Songs of the South: A Review of Beth Gilstrap’s I Am Barbarella by Angele Ellis

cover credit: Twelve Winters Press

I Am Barbarella by Beth Gilstrap
Twelve Winters Press (2015)

Reviewed by Angele Ellis

Beth Gilstrap’s composite collection of short stories and flash fiction begins like a wild drum solo and ends like a sweet refrain—the kind in which the singers fade softly into silence.

From the title piece, “I Am Barbarella,” to the final story, “B-Sides,” Gilstrap’s tough lyricism, in a medley of first-person voices, wraps mystery and heartbreak around her characters’ grooved lives. No wonder Gilstrap has included a playlist for this debut collection, drawn from fifty years of popular music (the Spotify playlist is available at her website, bethgilstrap.com).

In “I Am Barbarella,” Gilstrap’s nameless narrator, egged on by a friend and her own conflicted desires, transforms herself from wife to bar-show sex queen and back again—in five hundred words. As the narrator of the following story, “Yard Sale,” says: “It ain’t garbage if you turn it into something.”

At the heart of this book are ten interconnected short stories that trace the lives of three generations of southerners—solid Sue and William; their dutiful son Hardy and his runaway wife, Loretta; and Hardy and Loretta’s pained yet loyal daughter, Janine. (Neighbors Lucille and Rachel—whom this reader imagines as a gritty alto and a shrill soprano—also add their voices to the mix.)

Gilstrap, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is editor-in-chief of Atticus Review, has a gift for describing place and nature as palpable as her love of music. In “Paper Fans,” Janine and her best friend Maddie hang at a local bar:

Janine tosses her and Maddie’s coats up in the corner like some black heap of animal carcass… The burned out letters BBQ hanging on the opposite wall look their age. Janine’s mind felt the same, like charred paint flakes on metal shells. This is the Diamond’s second life, but it’s been open in some fashion since the ’50s. It smells like burnt tomato sauce, fryer grease, and cigarettes. […] She orders fried pickles. Two junior blocks with chili. Pitcher of Pabst.

And in “Getting by with Sound,” Hardy ruminates on the rural pleasures of his late father, William:

Those were the things he liked to do. Listen to stories, walk, and admire the scent of his gardenias, the feel of their waxy leaves and petals. He used to pick them for my mother, and she always kept them on the windowsill in the kitchen. They were beautiful until the petals turned brown, but then the smell just grew sweeter.

In an interview with Twelve Winters Press, Gilstrap describes her use of place and her attachment to the South as follows:

For me place is as much a character as a walking, breathing person. It shapes everything: plot, character, atmosphere, you name it. I grew up reading Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, Carson McCullers, and Alice Walker so place was already vital in the literature I loved. Chatham’s [Pittsburgh’s Chatham University, where Gilstrap earned an MFA in fiction writing] emphasis on place-based writing was one of the reasons I chose their program. My bones, my heart are the South, for better or worse, whether I like it or not. I am built of this land and all the ghosts that accompany it.

The ghosts in I Am Barbarella propel its living characters away from intimacy as much as they root them in the land—including a child lost in an accident, a father eaten away by cancer, a husband who completes suicide, and a lover who “smelled like bug spray and honeysuckle.” When Hardy and Loretta—who’s back in town after years on the road with a boyfriend’s band, but still restless—visit William’s grave, Loretta insists on bringing a bag of Red Man tobacco to place on William’s headstone. But when Loretta reaches out in compassion to the still grieving Hardy, the result is solitary tears, not renewal of long lost togetherness.

Giving away too much of the characters’ skipping lives seems like revealing the punch line of a joke—even one told many times, as a favorite song is played into infinity. But it is not cheating to say that in I Am Barbarella, Gilstrap creates a vital world in which friendship is as strong as betrayal; beauty endures not only in the landscape, but also in objects as small as a leftover Christmas package or a perfect chocolate pie; and there may be time for tentative second chances.

Thrilling and Heroic and Strange: A Review of Laura van den Berg’s There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights by Michael VanCalbergh

cover credit: Origami Zoo Press

There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights by Laura van den Berg
Origami Zoo Press (2012)

Reviewed by Michael VanCalbergh

In Laura van den Berg’s There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights from Origami Zoo Press, readers get an intimate look into some very wondrous but strange lives. Each of Berg’s very short stories provides glimpses into miniscule moments within these characters’ lives, exploding the importance we place on the unusual.

The characters find meaning in weird moments: blaming a husband’s birds for marital problems, trying to escape fighting parents by building a spaceship, and seeing an enlarged photograph of a neighbor’s mouth as the tunnel to heaven for a woman’s deceased son and ex-husband. In the last example, the main character Lenore identifies with the strange photo hanging on her neighbor’s wall. In it, van den Berg explains:

It was, Lenore had realized after staring at the photograph for a while, the kind of boundless space she had pictured her son, and now her ex-husband, passing through during the moment their life turned to non-life, presence to absence, as though Mr. Masiki had photographed a hidden part of her consciousness and hung it on his living room wall… She imagined the night could stretch into eternity, the quiet, the watching, the ring of light.

As readers, we expect that there will be more after this connection to the photo. But, van den Berg ends the story here. She leaves us in the climax of the story with a resolution that only exists outside her pages.

The author redefines the typical narrative arc of fiction by sometimes stopping a story before the conflict. In “The Golden Dragon Express,” the story ends just after the narrator confronts her husband about his affair and his late-night phone calls. Specifically, it ends with: “Rick touched my knee, started to say something. In the kitchen, the phone rang.” It starts toward a resolution of separation or reconciliation, but suddenly stops by asking the reader to imagine the narrator’s response. The story “Reptiles” has the same movement when the narrator buries a turtle from a failed pet store venture. She remembers that you can “see the future in the markings on a turtle’s shell” and ends the story by looking at the shell before the burial. That’s it. In fact, the narrator describes it as she “started to look”—not even a completed look.

With each ending resembling the beginning of a longer story, the reader is forced to focus on moments just before a change occurs. This is how van den Berg’s characters are so brilliantly relatable. Instead of the reader relating to situations or the actions of a character, van den Berg finds a universal emotional space. When the narrator of “Lake” says, “she wanted so badly to reach him, she would have swum across the lake to meet him, if that’s what it took…” and that she wanted to “step off their usual path and run up one of the narrow trails that led into the forest and see what was there,” readers understand the need to reach someone. And when Sheila, in “Something Thrilling and Heroic and Strange,” desires change, “something radical” like changing her whole identity, readers get that feeling. The brave part of this is that van den Berg’s stories only concern themselves with these emotional shifts. They are not part of a larger story that attempts to explore themes of existence—they are existence. These shifts are what it means to be alive.

The stories also don’t shy away from the weird or unusual parts of life. The last story, “Cannibals,” starts with, “The cannibals loved music.” The rest of the story details the life two children have with the cannibals and whether they “were supposed to be in charge of the cannibals, of if the cannibals were in charge” of them. The plot is humorous and absurd, but van den Berg doesn’t settle for an eccentric, giggly story; she turns up the weird. The last paragraph of both the story and the book poses a series of questions from one of the children. She imagines her parents finally coming home by stating:

Did they notice the marks on our arms and legs from where we had bitten into ourselves, ever so gently? Did they try to console themselves with that old line about children being resilient? Did they notice that when they walked through the front door and dropped their suitcases and called for us, we raised our heads from the couch and looked at them like strangers? Did they realize that they were?

This paragraph suddenly allows the possibility that the whole story of cannibals could be a child’s fantasy. Or the children could be the cannibals. Or it really happened and… The choices can make any reader’s head swim.

All of van den Berg’s stories make the reader feel strange. The conciseness of each story and the layered understanding of human experience make each a gorgeous, hard-to-define cross of fiction and poetry. Her greatest accomplishment, though, is creating characters that readers cannot imagine themselves as, but can understand at a molecular level.

Humans and Animals: Connected at Heart: A Review of Ceridwen Dovey's Only the Animals by Tansy Bradshaw

cover credit: Penguin Australia

Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey
Penguin Australia (2014)

Reviewed by Tansy Bradshaw

Winner of 2014’s Readings Bookstore New Australian Writing Award, Ceridwen Dovey’s second novel is best described as a variety of short stories and letters. Less than 250 pages, this book’s rich stories peak to everyone.

