The Saltbox Olive
By Angela Antle
Breakwater Books, June 2025 | $24.95
Reviewed by Caleb J. Browne
“Stories are how we tell people we love them.”
This line, as Min says in Angela Antle’s prescient novel The Saltbox Olive, reads as a simple truth, a thesis, an unrepeated mantra. I read this novel mostly during a family reunion in Flowers Cove. I felt this line and lived it while I read it. I heard stories upon stories from and about family members I had only just met.
The Saltbox Olive is a story about stories, how we tell them, why we tell them, how we uncover them, and the power behind them. From Min’s tea-leaf readings, to wartime letters from Arch, from Barbara’s composition of war footage, to Caroline’s discovery of her family history, this novel is crammed with narratives within narratives.
Caroline’s story, taking place in contemporary Newfoundland, frames the other stories which unfold in wartime Newfoundland and Italy. An olive tree belonging to Min, her great grandmother, arrives on her doorstep in present day Newfoundland which leads Caroline down the rabbit hole of just what happened to her grandfather, Garl, and his brother, Arch, in Italy during World War II. Garl told Caroline little of the war and burned Arch’s wartime letters after his death in Italy, so Caroline is left trying to piece together this narrative with very little.
Arch’s fight against fascism didn’t begin with his enlistment. It began at home, where Arch deals with patriarchal violent fascistic tendencies with his father, Skipper, from childhood on. He tries to emancipate his mother from Skipper by joining the priesthood, hoping to take her into his rectory as a live-in servant, but again finds himself under the thumb of someone abusing their power. When the priest attempts to sexually abuse him, he flees yet again. So when Arch enlists, it is a continuity of this resistance. In battle, when Arch has power over life and death, he must also confront his own erotic lust for this power.
Though it is not only Arch who is present in this fight against fascism. Antle makes a point of showing the often overlooked role and experience of women during the war. Lucia flees Italy with her son Cosimo due to her partisanism against Italian fascism. In Britain, she finds work creating silk maps for the British military, before she is again forced to flee because of her heritage and return to her wartorn homeland. Meanwhile, Barbara’s behind the scenes work facilitating vital wartime photography is essential to the war effort. It is through her direct action that truths about the devastation of the war are able to penetrate the waves of propaganda.
The Saltbox Olive is a family saga and a profound meditation on the nature of stories. It shows how stories are passed down and how they persist even when they are silenced. Antle’s depiction of this history is as urgent today, during the necromantic rise of fascism’s corpse, as ever. As in this timely novel, it is vital to confront these power structures not just at their institutional levels, but as they are instantiated in the day-to-day and, regrettably, within ourselves. That is the urgency of stories.
Caleb J. Browne (they/them) is a writer born in Newfoundland and Labrador, and raised throughout the Newfoundland-diaspora. They are pursuing a joint honours degree in English and Philosophy at the Memorial University of Newfoundland along with a diploma in Creative Writing. They are also editor-in-chief at toothcut journal.