The comeback kid -- the phenom whose prowess at bat and in life faltered, who famously recovers his potential at a critical moment to take his team to the top -- is a well-known baseball archetype.
At age 76, B.C.-based W.P. Kinsella is probably too old to be called a kid. But he has made a phenomenal comeback in his first novel since a car accident in 1997 impaired his ability to concentrate. The author of 1982's Shoeless Joe, which American actor Kevin Costner turned into the Hollywood hit Field of Dreams, Kinsella continues to give his treasured sport credibility in the literary world.
Baseball and butterflies converge in this fabulist magical-realist story, set in the mythic country of Courteguay, 'a tiny landlocked country nestled like a snail between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in the shape of the moon of a fingernail, and not much larger.'
Crafted from two short stories Kinsella wrote in the 1980s, Butterfly Winter makes for a quirky, captivating read.
As in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, it's important to keep track of the changing situation. Kinsella creates unique characters that die and rise again; his unreliable and manipulative narrator is a shape-shifting wizard with a taste for flashy capes.
Life in beautiful Courteguay is pleasant, but not dull. Baseball is the national obsession, such that prospective brides must prove they can play passably before the wedding can be held.
Born are a set of twins who remember playing catch in the womb. Julio and Estaban Pimental sleep opposite to each other in the crib -- Julio with his arm stretched in a sidearm curve, Estaban curled in a permanent catcher's crouch.
Julio is unbeatable, but he can only pitch to his mediocre brother, and the greedy big leagues snap them up while they are still small children. Kinsella uses their tenure there to comment on the racism the 'cinnamon' Central Americans experience in baseball despite their talent and numbers, and the convenient way born-again Christians interpret religion to rationalize infidelity, among other hypocrisies.
Although the story is full of humour, satire and irony, it also mirrors the history of Central America and the succession of tinpot dictators the U.S. helped install there for 100 years. The political sickness that plagued Central America infests the paradise of Courteguay, too, with similar violent, cruel results at the hands of a former chiropractor.
The battle to restore the balance of good over evil challenges the strategies and skills Julio and Estaban learned on the diamond; love adds further complications. It's like a baseball game -- unpredictable and heart-wrenching.
The narrative weaves back and forth in time; short chapters alternate mostly between the recollections of the lying Wizard and a gullible Gringo Journalist.
The journalist can't seem to sort the magical from the real, a task made especially difficult because of surprising plot twists.
While best known for his baseball stories, Kinsella's long list of credits includes moving Prairie novels (Box Socials, The Winter Helen Dropped By), poems and short story collections set on the First Nations community in Hobbema, Alta., Dance Me Outside, The Fencepost Chronicles and The Miss Hobbema Pageant, among others.
Now plagued by health problems, Kinsella has nevertheless regained his creativity, his sharp edge and writing prowess.
Published by the literary imprint of Winnipeg's Great Plains Publications, Butterfly Winter is a welcome return for one of Canada's most prolific and masterful writers, who reportedly finished another book this past summer.
Reading Kinsella, as the Wizard describes baseball, is like spending 'an afternoon beside a clear brook, birds singing, sun shining, flowers blooming.' Who could ask for more?
Harriet Zaidman is a teacher-librarian in Winnipeg.
Butterfly Winter
By W.P. Kinsella
Enfield and Wizenty, 300 pages, $30
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