In Only the Animals, ten animals are caught in human conflict that ranges from a camel who was in the presence of Australian author Henry Lawson to a letter written to Sylvia Plath by a dolphin. With each story, readers glimpse into the hearts of the animals that stoically stood by their owners or, like their owners, dreamed of a better life. Giving a unique insight into the animal psyche, these stories reveal the raw suffering and joy that the real heroes experienced like losing a loved one or the fear of uncertainty.

The book also pays homage to writers who chose to write about animals. As well as Sylvia Plath and Henry Lawson, Dovey includes Kafka, Ted Hughes, Leo Tolstoy, and Jack Kerouac. In a story with a camel who is the animal accompanying Henry Lawson during a trek in Queensland, she writes with Lawson’s style as she creates images of Australia’s outback by drawing on the Australian bush and referencing its natives. This is evident in the passage, “The goanna was moving through the dry leaves, making them scrape against one another like cartilage.”

Dovey has a unique ability to make well-rounded and lifelike characters. For example, “Pigeons, a Pony, the Tomcat and I,” set on the Western Front, is a story about a cat reminiscing about her owner’s life in Paris. There, the actress was known for her theatrical antics, and the cat remarks, “… how entranced Collette would be by this little scene…” like walking her on a lead around town.

A more touching story in this collection is “Plautus: A Memoir Of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space,” in which a soul of a tortoise writes about Virginia Woolf’s life by replicating her essay A Room of One’s Own with one segment called “A Terrarium of One’s Own.” The tortoise remembers when Virginia discovered him in a box. The tortoise says that “she had done what she usually did when she encountered a new phenomenon … and went to literature.” This story provides an alternative look at a writer, who was living through social change at the time of writing her piece. A Room of One’s Own was her stating that she did not wish to be just known as a house wife, wanting a place where she could write and devote herself to her work. For the time where men hold the balance of power this was a stand for women’s rights.

Only the Animals is a beautiful piece of literature that makes readers ponder the lives that these animals and authors may and lived. Dovey seems to ask whether readers can understand an author better by looking at the symbolic use of animals within their work. For example, Kafka symbolised disability and the feeling of helplessness through the representation of being a cockroach that has fallen on his back and is unable to be righted. She also postulates whether animals can return feelings we wished we received from other humans: unconditional love? Only the Animals seeks out the empathy in everyone, whether it be for animals, humans, or for both. It all but hands a typewriter to a beloved pet.

Life Leaves Its Scars: A Review of Michael Gerhard Martin's Easiest If I Had a Gun by Michael Chin

cover credit: Braddock Avenue Books

Easiest If I Had a Gun by Michael Gerhard Martin
Braddock Avenue Books (2014)

Reviewed by Michael Chin

Easiest If I Had a Gun is a remarkable debut collection from Michael Gerhard Martin. The short stories tend to focus on young characters who stand on the precipice of life-shaping decisions. In some cases, the choices are obviously significant—a high schooler alternately contemplating a school shooting or suicide—while others are less evident but little less formative—a lying, bullying, and manipulating boy attends a fishing trip to compensate for the absence of a real relationship with his father. In his longer pieces, a young man spends a semester groping to understand the changing dynamics of his relationship when his girlfriend leaves for college, and a woman navigates adult waters all her own—sleeping with her music teacher and engaged in the constant ebb and flow of conflict with her alcoholic mother. In each case, Martin remains fiercely true to the thought processes of his characters.

The collection opens with “Shit Weasel is Late for Class.” The story sees Josh Geringer—an overweight, acne-riddled high schooler—face all manners of torture. Bullies throw basketballs at his head, punch him, and shove their bare buttocks in his face in the locker room. Teachers and administrators are both oblivious and aggressive toward Josh for not trying harder to fit in. As Josh, the narrator, articulates:

I hate being a punching bag, especially in front of other kids. I hate his hands on me, pinching, flicking, poking. I hate his locker-room smell of sweat covered over with Right Guard. I hate being one of the weird ones, hate being the kind of kid that gets bullied by Burnout Brian McVey.

