Grace Book Clubtag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews//292007-02-06T02:42:43ZPHP Blog ManagerLuckytag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.8932007-02-06T02:42:43Z2007-02-05T22:51:24ZGabrielle Bell is everyday people. In her graphic chronicle of life as an underemployed twenty-something in Brooklyn, NY, Bell illustrates her drifting existence in small, minimalist panels. The collection begins in diary format. As she moves between studio apartments, stints as a nude model, an art...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
Lucky moves into longer format comics and trips through Bell’s escapist fantasies. Lucky is a book you can start anywhere and enjoy, or it can be read in a single gulp, either way it packs an understated punch.]]>
The Teahouse Firetag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.8622007-02-06T02:42:43Z2007-01-09T05:30:16ZNineteenth-century Kyoto, the floating world of geishas and temae (tea ceremony) is the subject of Ellis Avery’s grand new page-turner of a novel, The Teahouse Fire, out in hardcover from Riverhead Books. In 1865, nine-year-old Aurelia Caillard, a French-born New Yorker, is taken to Japan...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
The Teahouse Fire, out in hardcover from Riverhead Books. In 1865, nine-year-old Aurelia Caillard, a French-born New Yorker, is taken to Japan by her missionary uncle. When her uncle dies in a fire, Aurelia becomes the adopted servant of the Shin family, master teachers of temae. As Japan moves from a closed Shogun society to the Western-leaning reign of the emporer Meiji, Aurelia’s (now called Urako) life in the teahouse switchbacks through the years, shadowing the rise of modern Japan. The Teahouse Fire has layers of betrayal and intrigue and there is something so deliciously pulpy in the tale of an undiscovered Westerner growing up cosseted in traditional Japanese society. At the same time the novel manages its drama around a very still center. Urako’s gaze takes in arresting and provocative period details. The tea ceremony scenes are precise and vivid as they illustrate the pull of old ways. Urako’s oblique looks at Yukako, the strong-willed daughter of the master teacher, transform into an excessive, erotic, unrequited love. Shoguns, merchants, and a bartering geisha move in and out of teahouse life. Here is a compulsively readable, literary epic.]]>
I Love Led Zeppelintag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.8432007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-12-19T01:04:05ZA beautiful collection of Ellen Forney’s comics published by Fantagraphics Books, I Love Led Zeppelin is the work of an artist totally geeking out on human behavior. Black and white panels are crammed with texture, motion lines, grunts, gulps, and scads of wry commentary. Forney is funny ...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
I Love Led Zeppelin is the work of an artist totally geeking out on human behavior. Black and white panels are crammed with texture, motion lines, grunts, gulps, and scads of wry commentary. Forney is funny and lowers a big bullshit detector on topics such as sex (gay), drugs (recreation/recovery), and the marvelous enterprises of others (blacksmiths, microvascular surgeons, call girls). In the “How To…” section of the book, large one-page panels demonstrate How To Be a Fabulous Fag Hag (a collaboration with Margaret Cho), How To Sew an Amputated Finger Back On, How To Tip, How To Use Your Voice, and How To Fuck a Woman With Your Hands!!. Ellen Forney has done her research, the comics are practical and instructive and hilarious and serious, too. The artist’s inner nerd has been commissioned to celebrate the diversity and the diversity of skills in the people around her. Later sections of the book include more comics in the single-page format, a section of longer comics from ’92-’94, and a series of collaborations with the likes of Dan Savage and Kristin Gore, who write text paired with Forney’s bold illustrations, as well as a collaboration with artist Ariel Bordeaux. Ellen Forney draws with a wink and a nudge and then draws you in with intimate close-ups of how sweet and silly and vulnerable we all are. In I Love Led Zeppelin, maybe she loves Led Zeppelin, but she also loves the people in her world and all the neat shit they know how to do.]]>
Pop!tag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.8362007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-12-13T00:34:10ZAury Wallington (Sex & the City, Veronica Mars) has dished up a teen novel about sex that focuses on that universal teenage preoccupation: everyone-has-done-it-but-me! Sterling Prep high-school senior Marit is set to lose her virginity. She just needs to find the lucky guy to give the goods...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
Sex & the City, Veronica Mars) has dished up a teen novel about sex that focuses on that universal teenage preoccupation: everyone-has-done-it-but-me! Sterling Prep high-school senior Marit is set to lose her virginity. She just needs to find the lucky guy to give the goods to. Only no candidate seems exactly right and Marit tends to bail when things get intimate. Marit plays violin badly, dresses with an artistic bent, and is at times bold and other times convincingly self-loathing and insecure. (In other words, a girl, a real flesh-and-blood girl!) When she decides to take her virginity in her own hands and sleep with her best guy friend, Jamie, who is also a virgin, Marit finds out exactly what “doing it” does and doesn’t change. Pop! is not the usual sensationalistic literary fare. Snappy and fun, serious and relatable, Wallington doesn’t hold back when talking about the confusion, the embarrassment, and the thrall that sex holds over teens.]]>
Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Malitag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.8112007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-11-20T23:04:19ZA memoir of a young American woman’s two years in the Peace Corps in Africa assisting a Malian midwife, Monique and the Mango Rains is a straight-ahead plunge into female friendship that tackles women’s issues in a developing country. Kris Holloway’s memoir is true-blue, the genuine a...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
Monique and the Mango Rains is a straight-ahead plunge into female friendship that tackles women’s issues in a developing country. Kris Holloway’s memoir is true-blue, the genuine article, a journey at once familiar and excitingly new as she vigilantly, and with great heart, recreates life in the tiny West African village of Nampossela. Holloway’s working relationship and friendship with Monique Dembele, a modern, educated African woman who works to advance girls’ education, maternal and child health, and to prevent brutal female genital cutting, moves with all the urgency expected of a profound life-changing relationship. Most of the import and drama takes place in the village birthing hut, where women and their babies live or die by what they manage for themselves in a country where men come first. What this book unfailingly does is bring up the question of vocation and avocation in women’s lives. The acceptance of what comes with being a woman and at the same time how to push for reform, to coax acceptable degrees of change and development in such an environment where women, even as victims, are less than equal, is captured in the singular sagesse of Monique in Kris Holloway's remarkable memoir.]]>
Fun Home : A Family Tragicomictag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.8072007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-11-13T22:04:34ZAlison Bechdel can write, draw, and pull infinite quantities of pathos and humor from her memories of growing up in a funeral home in a small Pennsylvania town. Her graphic memoir, Fun Home, which came out this summer, examines her early life, in particular her relationship with her father,...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
Fun Home, which came out this summer, examines her early life, in particular her relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual who died at the age of 44, possibly a suicide. Bechdel is a lesbian and the wonderfully evocative panels detail her attempts to cohere her father’s closeted sexuality with her own coming out and coming of age. Entwined with literary classics and novelistic in scope, Fun Home is an utterly absorbing, luminous, genre-bending work for book-lovers or for anyone who has ever tried to figure out where they came from.
A wonderful review of the book here.]]>
The End of Mr. Ytag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.7952007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-11-06T01:30:42ZAn atmospheric concoction of mystery and science, as well as a ranging philosophical mind-walk, Great Britain’s Scarlett Thomas has written a compulsively readable second novel. The End of Mr. Y is a book that explores big ideas at a life-or-death clip. Ariel Manto, working on a PhD in En...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
The End of Mr. Y is a book that explores big ideas at a life-or-death clip. Ariel Manto, working on a PhD in English on nineteenth- century thought experiments, reads a cursed book, swallows a homeopathic tincture, and is transported to the Troposphere. Ariel is an intriguingly flawed narrator with her share of emotional and sexual hang-ups, but she’s a completely liberated force intellectually. The premise of the book is fantastical: the Trophosphere is a Wonderland, a veritable trip down the rabbit hole, where Ariel encounters the trippy fabrications of her own psyche as well as the ability to travel through space and time via other people’s minds. Thomas keeps her eye on the flow of the narrative and plays with the twists and turns of the adventure -mystery while managing to fit in a satisfying love story, a primer on the history of thought, and a comment on the dance into the obscure that is graduate school. An obsessive, playful, and suspenseful read bolstered with expressive and imaginative language, The End of Mr. Y is a wonderful escape from the ordinary.]]>
The Positiontag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.7872007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-10-31T02:13:38ZAssume The Position is about sex and you’d be perfectly right. If you’ve ever walked in on your parents in flagrante delicato, or thumbed through a copy of The Joy of Sex with its shaggy partners deep into the trip of lovemaking, and wondered how children of the sexual...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
The Position is about sex and you’d be perfectly right. If you’ve ever walked in on your parents in flagrante delicato, or thumbed through a copy of The Joy of Sex with its shaggy partners deep into the trip of lovemaking, and wondered how children of the sexual revolution feel about all that sexual flowering thirty years later, Meg Wolitzer’s seventh novel, out in paperback from Scribner, is one for tackling the subject with wit and poignancy. Wolitzer is an impressive novelist, a careful observer of the interstices of society and of family as she explores sexual politics, shame, and intimacy in two very different generations.
