – greeted with skepticism, and quickly forgotten, when first published in Canada almost three years ago hailed as a major achievement by top taste makers upon publication in New York one year ago. ![]() But the quirky "novel from life" that has brought her international renown over the past year, How Should a Person Be?, is in some ways a direct, albeit facetious answer. Thus, Canada's latest literary shooting star, Sheila Heti, agrees that grand dowager Alice Munro chose "the perfect Canadian title" for a collection of stories first published in 1978, when Munro was a shooting star and Heti an infant: Who Do You Think You Are? Nobody has ever come right out and asked Heti that question. The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and CanLit fulfills itself in many ways. Update: Sheila Heti has posted a thoughtful response to this article. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |