Dressing Up for the Carnival - Hardcover

This is the third short story collection from the prize-winning Canadian novelist Carol Shields. It is neatly enwrapped by two stories involving clothes: the title story, in which a cast of characters stride out into the day and "Dressing Down" about a nudist whose wife enjoys the comfort of layers. In "Dressing for the Carnival", a delightfully anti-climactic tale, Tamara dresses in yellow, without checking the weather, for "her clothes are the weather, as powerful in their sunniness as the strong, muzzy early morning light." Only X, an anonymous middle-aged man, stays indoors, dancing in his wife's nightie and watching "cycles of consolation and enhancement" from afar.

In "Dressing Down", the vigorous nudist and his wife separate and the story captures her final poignant gesture towards amends. In the hilarious "Invention", a husband is left behind when his wife finds fame after inventing the steering wheel muff and the narrator traces an ancestral line of inventors including a shepherd who discovered day-dreaming and others who developed the hyphen, word space and full-stop. This story brings together the main concerns of this collection: the investigation of long-term intimacies of people who inhabit "parallel weather systems" and a self-conscious teasing of the short story form. In "A Scarf", a failed writer who's eschewed "beginnings, middles and ends" for a feminist structure ends up removing her navel by plastic surgery after an unkind remark by her husband. Her friend fails to articulate the truth about a misunderstanding and realises that not one woman in her life "was going to get what we wanted..." and remained "too kind ... not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want." In "Ilk", a polished and wry spoof on academic musings about "buds of narrativity", a young untenured professor wonders where she stands on "narrative enclosures". A jammed vowel key in "Absence", forces the writer to complete the story without the use of this letter and creates a clever literary pun. One of the best stories is "Windows", in which two artists struggle against a new government tax on glass and have to paint in artificial light until they resolve their light-less gloom through art itself.

A provocative, tricky and often serious collection which asks profound questions of short fiction and love's mechanisms for survival.--Cherry Smyth

‘There are few writers currently at work who display such steely control of their material, such seemingly effortless range and variety.’ Alex Clark, Guardian

‘Shields is about the best we have, she does not just express what oft was thought; she snags the shadows of those thoughts, the thoughts we did not know we had. The effect – at once elating and visceral – feels like a conjurer pulling a handkerchief from your heart.’ Daily Telegraph

‘Her perceptions are so quick, her style is so acute, that she can tack a breath to the page and skewer a thought on the wing. It is her speciality to isolate moments that, because of some sensuous overkill they possess, remaining distinct in the mind for years, perhaps for a lifetime.’ Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times

‘It is the breadth of Carol Shields’ human sympathy that marks her out as a special writer. That breadth is gloriously evident in “Dressing Up for the Carnival”. Whether she is playing the clown or offering poignant reflections on the fragility of happiness, Shields writes with a grace and lucidity that few of her contemporaries can match.’ Sunday Telegraph