Thirty years after the publication of Paul and Roz Mellow’s best-selling 1975 sex book, “Pleasuring,” complete with illustrations, the Mellow family is scattered: an older brother on anti-depressants that blunt his sex drive, the lonely youngest girl attempting a documentary about a cherished Long Island elementary school, the older sister, a former drug addict and new mother in California, and the younger brother, a gay Republican in Rhode Island diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease. The Mellow's divorce following the wake of the book's phenomenal success has left the family doubly exposed, adrift in degrees of dissatisfaction, repression, and disillusion. As each chapter chronicles present compromises and disappointments that tie them to the past (and, inevitably, to the shame, confusion, and embarrasment surrounding the public airing of their parents' sex life), Wolitzer’s unsparing exploration of how "the sounds of parents traveled through walls, traveled up stairs" is commanding and bittersweet. There seems to be a simmering adolescent inside most adult children, which Wolitzer manages alternately to indulge and to pull up short.
The suspense in the novel revolves around the re-issue of Pleasuring and the complicated rewards of letting go of old ways of thinking about the past. Let the most famous position in the Mellow's book, called “Electric Forgiveness,” provide a way of thinking about intimacy. When your parents stop being to blame, quit being the defining drama of all that has happened or will happen to you, you can look through the keyhole, open up and find a new way of embracing the long arm of the past.]]>
Sins of the Innocenttag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.7832007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-10-30T03:44:56ZMireille Marokvia has pluck. In her memoir, Sins of the Innocent, recently out in hardcover from Unbridled Books, she tells the story of her young adult life as a French woman, a student at the Sorbonne, who follows her German artist lover to Stuttgart in 1939 for a stay of six months and e...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
Sins of the Innocent, recently out in hardcover from Unbridled Books, she tells the story of her young adult life as a French woman, a student at the Sorbonne, who follows her German artist lover to Stuttgart in 1939 for a stay of six months and ends up staying in Germany for the duration of the war. There is a keen and immensely likable intelligence at work as Marokvia’s story turns from the bright bohemian light of Parisian cafés to beam down the increasingly narrow and harrowing paths of life in Hitler’s Germany. As Marokvia’s lover, an outspoken anti-Nazi, manages to secure a post abroad completing military illustrations, coming home only on leave, Marokvia’s struggle becomes as much a struggle against isolation as against the dangers her outsider and anti-Nazi status pose. This is where the pluck comes in. Marokvia’s physical existence – hiking, biking, skiing, milking, weaving – plays into her dynamic, complicated form of survival and resistance. She is often scared, but never stops. The more dramatic episodes – being denounced as a spy, helping escaped prisoners reach the Swiss border – carry a good deal of novelistic suspense, but it is the portrait of daily life that quietly opens up a new perspective on life inside Germany during the war. And it is the light-and-air quality Marokvia brings to her prose, this compelling voice of a confident, adventuresome woman settled on what she wants, who is able to give such a complete, riveting, and idiosyncratic account of a wholly unexpected life.]]>
La Perdidatag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.2992007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-05-07T12:18:14ZWhen I read La Perdida I had just gotten back from a trip to Guatemala, and it was easy to understand how someone might fall into a love affair with a Latin American country. Jessica Abel’s brilliant graphic novel is interested in exploring what happens when we let ourselves be swept off ou...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
La Perdida I had just gotten back from a trip to Guatemala, and it was easy to understand how someone might fall into a love affair with a Latin American country. Jessica Abel’s brilliant graphic novel is interested in exploring what happens when we let ourselves be swept off our feet by a place or situation and decide that no matter what, we will not pull away. Her beautifully observed illustrations capture wonder and danger with equal sensitivity.
