Delight in the Details

The power of reading, as performed by Leon Rooke

By Jeet Heer • April 13, 2010 • 1 Comment

Among Canadian writers who frequent the lecture circuit, there is an adage that you never want to do a reading after Leon Rooke, who is widely regarded as one of literature’s great on-stage personalities. Opening for Leon Rooke is as daunting as being the warm up act for the Beatles. Anne Michaels wrote an entire essay describing “the incomparable experience of hearing Leon Rooke.” She called Rooke “a preacher,” while Kent Thompson says he’s a “performance artist,” a description echoed by John Metcalf. You can get a sense of Rooke’s stage presence in the above YouTube video, where he reads from “Legend of the Flaming Moths,” from his recent collection The Last Shot.

I don’t disagree with the celebrations of Rooke-as-a-performer, but I sometimes wonder whether this type of praise doesn’t prevent people from seeing how good Rooke is in the cold type of the printed page. When I first read “Legend of the Flaming Moths,” I was struck by how coolly visual the story was: the magic realist conceit of moths that eat up all the cloth in a Mexican village was made real by Rooke’s great attentiveness to detail. “The moths swarmed into every house and ate not only the raiment of every sleeper but every blanket and sheet, the very stuffing from every bed; they consumed every curtain, every rug, the covers and stuffing of every sofa and chair; they probed to the depths of every closet, draw, box, or hamper where cloth of any kind was stored.” What gives this passage power is not just the rhetorical sweep of the prose or the careful repetition of the word “every,” but also the many observed little details (like the hamper).

Rooke’s reading of the story makes it feel very different, more freverent and passionate but also less minutely attentive. As we get caught up in the words we miss many details. Rooke is a great reader of his own work and anyone who has a chance to listen to his talks should take the opportunity. But it’s also important to read him silently, far away from the floodlights and the stage, with just his book in our hands.