“Woman Inside Out” by Kathryn Magendie

The new literary magazine Sotto Voce, which is available online and soon in print as well, features in its second issue a short story by Kathryn Magendie, a North Carolina author and editor of The Rose & Thorn E-Zine.

Magendie’s story is one of those rare pieces that use smooth and graceful style to strip characters, and I’d say humanity itself, to the bones. Unlike many intellectual writers, Magendie carves her well-thought, deep, and witty prose with exquisite poetics that balance out her brooding mind.

The story is about Beth, a Vicodin munching, fifty-year-old woman who keeps her husband ignorant of his failures, which are at the same time her own failures.

“Beth hates the smell of sex in the morning. Her panties hug her thighs as she lets loose the water she’s held since the sun first broke over the mountaintops. She feels chilled, but her stream is hot and that heat makes her feel alive, in a way the sperm squiggling inside to her useless womb does not. She imagines the little spermlets’ struggles to find the eggs that no longer drop like beautiful ripe fruit. Not that those ripe fruit ever bore anything more than an ache.”

Struggling to reconcile her young bones with what she sees as older face, Beth attracts a younger man, which both flatters her and pushes her deeper into the strange state that is neither that of sadness, nor repressed desire, neither lack nor the fed-up-ness. Beth is flattered by the young lover, but the meaninglessness of it comes up when she reacts to his name: “‘By the way, my name’s Gary.’ She thinks what a normal name this is. Not like Zeus, or Hamlet, or Thor, or Hercules.” Then again after they’ve had sex.

Magendie’s earlier stories and brilliant essays indeed all create the same kind of strength-fragility, and wit-sensibility syntheses. Read “Woman Inside Out” online, and visit Magendie’s blog where she speaks about her forthcoming book Tender Graces.

“The Limner” by Julian Barnes

The New Yorker opens the 2009 fiction year with Barnes’ short story about Mr. Wadsworth, not-quite-an-artist, and yet not a non-artist. He paints anything people order: portraits, horses, even windows in bad times. The name evokes Wordsworth and the story gives a funny and serious take on the role of an artist in his community: “Wadsworth was paid to represent waistcoats, not opinions. Of course, it was more complicated than that: to represent the waistcoat, and the wig, and the breeches, was to represent an opinion—indeed, a whole corpus of them. The waistcoat and breeches showed the body beneath, as the wig and hat showed the brain beneath—though, in some cases, it was a pictorial exaggeration to suggest that any brains lay beneath.”

Through the deaf figure of Wadsworth, Barnes asks all the old questions about art, artists, mediocrity, excellence, the nature of reality artists “represent” or perhaps even “present as it is”, the truth in painting, the lie in art, the embellishing that sometimes appears as its opposite, the soft religious flavor in artistry, and what not, but everything seems fresh, light/heavy, intimate and yet often ironic.

What I liked the most is the stress on deafness. You’d think a painter doesn’t need to hear because art is purely visual, but in this story sounds are somehow essential to painting. Perhaps because a painter does not merely re-present reality, not does he simply change it into something more beautiful/uglier. The sound in painting is the secret ingredient, what makes Wadsworth an artist in my eyes or rather ears (I tried reading the story aloud right away as if some invisible muse told me so, sorry if I sound ironic).

He’s also something between a master and a slave, in Hegelian terms. Not quite the one, not quite the other. But he is not the Romantic artist/slave whose work is so magnificent that it gives flavor to an empire, but a local bread winner, which I loved.

I relished “The Limner” like no story in a long time. Read it at The New Yorker web site, and please do comment here if you have a different reading. I’d love to discuss it further.

Gaza on my Mind

When I opened this blog it was not to pour out my everyday frustrations and joys, my political preferences, etc. I opened this blog to review fiction, which to me often can speak the truth, and denaturalize ideological determination of everyday life.

