ETEWAF

ETEWAF: From WIRED a couple of months ago. I have run out of interest. Everybody seems to have eaten Quake and Quisp with Wanda Jackson and Hasil Adkins while wearing their soupy Sales Fan Club Badge, nowadays.

I go do now.

Yes- YES there's an ad at the beginning of the clip I CAN'T HELP THAT. Hit mute or something.

I find that this is always a real pick-me-up, Dave's "I Can't Read":



Yes I'm all curmudgeon-y today.

The luckiest woman who ever lived

"In Spanish, Rubirosa means a red rose, but to me it's a black eye," she said, adjusting a big black patch over her right eye. "He said to me, 'If you do not marry me now I will marry Barbara Hutton.' I said, 'That is a smart idea.' He said, 'Why won't you marry me?' and I said, 'If I must tell you the truth, I am in love with George.' [This refers to George Sanders, the actor. George and Zsa Zsa are in the midst of getting a divorce. "She is discarding me like a squeezed lemon," George says.] And so then Rubi hits me. I am the luckiest woman who ever lived. He might have broken my head or my nose.… A man only beats a woman if he loves her. I always loved George, the love of my life. After our divorce, George and I will be beaus." Rubirosa denied that he had proposed to Zsa Zsa, recently anyway. Miss Hutton, when asked to comment on Zsa Zsa's announcements, said, "I am a lady."

Life Jan. 11, 1954.

Bijou Roy

By Ronica Dhar
St. Martin's Press

Bijou Roy reminded me a bit of Sameer Parekh's Stealing the Ambassador. Both novels feature a young Indian American who visits India after his or her father's death in an attempt to understand the father better, especially his motivation for leaving his home country. Both are quintessential second-generation novels, I feel, because they attempt to recover the lost homeland through a kind of false nostalgia—a desire for a place that was never theirs, but rather of their parents and of the past.

Dhar's novel seemed to try to touch on a number of cultural issues, too, in the contrast between the United States and India in the Indian American's perspective. One example is that Bijou, the title character, is somewhat obsessed with Ketaki, her aunt's maidservant. Bijou sympathizes with this fifteen-year-old and wants to befriend her because the stark class difference of her aunt and uncle from this maid rubs against the ideal of class mobility that she is familiar with having grown up in the United States.

Bijou's name is French for jewel, a word her father picked up when he visited France. He also met Bijou's mother, Sheela, while in France, and this diversion from a more direct India-to-United States path for the parents is interesting for creating a more complex sense of diasporic movement. The France moment in the parents' lives also brings in Billie Holiday as a favorite singer of the father and Bijou (the father first heard Billie Holiday in France as well).

Bijou Roy also has a number of sections from the perspective of the father, Nitish Roy. (The narration is in the third person throughout, though the character's voices emerge in free indirect discourse.) As in Parekh's novel, there is a past (of the father, of the grandfather) haunted by revolutionary and Communist zeal. Nitish was involved with the Naxalites, a revolutionary group that refused Gandhi's nonviolent tactics for social change. I think it's fascinating how newer fiction by Indian Americans (and Indians in the diaspora) seem to be marking a post-independence moment of political contestation rather than the moment of independence from British colonial rule and the trauma of the India-Pakistan split. It definitely seems generational—that the memories of the authors' parents are what make the substance of the fiction.

There was a kind of interesting relationship between Bijou and her younger sister Pari, too. Dhar sketched out subtle differences in how they perceived this trip to India (due perhaps to age difference but also to the different relationships that they had to their parents).

Ultimately, I think Dhar's novel also aims to explore differences in gender norms in the United States versus in India. That exploration isn't fully fleshed out, though, and gets subsumed by the love triangle subplot, which somewhat predictably forces Bijou to puzzle through her relationship with a White American man and her attraction to an Indian man who is the son of a close friend of the father.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

Buddha's Orphans

By Samrat Upadhyay

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I’ve been behind the ball in the sense that I haven’t had a chance to read any works by Samrat Upadhyay. Upadhyay is a Nepalese-American writer, who has already published three full-length works of fiction, including Arresting God in Kathmandu, The Royal Ghosts, and The Guru of Love. His latest novel is called Buddha's Orphans, and since it was just published, I felt it would be the perfect place to address my reading oversight.

