[In the highly favorable review below, Manguel offers a stylistic and thematic overview of Dinner along the Amazon, noting how this work is representative of and related to Findley's other writings.]

We always arrive too late or too early in Timothy Findley's stories. The event has already taken place, or will take place sometime later, once we have left the page, or perhaps it will never take place. "Sometime—Later—Not Now" is the title of one of the stories in Dinner Along the Amazon (which is one of the first four titles in Penguin's new Penguin Short Fiction series), and the title fits almost all pieces in this brilliant book. "… There are no beginnings, not even to stories," writes Findley in "Losers, Finders: Strangers at the Door." "There are only places where you make an entrance into someone else's life and either stay or turn and go away." This sense of distant continuity, of solidity in all of Findley's work, lends reality to the world he portrays. His characters have lives of their own, lives that come from a past we, the readers, are not asked to witness, and drift toward a future we are not invited to share. Their history, which is also the history of Findley's obsessions, is taken for granted.

The background of Findley's world is ours, however; it is known to us, its features are common to our experience. Suburbia in our time, the world wars in our shared past: this chosen background enjoys the prestige of "having happened," of being true to life. The reader's disbelief is suspended from the very start: of course these houses exist, of course the war took place—and the reader is then left to wander in the maze he has accepted as real. But now comes the realization that the background is not the focus of our attention. Against it, in mid-speech, in mid-action, we see Findley's people. They are always occupied, a group obsessed with collecting whatever evidence about themselves is available—photographs, childhood memories, souvenirs in cardboard boxes—trying to understand their world. Suddenly the landscape is questioned, and the reader is made to question it with them.

Chekhov (whom Findley mentions in his introduction as another writer pursued by obsessions) proceeds in the same manner: setting up an acceptable world and peopling it with characters who fail to understand it. The reader then joins the characters in the investigation of the story.

One of the finest stories in this collection, the macabre and moving masterpiece that lends its title to the book—"Dinner Along the Amazon"—is remarkable because of the many ways in which it explores the paradox of the reader joining forces with the fictional characters to solve the riddle of their common world, a paradox illustrated by one of the characters, Fabiana:

She began in the middle of some interior monologue that perhaps had occupied her for some time—which yet seemed pertinent to the monologue of each of the others; one long sentence describing their mutual apprehension, whether it be about the past or the present or the future; arising out of the common literature which is the mind, peopled with common characters, moving over a common landscape, like a book they had all read—from which one of their voices began to quote aloud.

Their voices: the plural reveals another aspect of Findley's people. They are a conglomerate, a group functioning as one single being, each part unable to detach itself from the others, each however keeping its individual face, and yet depending on the others for survival, suffering the others' misfortunes and fears. Everything is shared, and yet the characters still feel lonely, like Siamese twins/each speaking a different language, each with his own memory. "Adult loneliness," says Findley "is the loneliness defined by remembrance."

Even when a character succeeds in freeing himself from the knot of his fellow beings (as does the Snow White maid in "About Effie"), his influence is still felt by the rest of the group. "I don't know how to begin about Effie," says the child narrator (beginning, as is usual in Findley, after the fact), "but I've got to because I think you ought to know about her. Maybe you'll meet her one day, and then you'll be glad I told you all this. If I didn't, then maybe you wouldn't know what to do."

There seem to be two ways of entering Findley's world: through the eyes of a character whose reactions we follow ("Lemonade," "About Effie"), or on our own, with no interpreter ("Hello Cheeverland, Goodbye," "Dinner Along the Amazon"). In both cases the discovery of this world comes as a shock: we thought we knew it so well, and it is never what we expected. In most cases—unlike Effie—the characters share the shock and fail in their efforts to make sense of what is happening; their struggle, their passionate trying, makes the stories.

In Findley's world there is always a struggle, a war going on: historical or social, political or personal, a combat whose ends are not known. The war means different things to different characters; "war" is the name given to the machineries of fate. For Harper (in "Lemonade") war is a dream that has silenced his father; for Neil (in "War") it is a broken promise about skating. In "Hello Cheeverland, Goodbye" it is a strict code of social graces, fought as absurdly and pathetically as the kind of war fought with guns.

To survive in this world, Findley's characters perform rituals we as readers are made to observe: Harper's morning wakening before he is allowed to kiss his wasting mother; Neil's escape into the hayloft to punish his father for betrayal; T. S. Eliot distilling words from his wife Vivienne in "Out of the Silence"; Ezra Pound purging in his cage the sin of visionary poetry in "Daybreak at Pisa." Some perform these rituals as imitations of life, as Annie Bogan does in "The Book of Pins." Others, especially the children, perform them to find a place in the world of adults.