Because of his experiences, Josh contemplates suicide, threatening his antagonists with a knife, or shooting them with his grandfather’s gun. He goes so far as to bring the weapons to school, precipitating some form of disaster. The story takes a turn, however, when two good-hearted tough guys stick up for Josh and break the arm of the lead ruffian, McVey, in Josh’s defense. When one of McVey’s toadies, Billy, attempts to continue bullying, Josh handily pummels the smaller kid—then makes a habit out of it. Drunk with a new power, Josh starts calling Billy “Shit Weasel” and transforms into a bully in his own right. After inflicting one such bout of punishment on his victim, Josh ruminates, “I am sure he is going to tell, sure I will have to hang my head and pretend to be ashamed. The truth is, I do feel a little ashamed, but I hate Shit Weasel more.” Thus, the story defies saccharine resolutions or all but cliché scenes of the grotesque in favor of an entirely realistic shade of gray that allows readers to both sympathize with and recognize all of the ugliness within the adolescent tormenters.

Martin explores similar territory through a different lens in “Seventy-Two Pound Fish Story.” A boy, yearning for a better father-son relationship, places the weight of his aspirations on a fishing trip with his father’s friend and son, the Gormans. The boy lies about his relationship with his father, picks on Alec Gorman for struggling at school, acts out his jealousy toward his familial setup, and annoys everyone with his inexperience and preposterously boastful claims about his fishing skills and the fish he almost catches that day. In an artful moment, Alec’s father, who had at first insisted the boy call him Lute, retracts the offer, stating, “Why don’t you call me Mr. Gorman, okay?” The story proves to be a portrait of a boy who is desperate for connections of any kind, and who falls short with every attempt.

The collection also includes two longer stories that border on novellas: “Bridgeville” and “Dreamland.” Despite the strength of his shorter works, the longer form yields mixed results for Martin. “Bridgeville” maintains a tight arc of Jack’s coming of age during his senior year of high school, particularly through the lens of his relationship with Meaghan, who is one year older, college-bound, and alternately in love with, indifferent to, or actively manipulating Jack. Jack seems willfully oblivious to her shifts in attention, until he makes an ill-advised visit to her college, learns of her infidelities, and leaves in a huff. Weeks later, he succumbs to Meaghan’s charms all over again when she comes home for Thanksgiving. And though Jack can’t put his finger on it, Martin artfully paints a picture that their relationship has irrevocably changed at that point. In “Dreamland,” Martin is similarly true to his protagonist, Emilie, allowing her decision-making processes to dictate her path over a story arc that lasts for month. “Dreamland,” however, lacks the focus of “Bridgeville. It is, at first, the story of a teenage girl involved in a tryst with her teacher. However, it becomes a story about a fledgling artist who hopes to head to college, her relationship with her more adventurous best friend, and the ways in which her alcoholic mother’s lack of responsibility stunts her life. This all culminates in a suicide attempt. Taken as a whole, the story succeeds in capturing the confusion and multifaceted nature of a young woman’s life, but comes up short as a coherent narrative.

If there is one certainty to be taken from Easiest if I Had a Gun, it is that Martin knows his characters and follows them along their journeys to the fullest. The stories do not shy away from complex or ugly outcomes. At his best, Martin proves himself to be a master of a tightly contained form. Even the collection’s weaker stories hold true to a drive to explore every deep, dark crevice of the diverse characters’ psyches. Each one is haunted in unmistakable ways, and each gropes toward a better life. They rarely find lasting solace, but readers with a profoundly enriched insight into the human condition.

The Day of Fulfillment is Near: A Review of Tom Noyes's Come By Here by Michael VanCalbergh

cover credit: Autumn House Press

Come By Here by Tom Noyes
Autumn House Press (2013)

Reviewed by Michael VanCalbergh

There is something completely normal about Tom Noyes’s Come By Here. He presents characters that are often funny, periodically bored, insanely devout, and inexplicably sad. They buy houses, deal with loss, annoy the hell out of each other, lose dogs, and try to do what would be best for themselves and their families. They are prophets, lawyers, fishermen, reality TV stars, and members of the Fabulous 40s and 50s. Through these characters, Noyes captures the complexities and inconsistencies of being, well, human.

The novella and stories that compose Noyes’s book, the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize winner for 2013, inspect individual struggles that define so many people’s daily lives. His stories are often funny, though always tinged with very real issues. Even in the very first story, “Soul Patch,” which details the start of reality TV star Kingsley Carter’s downfall, environmental issues sneak in. When talking about birds affected by an oil spill near his most recent shoot, Carter says:

You want to explain the whole thing to the bird. You want to apologize for the mess it’s in, but then you also want to impress upon it how lucky it is to be receiving help. Of course, you can’t explain any of this to the bird, and there’s sadness in that communication gap, I think. That’s just one level of sadness, though.