Buddha's Orphans is exemplary of a book that entwines the political upheaval of Nepal with a personal love story. The emotional core is the fragile romance that blooms between Raja, an orphan, and Nilu, who hails from an upper-middle class background. One might read the novel through the frame of a Jamesonian allegory, but there are really too many layers and too many subplots to consider that already fracture our understanding of the novel, where post-colonial allegory is perhaps one of many competing concerns.

What makes Upadhyay’s novel a success is not so much the romance narrative itself, but the concluding arc in which Upadhyay makes clear that Raja’s experience is not singular. Indeed, there is an incredibly interesting repetitive narrative motif that emerges toward the novel’s end that makes it unclear whether a certain portion is occurring in one time period or another. Yet the point is dynamically made: the “orphans” that populate the novel are many in form and character, and the novel imagines a way in which to interrogate the cycle of expectation and caste that are the mainstay of other works situated in the field. Indeed, Raja and Nilu embark on a love marriage, rather than the more traditional forms that arise out of arrangements and matchmakings.

There is also a very interesting occupational trajectory for Raja, as he begins to work for a publishing company that produces tourist guides. Here, I couldn’t help but think about the way Upadhyay “domesticates” the Nepalese fictional terrain so that we might move beyond the touristic gaze that reduces the local population to “local color,” so quaint as to be purchased through trinkets and souvenirs. To be sure, Upadhyay does grant the reader uninformed of Nepalese contexts an engaging narrative, but it is not without its political heft and Raja continually considers the nature of his own political activism and his desire to produce social change.

Given the additive impulse that still sustains many of our teaching interests in Asian American literature, Upadhyay offers us a narrative which calls attention to a country often overlooked with the pan-ethnic rubric that situates the field. In this regard, his works are a welcome addition to syllabi looking to extend into national territories deserving of more representational inquiry. I enthusiastically look to catching up on his previous works!

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

Eat Pray Love

Directed by Ryan Murphy
Columbia Pictures



Pretty Woman meets Ugly American in Eat Pray Love, a gender reversal romp in which the woman, for a change, instead of the womanizing man, gets to be the one with commitment issues. And while this female free spirit fling junkie cruise around the planet for high carb self-fulfillment is clearly likewise cruising in search of the chick flick demographic, the misguided message seems to be that hedonism is the new feminism.

Julia Roberts is Liz Gilbert, a professional writer and depressed spouse who splits from her marriage on an impulse one day, leaving her husband (Billy Crudup) in a state of shock, because she's revolted by his desire to be a dad. Liz's aversion to dirty diapers, when observed at the home of her publisher, a brand new mom (Viola Davis), sends the faithless female into the arms of a younger guy stage actor (James Franco).

But following this second anxiety attack in the love department having to do with the way said boy toy neatly folds her clean undies in the laundromat, Liz is outta there too, and off on a one-year flight from reality to wherever, as long as it's exotic and boasting assorted metaphorical pleasure palaces. Though how she manages to finance the hefty price tag on such getaways these days remains a mystery, back in the real world the Elizabeth Gilbert bestseller on which this whimsical outing is based, was actually more on the premeditated side, funded by a generous advance received to write the memoir.

Eat Pray Love, with its pampered princess on constant display, is so utterly self-indulgent and in extreme disconnect with its surroundings that the movie ends up much less about exploring new worlds than getting stuck in the protagonist's old petulant, overblown ego. As this modern day Goldilocks samples, and finds lacking, assorted tempting hunks for no discernible reason at all, that Liz eventually settles on a Brazilian Australian in Bali over the alternatives back home because there's presumably more in common, makes no sense at all. Especially because the only bond the lovebirds seem to share in contrast to the other potential mates is sex, sex, sex.

The scenery is fine to look at, but seeing Julia Roberts thoughtlessly rummaging through the male population is another matter. Liz does learn a few things along the way about leading the liberated life, including mastering the art of guilt-free eating and embracing your inner fatty—not exactly a small feat in that sexist fashion police culture back home—while being defiantly anti-motherhood and proud.