La Perdida - which, as anyone with access to the miracle of Google translation tools can tell you, means “the lost one,” in Spanish - follows Carla, an itinerant, Frida Kahlo-obsessed twenty-something, through a year spent living in Mexico City. She shows up on the city’s doorstep without a plan and soon decides she can’t leave. From the first page, we’re drawn into her quest for authenticity and belonging, witnessing the conflict between her need to protect herself and her desire for an unfiltered experience. She has to learn many things quickly – Spanish being one of them.
Abel never lets Carla dodge the guilt and privilege that travel along with her, and isn’t afraid to let her be unsympathetic. To Carla, “tourist” is the worst thing a person can be called, and proving herself to be otherwise is a full time job. We know from the very start that it won’t end happily, but exactly how things will unravel is much less clear.
Turned off by the insular expatriate community, Carla vows to meet and befriend “real” Mexicans. Complicating her well-intentioned naïveté is Memo, to whom she is attracted both because of and in spite of his relentless stream of Communist dogma. He becomes one of her closest friends, though this doesn’t stop him from ruthlessly, and almost recreationally, fixating on her relative wealth and privilege. Carla is always on the defensive, pointing out the ways she is not like everyone else, outlining the steps she is taking to disown her American background. It doesn’t make a difference. “You don’t know what it is to be a conquistadora,” Memo tells her during one of their many clashes. “But here you are.”
Full of heated arguments and resonant wordless drawings, the story feels intimate despite its busy setting. Abel’s pen convincingly translates the textures and flavors of Mexico City to small panels and black ink. Her vivid, flawed characters change over the course of the story in ways that feel entirely believable. Carla’s boyfriend Oscar starts out sweet and harmless, but as her Spanish improves it becomes obvious that he is looking for an escape from the country she is eager to adopt as her own. When Carla’s brother comes to visit, she’s confused to find him slip into Mexican culture with an ease that is out of her reach. Memo is both her confessor and tormentor. Around them, the city swelters and seduces, and Carla ignores all manner of red flags in willing it to become her home.
This could be read as a cautionary tale, but Abel clearly has more in mind. In confronting the awkward baggage Americans drag around, she implicates her readers as well as her characters. This makes La Perdida more than a great book: it’s a brave one, too.]]>
My Sister's Continenttag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.2982007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-05-07T16:34:21ZGina Frangello has written a modern female counterpoint to Freud's case study of "Dora," and it is not for the timid reader. Frangello's novel, My Sister's Continent, is big, dense, complex, original and fascinating. Describing the plot hardly does justice to this book since its largest conce...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
My Sister's Continent, is big, dense, complex, original and fascinating. Describing the plot hardly does justice to this book since its largest concern is what sprawls below the surface and how individuals are compromised by the past. It's all here: secrets, sex, bulimia, incest, AIDS, intimacy, and My Sister’s Continent reads like psychological mystery. Spankings, whippings, addiction, analysis, none of it handled reductively: the book is ultimately about interpretation and identity, that harrowing growth managed on the journey to wholeness (or something close to it).
Kirby is a young woman plagued by the mysterious behavior and ultimate disappearance of her twin, Kendra. The novel is framed by Kirby's attempt to figure out what exactly happened to the twins as girls as well as to reconstruct the multiple strands that lead through a web of versions, half truths, partial blindness, hearsay and parallel story lines. When Kendra vanishes, Kirby is left to make sense, decipher, and ultimately attempt some sort of reconstruction. This process is complicated with Kirby's psychiatrist's own skewed case study, her boyfriends, adult betrayals, secrets and disassociations.
This is an impressive book, for its heft and three-dimensionality, its psychological depth, its portrayal of multiple agendas. It is not the conventional cinematic vision of an American family we often see in popular literary novels, but more a stylized collage of fictionalized journals, case notes, and psychological revelations collected in deft vignettes that together build into something large and dense. Frangello is clearly interested in what is conscious and unconscious, as well as in the texture and depth of psychological issues and how they might translate to real people and their experiences.