Although amusing, this observation is reminiscent of the moments of over-analysis that is incredibly familiar to many people. Noyes maintains this subtle comedy throughout his book, from a father spending a lot of time thinking about the importance of his daughter’s scrunchie in “Devil’s Night” to the participants in “Safari Supper” noting minute details of the guests and hosts.

When Noyes’s characters are not over-analyzing, they typically see themselves or their lives reflected in the world. The most beautiful example is from “Per League Rules,” wherein Dom, the father and coach of a recently suspended softball player, Kat, is looking at the smoke stacks of a coke plant during a game-ending storm. He notices:

Thunder crashes miles away over the lake, and then seconds later another rumbling sounds like it’s coming from the south. Like there are two storms. Or one with two heads that’s disagreeing with itself… Like the argument’s over him. Like it’s none of his business. Either way, he’s going to wait this one out.

In fact, Noyes’s characters constantly reflect upon the world around them. This permits themes of environmental responsibility because his characters are intertwined with the world. Even if they don’t take direct action, their lives are affected by the natural world, making the reader feel the import of being environmentally responsible.

This theme is most tangible in the novella “Come By Here.” Throughout the story, a literal coal steam fire rages underneath a small real-life Pennsylvania town called Centralia. The fire started in 1962, and Noyes brings readers through four different time periods since then: 1969, when readers follow a self proclaimed prophet; 1976, when a family tries to make ends meet and heal from the loss of a son; 1984, when a lawyer and his secretary enter mutual affairs; and 1995, when a fresh high school graduate learns he is going to be a father.

The novella is split into three sections with bookends describing a highway that runs through the town before and after the fire has consumed the town. The first, “Old Route 61,” is one of the most splendid parts of this book. It follows a “carrier” and a “corpse” as they walk down the road trying to reach the end. As the carrier gets too tired to continue, the corpse gets up to take his place and continue the journey across the highway. This parable for the rest of the novella is expertly crafted. “At this point, of course, it would come to pass that the carrier and the corpse would become each the other” is a perfect example of the conflation between the literal action of two people seeking the new road’s safety and the representation of each character’s conflict.

In the novella’s three parts, a different character from each time period is given voice and Noyes delivers the three stages of being human: birth, life, and death. Birth follows the prophet finding his way toward worshipping the fire as he repeats his mantra, “The day of fulfillment is near” and introduces all the struggles in the other time periods. Life sees the fruition of incidents that define these characters. And death details the literal and metaphorical end of all the conflicts.

Readers see the true range of Noyes’s craft in this novella. From the mystical half sentences of the prophet to the exquisitely constructed sentences of a mourning mother, Noyes brings readers completely into each character. This is what is normal about Come By Here. The characters are so fully realized and constructed that they seem absolutely regular. This is Noyes’s greatest achievement in Come By Here because he captures the absurdity and complexity that is every single normal human life.

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• have an in-depth review of an unknown author or a new release that may not receive the attention it deserves
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The Hectic Road to Compassion: A Review of Lorraine Lopez’s The Realm of Hungry Spirits by Nicole Bartley

cover credit: Hatchette Book Group

The Realm of Hungry Spirits by Lorraine Lopez

Grand Central Publishing (2011)

Review by Nicole Bartley

The Realm of Hungry Spirits by Lorraine Lopez is an overwhelming search for personal peace, for both characters and readers. Lopez drops readers into the main character’s varied and complex life, and readers will be compelled to learn how the drama unfolds and resolves—all in the span of two weeks. They may also reach for a bottle of wine just to tolerate the stress.

Marina Lucero is a middle-aged teacher who opens her home to friends and family members in need of shelter. Her unstable life becomes overrun with their troubles, such as her friend Carlotta who flees from an abusive husband, her nephew Kiko who is kicked out of his house, her little sister’s ex-fiancé Reggie who is grieving from their recent breakup and living with Marina for the time being, and her well-meaning but dimwitted ex-boyfriend Rudy and his blackmailing friend. Everyone turns to Marina because she is intelligent, reliable, and giving. To relieve her chaotic life, she relies on teachings from the Dalai Lama and Gandhi—teachings that play heavily into the overall plot.