But the tendency of Nip/Tuck director Ryan Murphy to depict the locals of color in foreign lands as caricatured buffoonish backdrop while invisibilizing the impoverished millions of India so they don't rain on Liz's parade, neutralizes any high-minded notions on the narrative menu—in addition to her bragging rights around landing reasonable hotel rates because of terrorism in the vicinity. Not to mention the self-centered, shallow screenplay of Jennifer Salt, a disappointing followup to dad Waldo Salt's idealism and persecution as a blacklisted writer during the McCarthy period.

Eat Pray Love: Me, Myself, and I, and a side order of serious jet lag.

Review by Prairie Miller

Cross-posted at News Blaze

M.I.A. - /\/\/\Y/\ (Maya)

Interscope Records



A week prior to its July 13th release, M.I.A.’s new album, /\/\/\Y/\ (or Maya), was made available streaming on the artist's MySpace page. The agitprop-meets-cyberpunk video for “Born Free” is the most inspiring thing I’ve seen all year (a clear indication that M.I.A.’s message is as much visual as it is aural), and my guess was that her latest effort would be the most overtly conceptual album that M.I.A. has recorded.

The first track, "The Message," begins with the sound of keyboard strokes that reminded me of early alternative rock heroes R.E.M. and experimental musician John Cage. It creates a rhythmic paranoid beat laid over a mechanical nursery rhyme. A male voice suggests that the body is no longer private property, and spells it out for the “connected” listener: “Headbone connects to the headphone/Headphones connect to the iPhone/iPhone connected to the internet/Connected to the Google/Connected to the government.”

“Steppin Up” will appeal to fans of Kala. It mixes laser and power drill sound effects with a melodic reggae pace while asserting an increasingly cyborgian identity. “Teqkilla” recalls “Boyz” for its hyperactive layers of hip-hop hooks and fluctuating vocals. This is a sexy club song, and would be the closest that M.I.A. settles into mood music.

Although she is stretching choruses and pressing the temporal limits of pop music, M.I.A. still has a knack for constructing tighter melodies, and proves it on “XXXO.” This track is about unrequited love, and calls a potential lover out for his down-low tweets. It’s a beat-heavy examination of familiar odes to obsessive love.

/\/\/\Y/\ is definitely weirder than M.I.A.'s previous recordings, and it will be interesting to see where critics of her ability to balance political and aesthetic ambitions go with this album. Will the media continue to castigate M.I.A. for going too far beyond the pop star galaxy with her overt political agenda? If so, I just hope M.I.A. doesn't go the way of pop feminist icon Madonna and, in the words of bell hooks, "return to patriarchy."

Review by Maria Guzman

Cross-posted at Gender Across Borders

A Parallelogram - Steppenwolf Theater: Chicago, IL (7/1/2010)

Directed by Anna D. Shapiro

In Euclidean geometry, parallel lines never intersect. In post-Euclidean geometry, all parallel lines under specific conditions—for example, placed on a globe—will converge. In Bruce Norris’ new play, A Parallelogram, parallelogram is the term used to describe a window of sorts in space and time. The protagonist’s future self visits her through such a passage and discloses details of her life and the world to come. The intersecting lives—that of Bee, her boyfriend Jay, and the garden worker J.J.—are sharply critiqued by future Bee (henceforth referred to as “Bee 2”) to comic effect. The relentless quality and sharpness of the playwright’s words counterbalance the poignancy of Bee’s predicament: informed of the future, she rallies her will to intervene, with results that are futile at best.

Marylouise Burke plays Bee 2 and wins the audience over with her depiction of the idealistic young woman transformed into a bespectacled, chain-smoking, oreo-gobbling, sweatsuit clad pile of cynical resignation. The primary benefit of aging, she confidently yet conspiratorially announces, is no longer giving a shit. Younger Bee (Kate Arrington) becomes an increasingly engaging character, moving from annoying to genuinely concerned and of concern as the origin of her conundrum emerges and is further complicated by Bee 2’s interventions. Tom Irwin plays Bee’s boyfriend Jay, a man buffeted by his personal relationships who breaks off the relationship under the weight of Bee’s apparent insanity. J.J.—the sincere and ultimately unassuming lawnboy—is portrayed by Tim Bickel.