For Findley's children the world has already happened: the laws and reasons that governed its construction have been forgotten, and what faces them now is an incomprehensible theatre stage. Here actions are mistaken for other actions, and all intentions seem wrong. A poem—reminiscent of Stevie Smith's "Not Waving, Drowning"—introduces "Losers, Finders: Strangers at the Door":

      Some lives
      are only seen
      through windows
      beyond which
      the appearance
      of laughter
      and of screaming
      is the same.

The confusion of appearances provides a key to most of Findley's stories. In "Lemonade" Harper cannot understand why his mother lets her beauty die away and imagines that the jewels she has sold can restore her lost grace; in "War" Neil takes his father's enlistment as an act of unfaithfulness; in "The People on the Shore" the narrator assumes that a dying woman's last glance is a revelation. After the confusion comes the disappointment: the jealousy, the rage of unkept promises, the disenchantment. "Dinner Along the Amazon" is thickly layered with this sequence: the characters build their hopes on their assumptions, fall from grace, and rise again, in a seemingly everlasting pattern.

Because their assumptions are mistaken, their lives are never fulfilled. In "Sometime—Later—Not Now" Diana, the young artist with whom the narrator is in love, never becomes a great pianist. "No. They won't die," she says talking about the babies she will never have. "They just won't happen." It was her own epitaph," the narrator adds. It is also the epitaph of most of Findley's people. In "Lemonade" the neighbourhood witch mistakenly supposes that Harper is setting off on an adventure: "I've been waiting for adventure all my life," she says. "How lucky that you're so young." Adventure will never come to her (perhaps because she never sets out to find it) nor will it come for Harper. The solid background reality is inflexible, and when we leave the story—even though we will never know its true end—we realize that the characters will not succeed. Defeat seems to be the very essence of a Findley being.

The children are encroached by adults, the adults are encroached by war, the countryside (in the least successful of the stories in this collection, a fable called "What Mrs. Felton Knew") is encroached by the city. Danger is always there, lurking, ready to spring, bringing change. Change is to be avoided at all costs. The children do not want to become adults, the adults do not want to grow or learn too much: a delicate balance maintains the social structure. Only the present counts: things are as they are, never as they might be. Michael, in "Dinner Along the Amazon," hates the future: "He hated anything he could not control: he hated anything he didn't know. Certainty was the only ally you could trust." And then: "The future was his enemy." Fear of change keeps Findley's people alive.

As a group, Findley's people believe they are guilty. They never question why whatever has happened, has happened to them; instead they try to explore new ways of living with their guilt. In "Losers, Finders: Strangers at the Door" the heroine tries to convince a stranger to come and live in her house and share her [plans] and her anguish; in "The Book of Pins" Annie Bogan purges her guilt through memory; in The Last of the Crazy People (Findley's first novel) guilt is paid for with death. As in Catholic confession, the assumption is always that we have sinned, that we are never guiltless.

Read after The Wars and Famous Last Words, Dinner Along the Amazon takes on another significance: it is not only a collection of extraordinary short stories—it is also a showcase of drafts, ideas, new developments, variations on the obsessions that make up Findley's chosen world. In his introduction, Findley says he was surprised to find that certain themes, certain "sounds and images," crop up again and again in his writing. It is true that what Henry James called "the figure in the carpet" repeats itself in Findley's work—dusty roads, solitary children, photographs, silence—but these images are not just samples of a collector's hobby. They constitute the certain, precise landscape of the writer, a dangerous landscape laid thick with traps, through which the characters have to pick their way. The roads have to be dusty because Nature here is not welcoming; the children have to be lonely because within the group speech carries no meaning, no comfort; the photographs are necessary because they are the only tangible evidence of these moments, these stories, with no ending and no beginning, moments snipped out of time; silence is essential because from the lack of words comes the words themselves (as in the Eliot story or in Famous Last Words). Silence is all-important. "Our world," says Findley, "had been secured for us by a World War that closed in a parable of silence."

To anyone approaching Canadian literature for the first time, it becomes painfully obvious that the quest for a national identity is a literary obsession. The reader has the overall feeling that most Canadian writers confirm their existence by constantly pinching their nationality, by making statements rather than showing a world. Timothy Findley is never guilty of rhetoric: his stories are wonderfully visual, like plays acted out on the page at a breathtaking pace. When his characters speak, they never explain: they explore, they talk, and their dialogue becomes the characters.

Certain writers, perhaps unwittingly, have defined a country through their literature: Paul Scott's India, García Márquez's Colombia, Malcolm Lowry's Mexico. Findley's world of missed historical events, assumed guilt and contrived ways of survival, of children besieged by paternalistic politics and culture, of adults deeply concerned with, but awed by, art and social graces—all this world seems to me an excellent definition of Canada. In his major novels, in this astounding Dinner Along the Amazon, Timothy Findley restores an almost forgotten power to the art of fiction: the creation of a deep, coherent world in which we see our own.