But Marina—despite her good intentions, responsibility, propensity to care too much, and lofty spiritual goals—is an unreliable narrator amongst many unreliable characters. Her emotions can flip at least three times in one page, and she is subject more to rage and pheromones than the rationality she attempts to wield. Her loneliness gets the better of her more often than not, and readers are left wondering how one so intelligent can lack emotional follow-through.

Luckily, Lopez is deft at making readers quickly sympathize with Marina’s plight. From the first chapter, readers are bombarded with Marina’s troubles in order to quickly understand her anger, annoyance, and exhaustion: Her nephew starts a rap band one morning and by the evening, he’s acquired a small dog to train for fights and claims it’s his calling; a neighbor’s sister asks Marina to help her pack belongings but is caught in the act of trying to rob a former married lover; Marina’s younger sister dates and seduces anyone who might seem financially well-off; and an ex-boyfriend’s best friend threatens spiritual curses if Marina doesn’t follow the friend’s instructions concerning his custody deposition. The tribulations quickly pile atop Marina, and it’s a wonder she manages to keep everything in line.

Through numerous extreme situations and their resolutions, Lopez shows that everyone should be accepted and forgiven, despite their flaws. This, in the end, is the main lesson of the book: to recognize similarities, not differences, in others and accept them. This Buddhist method of compassion has a Christian correspondence: “God grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

For example, when Marina’s harsh words about another man backfire, they open her eyes to one of the Dalai Lama’s true meanings behind his teachings. Lopez writes:

“I nod, my cheeks suffusing with heat. The Dalai Lama’s gentle face appears in my mind’s eye, his expression sharpening into disapproval, even disgust. Compassion, he writes, is built upon connections forged through recognizing similarities, not by fixating on differences and holding in contempt those who are different, as if they are lower than the self” (122-123).

Throughout the story, Marina seeks like minded people who are intelligent, responsible, and clean. Those who don’t fit these traits are usually met with consternation and impatience. It takes a small family to make her realize she’s been looking at compassion with the wrong perspective. She doesn’t often recognize the good in people around her until they shove it in her face. The passage above is a subtle turning point in the story—a eureka moment for her.

Although Marina’s internal world grounds the story, readers unfamiliar with Los Angeles may feel lost amidst the geographical references and the consistent use of Spanish in both narration and dialogue.  They may also wonder if life is really how she depicts it: poverty results in insanity and promiscuity, most men are too lazy to be responsible for anything, and most uneducated women are weak, selfish, and manipulative. It’s not a pretty rendering. Yet, most of the characters exhibit a moment of pure humanity, such as when an abusive husband reveals intense love and stand-offish teenagers show compulsions to please. If readers substitute their own neighborhoods for the one in Lopez’s novel, they might recognize themselves or the people around them. This returns readers to the aforementioned passage; there is always something that connects us to everyone else, and we must recognize that similarity and feed it in order to gain peace.

Bittersweet Soup: A Review of Marsha Mehran's Pomegranate Soup by Nicole Bartley

cover credit: Random House, LLC.

Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran is an intriguing narrative with a dash of wonder and one-too-many sprigs of enchantment. She gradually unfolds the co-dependent Aminpour sisters’ tale of evading mysterious pasts and a desperate attempt to establish a safe home in the small Irish town of Ballinacroagh. While there, Marjan, Bahar, and Layla rent a small cafe from an Italian landlady, Estelle, and introduce their secluded town to cultural cuisine. This results in both trusting friendships and despicable prejudices.

The Iranian, Irish, and Italian cultures are depicted only through language and food. Mehran created strong, distinct voices through realistic vernacular from Estelle and the Irish citizens. However the Aminpour sisters don’t present dialogue cadences. Instead, they use the same language structures as the narration: American. This could be an attempt to make the sisters as “normal” as possible for American readers and set them apart from other characters.

Mehran explores the sisters’ “otherness” further through their experiences with prejudice from the town gossip, close-minded society women, and the town bully. Although the sisters are never questioned about running a business without a man, the town (and author) focuses on their ethnicity. Among earlier instances of indirect prejudice, Bahar encounters hatred when she is angrily shunned by the butcher’s wife and men in a bar while trying to find Layla one evening.