I started writing a new novel last summer, a novel about a Palestinian boy Yusuf, born in Gaza, adopted by an American nurse from North Carolina and renamed into Joseph. When  wrote the first chapters I thought I would go to Gaza, spend some time in Palestine and Israel, which are the holy land for billions of people world over. I thought the situation was getting better. My mistake, your mistake, everyone’s mistake, isn’t it?

Instead of fiction, this entry is about real blood and failure to act. I feel impotent. I can say a few words, but bigger words by bigger men and women have accomplished nothing. Watching everything from a safe place it seems to me that thoughts and action, language and action are truly split. There is such a thing as empty, idle talk. Maybe it is still only the word of God that is pure action. I wish I could hear Him speak.

I have friends religious and secular, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and what not. I do not give a damn about Hamas and Israeli politicians and soldiers. The moment I see a dead kid, or a cringing-against-a-crumbling-wall kid, or a dusty-lips kid, or an at-gun-point kid, I do not give a damn about the reasons of the vicious individual or even a community that made the kid that way, his or her hands should not be able to use a fork. I do not care who started what, because one thing I believe is true, those kids did not start it. Whether you are an Israeli soldier or a wannabe suicide killer aiming at a coffee shop or a bus, you just got an entry in my black book, and all rationalization in the world cannot help you.

Not only are the rocket-shooting, tank-driving, gun-firing, gut-kicking guilty right now, but also ever-babbling politicians of the world that spend our money to fly to conventions and say they feel “sad” and then nothing. The word “must” as in “must-stop-fighting” and “must-find-a-peaceful-solution” does not entail action in itself. It’s idle talk. The US soldiers from those videos in support of the war in Iraq always say how proud they are to be fighting to bring peace and democracy and how they are willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause. Well maybe someone should send those soldiers, and the soldiers from all over the world, mix them, send them to enter the region to cease all the weapons, secure the Palestinian kids, secure the Israeli kids, whoever needs securing. Where are the wannabe martyrs now? Why don’t they stand in front of tanks and gun fire? Where are the suicide bombers? I’d like to see a wall of them in front of the victimized kids rather than on a local bus. All those who found it necessary to rage against silly Danish cartoons, if you really want to show you are good Muslims come and stand in front of those Palestinian kids, those Israeli kids too. The Jews who like to talk about their victim-hood like we Bosnians and all other peoples who have suffered from occupation and extermination, why not raise your voices and use your bodies to defend other people like you. Are national agendas really on your priority lists. Killing one innocent person is like killing the entire world. We say we need reason to solve the conflict, but it is nothing but reason that keeps it aflame. All we do is reason to justify our actions. Reason, the fickle tool of destruction, reason the damn pliable tool and a turncoat.

Nuff said, I keep babbling myself. Words do nothing to soothe the anguish, to mend wounds, or wash dry lips. But maybe one word could be used over and again once the rifles are packed again and tanks parked deep under ground: Sorry. Everyone should say it to the other no matter what. Sorry. Such an irrational word, especially in a complete sentence: I‘m sorry.

“Sleep” by Roddy Doyle

A nice story, with some heartbreaking twists and turns. “It was the thing he’d always loved about her. The way she could sleep. When they’d just started going with each other, before they really knew each other, he’d lie awake, hoping she’d wake up, praying for it, dying. But even then he’d loved to look at her while she slept. There was something about it that made him feel lucky, or privileged. Or trusted. She could do that beside him, turn everything off, all the defenses, and let him watch her.”

Read the story.

“Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” by Yiyun Li

The protagonist Siyu has practically lost her marriage prospects, but goes out on a date with Hanfeng: “He was raised by his mother alone, as she was by her father. She wondered if his mother, who had set up their date, had told him about that.”

I would have liked this story had I not so many times before seen the same setup, same points, same sentimentality, same characterization, same mellifluous colorization, and the excess of telling as opposed to showing. I feel awful writing this, but I really couldn’t wait to put it down.

The only thing that made me smile was the ironic reference to Siyu learning Great Expectations by heart. This appeals to a postcolonially sensitive eye.

Read the story.