Every Night I Dream I Am A Monk, Every Night I Dream I Am A Monster by Damian Tarnopolsky

Review by Emily Weedon

I really wasn’t sure how I felt about Damian’s Tarnopolsky’s book Every Night I Dream I Am A Monk, Every Night I Dream I Am A Monster at first. Something in the cadence didn’t click with the gears in my head, and it starts with that rambling title, which sets the reader for stories not told in a quotidian manner. Almost halfway through the book I hit on one of the things that was tripping me up. There is barely a sentence Tarnopolsky writes that finishes the way I expect it to. In conversation, Tarnopolsky remarked to me that he likes writing that slaps him around a bit. The author set out to write something a bit jarring, a bit of a slap, and is successful in this and much more.

The exercise of this review got me thinking about questions of taste, likability, palatability. I felt I had to admit to Tarnopolsky for example, that try as I have, many times over, I just don’t enjoy James Joyce. And with that mea culpa and admission of possibly being a total cretin, I determined I would to get into some of the nuts and bolts of this collection of short stories. Because it is a remarkable collection that deserves attention. It’s possible, in fact necessary, in short, to champion work whether or not it is to one’s taste.

I pushed myself to get inside this book - as I unsuccessfully did Ulysses, and as I did Cormack McCarthy, which took multiple attempts. What all three authors share is a challenge to readers. This is not cozy, easy reading. There are upheavals all over the writing in Tarnopolsky’s work: within sentences, within turns of phrase. Dialogue frequently comes at the reader without labels, necessitating re-reading, carefully, to try to figure out what is going on, and often as not, I’m still confused. The writing continually unseated me. It’s possible that something Brechtian is going on here… (Brecht was known for planting dissonant actors in the audience at his own plays to disagree with what was on stage.) I sense some signal jamming, some culture ruffling. I am personally a proponent of aiming for clarity in writing, and I prefer audience superior position. At times I feel like we are in a cultural moment that prefers author superior. In these post modern times, readers are given fragmentary crumbs to piece together and form their own judgments.

In almost every scene and each dialogue exchange, in Tarnopolsky’s collection, it feels as though I am eavesdropping on strangers on a train going the other way from the one I am on. Snatches. Fragments. I get the sense that Tarnopolsky is nearby, with a glint in his eye, saying “I’m not going to make this simplistic for you, you know!” And for that, I should be thankful, because sometimes I feel like only my internal anxiety machine gets exercised these days, and not my intellect.

The prose is dense, tightly curled in on itself like the petals of an unbloomed flower, whorled around its inner secrets and logic, seemingly content to be about itself.

Just when I think I’ve figured out the cadence, learned to dance to the same rhythm as the stories in the book, Tarnopolsky throws a new spanner in. He starts a bit where some unknown person is editing the same story I am reading, in real time, written in a bold font, interspersed with the ‘original’ prose, adding a second voice to juggle, creating a cognitive dissonance and a meta-level. It’s a Rubics cube of sjuzhet, the telling of and re-ordering of the chronological events of a story. I think this is the sort of thing people who are fans of films like Memento would deeply dig. Tarnopolsky remarked to me he thought Fabula and Sjuzhet would make good names for cats. I have to agree.

I found the first half of the work harder to slide into, and often felt unsituated and a little unsafe. But pushing through I was rewarded with jet-black gems of humour, glittering in the storm of words, and moments of shocking beauty.

My decision to review Every Night I Dream I Am A Monk, Every Night I Dream I Am A Monster came out of not one, but two quandaries. The first, What do with literature that is “good” but not to one’s taste, as a reviewer? The second, what does one do with that literature when one reviews books, believes that Canada desperately needs more reviewing outlets for the health of the entire culture, and most poignantly, one knows and personally likes the author? From my conversations with other authors, the path most often chosen is to neglect to critique or even mention.

It’s necessary to dive in, struggle, get pushed to new limits, and review.

It is necessary, now more than ever, I believe, that writers put writing first and remember that, differences aside, we are comrades in arms against AI, declining publishing revenues, against inertia and indifference, against book banning. I embrace the fact that people have different politics, tastes, approaches. Writing brings a variety of experience to others and creates empathy and common ground. A book is the surest way for one human to get inside the workings of another human’s mind. The strength in writing is that it presents a plurality of voices, of experiences. Oh yeah, and poetry of the ineffable, reflecting on the bittersweetness of fleeting life. There’s that too.

I came to Damian Tarnopolsky’s Every Night I Dream I’m A Monk, Overnight I Dream I’m A Monster in part because he was one of the stalwart souls who came out to read at my reading series in Toronto - which I created with the sole and desperate mandate of getting more exposure for more authors in a world that has diminishing opportunity to do so. He’s a fantastic reader, with a sonorous voice and a great command of the stage.

The author himself is a soft spoken man with a cultured accent, and a polished appearance. Behind the polish, one is immediately aware of an effervescently dark and dry sense of humour. Mischief simmers below the tweed of any given jacket he wears. My first hint to the “real” Tarnopolsky was, when I asked him to give me a one line bio ahead of his reading. The typed slip of paper he handed me mentioned something about international contract killing and ended with, ‘Damian died in 2004’. Not your average Tweed bear. Worth bearing this mischief in mind while reading.

I have enormous respect for the work, and especially the way Tarnopolsky has marched to his own drum, for taking risks in with the prose, for burrowing into the human psyche in a human submersible of his own design. I also frequently get the impression I am not ordained to worship at the altar of his words. A peek at Tarnopolsky's acknowledgements reveals heady and wide ranging influences. There is jamming going on with the non-narrative elements, a conscious frustration of narrative flow. At times, I feel too dense to be able to juggle the various delicate filaments and icons that connect the linked short stories. I frequently felt the way I did when attempting Joyce; perhaps not up to the task. Perhaps guilty of undertaking literature as a thing to be comprehended instead of allowing it to wash over me.

We come to literature for many things. To find beauty. Meaning. Alternative takes on life. Comfort. And to be challenged. Tarnopolsky has offered a challenge. I encourage readers to test their mettle.

“I think stories need to be trouble.”

Very well, Mr. Tarnopolsky. Give us more trouble, then.

---

About the Author

Damian Tarnopolsky’s work has been nominated for many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, and the Journey Prize, and he won the Voaden Prize for Playwriting in 2019. He teaches at the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab at the University of Toronto.

About the Reviewer

Emily Weedon is a CSA award winning screenwriter and author of the dystopian debut Autokrator, with Cormorant Books. Her forthcoming novel Hemo Sapiens will be published in September 2025, with Dundurn Press. https://emilyweedon.com/

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Freehand Books (Sept. 3 2024)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1990601804

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1990601804