There’s no going back for Melnyk: “Publication,” said Marshall McLuhan somewhere, “is the self-invasion of privacy.”
~Myrna Kostash

This collection of essays, a meditative, unusual album which focuses on images and their affect, is again surprising for how it connects characters as disparate as Marilyn Monroe and Leonard Cohen with George himself, who recurs as a persona in the discussion and discovery of how images project and protect identity. …. The book’s epigraph, by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, declares, “Everyone has three lives: a private life, a public life and a secret life.” True enough, but George Melnyk has three more: a visual life, a textual life, and a visionary life; and these writings throw his projections onto the shadowed screen of individuality and community.

The most interesting and effective motif recurring in these essays is the coded conflictedness of Melnyk’s Ukrainian roots, his admission that he is part of a triple diaspora, and thus has been pulled in multiple directions. He says, “My escape into western Canadian identity was a conscious way of avoiding the problematic past and its ongoing iterations in contemporary Ukraine.” This “hiding/revealing” informs both the content and the approach of the different commentaries here, all of them coloured through his projection of the personal. He confronts directly why he for a long time repressed his Ukrainian heritage and the effect his family’s displacement and migration has had on his choices and his intellectual enthusiasms. His sense of being an outsider, “of being ashamed of who one was,” delineates the profound reverberation of subtle alienations.
These essays are written with Melnyk’s straightforward style, his bluntness both unusual and disarming…He is best when he is personal, when he looks intimately at those images that compel our attention, whether they are photographs of Marilyn Munroe or of himself as an infant. “Melnyk, Urii Roman,” his identity as a stateless refugee on his way to Canada, is a powerful platform from which to investigate George Melnyk’s fascination with art and image, the play of history and fiction. These essays are most compelling when they explore the particular, when they dare to investigate what matters to an individual and his reading of himself, naked or not. His declared ambition, that he would like to be “recognized,” speaks to the past’s influence on our spectatorship and acceptance of who we become.
In these essays, George Melnyk performs a metamorphosis worthy of Ovid, always inventing a new mutability and a new escape. In his projection of the personal, he succeeds again in hiding, living that Kroetsch line of “unhiding the hidden” even while he dons another disguise. He says, “The essays hold up a mirror to different parts of me—my ethnic self, my artistic self, and my new regional self. When I combine them into a single self I become the kind of western Canadian I am today.” His yearning to imprint himself “onto a known geography” ventures into the unknown with a journey that collapses the familiar and the strange, and that engages with both known and alien geographies. He becomes the “kind of western Canadian” who embodies then our doubts and our determination, our archive and our aspiration. And what could be better than that?
Melnyk’s essays reveal himself as a refugee in Canada who repressed his Ukrainian heritage, his artistic self who is fascinated with art and image and his new regional self experimenting with history and fiction.
His identity as a stateless refugee on his way to Canada is a powerful platform from which to investigate George Melnyk’s fascination with art and image, the play of history and fiction.
~Aritha van Herk