“Something was very wrong here…. Something that went beyond the sad little curiosities of the old women in the butcher’s. Whatever she thought of that kind of small-mindedness, it was nothing compared to the bald hatred before her. It was an exclusion as foul as she had experienced in those scary early years in London, when the whole city was under alert of terrorist threats, and anyone who looked slightly foreign was watched with suspicion. Turning on her heels… Bahar pushed through the pub door, anxious to escape the dread that was rising in her chest. Just as the door slammed behind her, a sinister voice called out: ‘Go back to yer stinking camels!’ Raspy smokers’ laughs enveloped the rest of the smarting insult” (140).

The commonness of that insult connects with the characters, which mostly represent tropes. Bahar is fully developed and the overall story arc seems to center on her. Her abusive past resulted in mistrust of men, in addition to severe migraines triggered by fear and any conflict. She is constantly on edge, and her post-traumatic stress is enough to make readers want to hug her and hand her a bowl of abgusht and a cup of tea.

Because of this, readers will find common ground with Marjan. The narration follows her reliance on general kindness, food, and drinks as attempts to provide comfort. They also counteract her ineptitude of protecting and guiding her sisters. And, to ensure that they’re accepted in town, she uses her peculiar gift of making inspirational meals.

“Through her recipes, Marjan was able to encourage people toward accomplishments that they had previously thought impossible; one taste of her food and most would not only start dreaming but actually contemplate doing (78). … Evie and Fiona sat at one of the window-side tables now, each drinking her own bowl of red lentil soup as vague ruminations—prompted by Marjan’s magic—swam in their heads: Evie could see neon pink letters spelling out her name over the salon’s door, while Fiona imagined hers lighting up a theater marquee once again” (89).

But this relates to Mehran’s inability to remove excessive ingredients after her dish has been plated and served. Although Marjan’s cuisine provides a touch of magical realism, other poorly integrated fantastic elements cause hiccups. For example, Layla’s supernatural musk of cinnamon and rose is just enough for readers to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story. But Mehran unnecessarily explains the scent by killing the sisters’ mother in childbirth.

“Layla never knew her mother either, for she died shortly after pushing her out into the harsh world… The weary doctors in Tehran General Hospital had no explanation for the merciless bleeding and just shrugged with defeat when they told her father the news. They failed to mention that, as the last drops of blood seeped into the hospital’s sea green bedsheets, a tiny bud had popped out of his wife’s womb. When the flower seed fell into the pool of blood, it blossomed into the face of a full-grown rose. The fearful doctors kept this to themselves, partly to avoid a malpractice suit, and partly because the rosewater and cinnamon scent that accompanied the flower’s miraculous unfolding reminded them of a time when military guards did not hover behind every surgery room door” (29).

The background of the mother dying will gain readers’ sympathies, and it’s easy to believe that Layla’s natural musk is due to Marjan’s constant cooking with exotic spices. But a rosebud causing fatal hemorrhaging represents an elaborate need to appeal to readers, which tarnishes the story.

But Pomegranate Soup isn’t just a novel about family and finding a safe home; it is also, surprisingly, a cookbook. Each chapter is prefaced by recipes, and the rich descriptions of ingredients will make readers salivate. Overall, the novel provides enough intrigue and simplicity to keep readers turning pages without much thought. It will succeed when readers wonder if they, too, live in a provincial town that needs a bit of spice.

Review by Nicole Bartley

Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran
Random House, 2005

Weave Seeks Literary Review Coordinator

Weave is looking for a Literary Review Coordinator. Read on to find out more about the position and how to apply.

Description:
-Write weekly reviews of chapbooks, books, novellas, anthologies, or collections of short stories as content for Weave Magazine's website
-Ability to use Blogger to post reviews each week to the Weave website
-Coordinate incoming review requests from authors
-Recruit additional review writers through promotions and other means
-Delegate and track review writing with outside writers

Job Skills:
-Ability to work independently; motivated
-Good written and oral communication skills
-Flexible, responsible and devoted to the written word
-Dancing skills optional, but appreciated, seeing as we love to dance

We are also looking for someone who is familiar with Weave's aesthetic and vision. This is a volunteer position (as are all positions with Weave) and would require as many hours as someone is willing to give -and that is required to get the job done. Payment could potentially be free books and something awesome to add to your resume. This job would require very minimal interaction with the rest of the Weave staff; the Literary Review Coordinator will work independently.