There is much to admire here, and Frangello is smart, writes with real audacity and integrity: "The world loves a dead child, isn't that true? The dead child resides at the top of the tragedy pyramid, just above a terminally ill lover and miles away from less poetic catastrophes as physical handicaps, poverty, and rapes.” My Sister’s Continent is a disturbing and chilling plunge into the intimate. It is compelling because it encompasses the dark and the light with the complexity of true insight and its power to transform.]]>
Beyond Blacktag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.2972007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-05-07T12:26:46Z“Beyond Black” refers to the spirit world, which is a quite literal place in Hilary Mantel’s latest novel. Medium and clairvoyant Alison Hart, an affectionate showman and therapist on stage, is a fat, likeable, and unassuming guide through England’s psychic fairs and spiritual consultations....Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
Beyond Black is worthy of admiration. There is a riveting amount of detail and a brutal integrity to this book. Psychologically suspenseful and fanned by the wry humor, intelligence, and scope of a seasoned novelist, it makes for an alternately dark and rollicking read.]]>
Come Together, Fall Aparttag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.1722007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-08-16T05:14:58ZA collection of stories and a novella by first-time writer Cristina Henríquez, Come Together, Fall Apart, like Junot Diaz’s excellent Drown, captures a Spanish-language landscape of young people breaking away. Henríquez explores the beaches, cities, and rainforests of Panama. The n...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
Come Together, Fall Apart, like Junot Diaz’s excellent Drown, captures a Spanish-language landscape of young people breaking away. Henríquez explores the beaches, cities, and rainforests of Panama. The narrators are both young men and women, but the pull in the stories is towards the women, who invariably have distant fathers and vigilant mothers, one with “a body like a big yam – everything fleshy and sweet.” The collection focuses on the ache of upheaval – of domestic arrangements, the economy, the ousting of Manuel Noriega. Each story clacks tightly against the next, like beads on a string, to reveal the inner lives of the characters as well as the shifting culture of a country in transition.
In the first story “Yanina,” a young man tries to decide if he should marry the girlfriend who has already proposed to him forty-five times. “Ashes” introduces a wonderfully complex and reserved young woman with a low-wage job at the Casa de la Carne; she is a woman who “knows her depths” and who is broken open by her mother’s death. Henríquez states emotional truths with simplicity and there is comfort and even companionship in the way she so carefully attends to small shifts in the characters’ desires in both of these stories. The reserved woman in “Ashes” “always thought there was something special between my mother and me. Like she was somehow more mine… But maybe all children feel that – a sovereignty over the parent they love best.” Parents and lovers retain the power to wound, but always with an excess of love.
“Drive,” a story about a young woman who works in a department store in Panama City (where they haven’t sold an appliance in seventeen days), who gets pregnant by her drug-dealing boyfriend, makes the delightfully reductive case that “There are two ways you can go in this life: Either a whole family, twenty people or whatever, stick together and live all in one house like a big pod, or else everyone’s spread all over, like seeds, and you each replant yourself and make a new life on your own.” Change pushes the woman both literally and figuratively away from what she knows, just as new highways are built that direct tourists away from the center of Panama City, away from what’s real, highways where, she says, “the thought of shooting around in a car that fast scares the shit out of everyone” and no one “is going to pay to drive on a stupid highway when the other roads are free.” In this story, sex and drugs are not an escape, but a way of finding some kind of center. As a woman in another story, “Chasing Birds,” puts it, “Here the city felt boundless around her. As if she were no more than a small crumb in the center of it and it ebbed in concentric circles around her and around her, endlessly outward. It seemed so easy to lose the sense of your place in the world entirely.”
The concluding novella, from which the collection draws its title, takes place in December of 1989 and January1990, as a tense Panama witnesses the removal by U.S. troops of dictator Manuel Noriega. Narrated by fifteen year old Ramón, we follow one family forced from the modest home generations of their families have rented, made to move out by a construction company clearing the way for high-rises. The narrative allows the larger situation, the bombing, the food shortage, and the violence in the streets, to creep around the corners and for once in a Henríquez tale, the more interesting human drama is not the plot but the convincing, detailed, sensory history lesson about the recent past.]]>
The Seastag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.1742007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-04-04T02:22:46ZYears ago, the father of the nameless, nineteen-year-old narrator of The Seas walked out into the ocean and never came back. Before he disappeared, he told his daughter – then a small child – that she was a mermaid. In the years that followed, she turned this knowledge into a kind of ques...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
The Seas walked out into the ocean and never came back. Before he disappeared, he told his daughter – then a small child – that she was a mermaid. In the years that followed, she turned this knowledge into a kind of quest. But while the girl’s belief that she is a mermaid is the basis for Samantha Hunt’s captivating first novel, what really matters is her all-consuming love for a man named Jude, which is doomed from the start.
