My Life Among The Apes (Fagan, 2012)

Cary Fagan. My Life Among the Apes. (2012) Short stories, winner of the 2012 Giller Prize. Some first-person, and mostly including a dash of sometimes dark comedy. Very Canadian, in that they tell of the mundane defeats and victories of our lives. Most feel autobiographical, and not just because of the 1st person narrator.

The title story is in part about the narrator’s infatuation with Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees. But we humans are apes, too. Just very clever ones. Clever enough to solve problems, but not clever enough to avoid the unpleasant consequences of some of the solutions. One of the sadder stories is about the narrator’s attempt to please the woman he’s about to dump by accompanying her on her dream vacation to learn chair-making. The after-story makes it clear that he never really understood what he lost. But that’s life.

Worth a read if you can find it. My copy was in the library’s summer book sale. ***