If interested please send your CV/Resume and a writing sample to: weavezine@gmail.com

Review: The Curse of Eve by Liliana Blum, trans. Toshiya Kamei

The Curse of Eve is a collection of stories about women—women as lovers, girls, mothers, and daughters, women of hope, violence, voice, Mexico and the violence of hope. The Curse of Eve represents a first on two counts—the first full-length story collection from author Liliana Blum, and the first full-length book translation by Toshiya Kamei.

In his opening note, Kamei uses these words to describe Blum’s fiction: ‘foreboding,’ ‘tragic,’ ‘lighthearted,’ ‘dark,’ and ‘damned feminist.’

Foreboding, yes, as in the story of a mistress who meets Stalin’s wife or when a modern-day Miss Marple attempts to solve the crime of infidelity. Tragic, when women describe their struggles to learn the touch of a man, and others who learn it too soon. Lighthearted in the case of dwarf as Avon Lady and in one woman’s chance meeting with Ron Jeremy. Dark as the inner psyche of an artist who uses real-life models for his work. The Curse of Eve as ‘damned feminist?’ Always.

Blum deftly renders each woman in her own state of personal trauma. There is the moment of discovery between a husband and wife, the beginnings of an understanding between brother and sister, and the recovery of a woman coming to terms with her past. There are men too—men defined by women, men driven by their repulsion and desire for women, men as narrators, observers, actors, and catalysts for action.

In the collection’s title story, The Curse of Eve (A Tragedy in Seven Acts), Kamei translates Blum’s story of a woman coming to terms with the pangs of pregnancy. While her husband remains blissfully absent, a modern-day Eve traces her thoughts through the course of two violent births, the loss of her youth, and her imprisonment in motherhood. From the insignificant act that marks the beginning of her curse to the birth of a daughter who will inherit “the sufferings of her kind,” the nameless narrator remarks that she is told that she must, at all times, remember to, “Take it like a woman.” A theme that is echoed throughout the collection, we are made to understand that Blum’s women can take it all. Even as we become acutely aware of the extent to which ‘Eve’ suffers, as well as the tragedy that lies in store for her, we hold on to the hope she feels when she admits to holding her child for the first time, admitting that, “at this moment nothing else matters.”

This sentiment is mirrored in the equally haunting, Periquita Shoes. With stark prose and striking imagery, Kamei renders Blum’s story about a local balloon seller’s desire for a young girl with Periquita shoes. His single-minded passion is likened to his craft, described as one that, “rises, blows up, [like] a balloon reaching its limits.” His desire is compounded by the vast difference in their ages. As the story culminates in an act of startling cruelty, we are left to lie in a field alongside the girl and her Periquita shoes, “full of pain, but alive.”

The landscape of Mexico provides the backdrop for these experiences—a country caught between the realm of superstition and spirituality, romance and reality. It defines Blum and The Curse of Eve as being both border and borderless, a nation of violence no more real than the violence of love, birth, and universal womanhood. From behind the curtains of race, class, gender, and sexuality, each woman carries her own curse of Eve, and the means to overcome it.

It is this universality that defines Blum’s work and her achievement as a writer. Although the stories in The Curse of Eve carry a thread of the foreign and the fantastical, the element of humanity that pervades each piece makes the event of one scene as recognizable as the next. The Curse of Eve is exact and exacting, written in a language that renders both the subject, and the reader, bare. The birth of both a new author and translator, The Curse of Eve marks the beginning of The Fall, a descent into a fiction where we are kept waiting for the next apple to drop.

Review by Jennifer Lue


Liliana V. Blum was born in Durango, Mexico, in 1974. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Kansas and a Master’s degree in Education from the Instituto Technológico de Monterrey. English translations of her stories have appeared in various literary journals, including Eclectica, Mslexia, storySouth, Blackbird, and The Dirty Goat. More of Liliana’s work can be found at http://lasalasdelalacran.blog.com/.

Toshiya Kamei has translated numerous Spanish and Latin American writers, including Liliana V. Blum, Estrella del Valle, Espido Freire, Ericka Ghersi, Leticia Luna, and Socorro Venegas. His translations have appeared in the journals The Dirty Goat, Literal: Latin American Voices and Metamorphoses, among others. His translation of Naoko Awa’s ‘White Mufflers’ can be found in Issue 02 of Weave Magazine.