The woman has been in love with Jude since she was twelve years old, and has poured all of her energy and dreams into her idea of who he is and what he means. A veteran of the Gulf War, Jude’s memories bring brief gusts of dry sand and dust to a story otherwise saturated with water. The war haunts him. He is an open wound, and at a decade older than her, tries hard to let their age difference stand as a reason not return her passion. Still, the two follow each other around their depressed ocean-side town, close friends despite the obvious tension. The woman, like so many heroines before her, is determined to save him.
Between stints as a chambermaid and in a sardine factory, she has plenty of time to muse about water, love and language. Hunt indulges her own clear fascination with the latter through the woman’s grandfather, a typesetter who spends his days picking through boxes of metal type as he compiles words for a dictionary. Though this sometimes feels too much like an indulgence, one of the book’s most memorable scenes occurs when the characters puzzle over a Russian word that means “the feelings one retains for someone he once loved”: “There’s a reason why we have no word for it. You don’t get to keep the feelings for someone you once loved. Once you’ve washed your hands of that person, all those feelings, all that dirty water is washed out to sea. There is no word for that dirty water.”
Loving Jude is a job in itself. All her watching and waiting and wishing may look a lot like obsession, but the woman’s determination to keep him afloat, along with her thirst to pull him out to sea with her, feel wholly honest. She may be a mermaid, but she is also very human, driven by her body’s demands: “I’d like to push the hair from his face and trace the lines of his nose. I’d like to hold my finger below his nostrils for a long time until it is damp from his exhalations. Then I’d put the finger in my mouth and drink Jude’s breath.” Each detail and stray gesture is a new heartbreak as the story moves in waves toward its conclusion.
Through it all the specter of water looms large. The Seas feels like a sea shanty, a faded photograph. The setting is vivid but time feels slippery, fluid. The naked urgency of Hunt’s writing makes the book impossible to put down, its questions and finely drawn characters lodged in your head long after you’ve finished reading. This is a story about the senses, about being washed up and away while still bound to the heartbeat of a small town. The book is so absorbing that you may never notice the main character isn't given a name.]]>
Holy Skirts: A Novel of a Flamboyant Woman Who Risked All For Arttag:www.elizabethmerrick.com,2007:grace_reading_series/reviews/29.1732007-02-06T02:42:43Z2006-04-04T02:22:31ZHoly Skirts is a fabulously written biographical novel based on the eccentric Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. This is a vivid, rewarding re-imagining of the life of a true original. The story traces the vibrant Elsa from a stint in Berlin’s Wintergarten Cabaret through a series of lo...Elizabeth Merrickhttp://www.phpblogmanager.com/users/profiles/36.html
Holy Skirts is a fabulously written biographical novel based on the eccentric Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. This is a vivid, rewarding re-imagining of the life of a true original. The story traces the vibrant Elsa from a stint in Berlin’s Wintergarten Cabaret through a series of lovers, through two marriages before she meets the charming, though impoverished, Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven in New York City. In addition to being an integral part of the revolutionary Dada art movement, the Baroness was a sexual libertine, fashion avatar, a poet, collagist, German émigré, and artist’s model who befriended artists and writers including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. This engaging book is “about” one woman but it is also about so much more – art, artistic norms, perception, sex, convention of all kinds, eccentricity, fashion, and the avant-garde.
The Baroness is a feminist freethinker before there were labels for such ways of being. Rene Steinke re-imagines the life of this thoroughly modern character: "She could not remember when there had not been an alarming absence inside of her. . . She knew that it meant there was not enough of her somehow, that she could so easily be snuffed out. The sensation made her want to create evidence of herself.” Yet Steinke has managed to create not only a thoroughly riveting portrayal of one woman who pushes the limits of society, manners, poetry and art, but a complex and realistic portrait of an era as well, filled with insightful glimpses into an age where Victorian morals clashed with modern technological innovation.
Rene Steinke’s writing is vivid and compelling—a captivating portrait of a single, vibrant creative life filled with perversity and touches of insanity. Steinke’s exceptional book demonstrates the complicated inner-workings of an artist even as it explores them. In the Baroness’ description: "There had been no poem all day, just words, but she’d been finding solace in just typing them over and over, hoping one fragment might take interest in another like a man and a woman in a dance hall, but they were all wallflowers. . . She wanted her work to move between inside and outside, to obliterate those boundaries. Precisely because people protected them, they needed to be broke, to be permeable was human, thrilling."]]>