A BODY OF FATES

In Evren’s debut speculative novel, a man at the end of his life struggles to reconcile his family history and his own misguided decisions.

Budding astrophysicist David Becker’s life changed when, as a cosmology student at the University of British Columbia, he met and fell in love with political science major Deb Glasscock. After marrying her and raising two sons, Becker, “the offspring of addiction and abuse, the progeny of hypocrisy, the downstream of an ancestral shitstorm,” is troubled by the idea that, somehow, his seemingly perfect life will be destroyed by the flaws and transgressions of his ancestors that lurk in his DNA. After discovering that his wife has multiple sclerosis (and subsequently having an affair with a much younger woman), Becker realizes his concerns may be coming to fruition. His examination of his family’s trauma-filled past over four generations is intensified when he meets his own personal Fate, whom he envisions as a crone called Mrs. Bleatwobble, “a wicked old harpy, sitting in the corner, glasses perched on the slope of her nose, calm and patient, knitting the future in soft, colourful prison stripes.” Whether real or hallucination, his Fate attempts to help him understand and come to grips with his own inescapable destiny. Although the nonlinear storyline takes some lengthy tangents—like the story of Deb’s great-grandfather, Albert, who fought for Canada in WWI—the deep existential introspection and the highly intelligent, probing nature of the writing more than overcome the erratic storyline. Inspired by tragedies in the author’s own life, the text is replete with profound and thought-provoking lines like: “You’re a finite self-aware creature with an infinite mind imprisoned in a doomed body alive in only a tiny raindrop of spacetime.”

A powerful look at love, loss, and what it means to be human.