Big ideas are bluntly addressed—Is there free will? Is love real? Does life hold any meaning whatsoever?—but the play’s most engaging moments lie in its precise comic timing and repartee. Norris shares explications of men falling in love with folding chairs, or individuals saved by parrot’s bites, and these specific sights brace the sides of this quadrilateral form. Anna D. Shapiro’s direction deftly renders repeated scenes gripping instead of tedious, and keeps baldly comic elements fresh. Todd Rosenthal designed a splendid set, a standard middle class condominium that spins to show a hospital room and back again. The quandary of the play is presented on its programs: "If someone could tell you in advance exactly what was going to happen in your life, and how everything was going to turn out, and if you knew you couldn’t do anything to change it, would you still want to go on with your life?" If my reiterated existence included another outing to the Steppenwolf to see A Parallelogram, I would.

Review by Erika Mikkalo

A Parallelogram is playing at the Steppenwolf through August 29.

Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary

By Fran Martin
Duke University Press

The study of female homoeroticism in Chinese media is a small yet evolving academic discipline. It is, therefore, of great importance that Backward Glances was written. Exploring popular media produced during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, author Fran Martin addresses the ways in which same-sex love between women is commonly depicted, and the ways in which those depictions simultaneously reinforce and challenge the conventional discourse on homosexuality in China.

On the surface, many of the novels, television dramas, and films Martin analyzes do not appear to be particularly transgressive. A common theme among the media she explores is memory; stories of same-sex desire between women are often presented as a fleeting childhood fantasy, something that perpetually exists in the past and can never be fully realized by adults in the present. This memorial mode is also tied to what Martin calls the “going-in" story. Unlike “coming-out” narratives, which depict homosexual identity as the final stage of an individual’s struggle with sexual identity, “going-in” stories start with same-sex desire and end with heterosexual marriage. None of these tropes disturb the status quo of Chinese society, where homosexuality remains incredibly stigmatized.

But Martin contends that there is more to these texts than immediately meet the eye. The protagonists of these stories tend to be overly feminine schoolgirls who fall in love with other feminine girls or tomboys. When that love is not ultimately realized, the lead femme becomes sad and nostalgic, leading to her remembering and recounting the story of her love over and over again. The stories are written so that the audience will identify with the lead femme character; as a result, homoerotic attraction is represented as a natural, universal feminine quality. It is depicted as tragic, if inevitable, when such love is not actualized, and the audience is meant to share in that sadness. Although few of the texts discussed disrupt Chinese societal order by depicting a fulfilled, long-term romantic relationship between women, the depictions of love between women as idyllic, universal, and tragic when prevented from closure suggest an innate acceptance of homosexuality as something natural and expected in young women, if also socially taboo.

What is particularly interesting is the contrast between the complex and, at times, subversive images of love between women in Chinese popular culture and the lack of acceptance of actual lesbianism in Chinese society. Martin frequently mentions this discrepancy, though she rarely explores it as it might relate to pro- or anti-LGBTQ legislation in China. Her primary focus is on the media itself, rather than the ultimate significance of the media in a real-life political context. I most appreciated Backward Glances when it touched upon the audience responses to the texts. Should a follow-up be written, Martin may want to explore the interactions between the viewers and the texts in greater detail, as a way of exploring the impact homoerotic media has (or could have) on Chinese politics and queer acceptance in China.

Though academic in style, Backward Glances is quite approachable. Written as a scholarly text, it can also be of interest to and easily enjoyed by anyone interested in the topics of queer representation, media, and Chinese culture. The book covers a wide range of material, but never feels overwhelming or dense. It may not remain the definitive text on the subject, but until one exists, Backward Glances is a well-written, critical exploration of a newly emerging field of study.

Review by Carrie Polansky

Cross-posted at Gender Across Borders

The Solitude of Prime Numbers

By Paolo Giordano
Penguin

My best friend often teasingly tells me that the books I recommend to her are all too depressing and sad. I always counter that I recommend books that make me laugh. Now, that either means that I have a sick sense of humor, or it simply illustrates that the stories I most enjoy reading combine painful topics and awkward characters with humor, sarcasm, and witty writing.

Paolo Giordano’s The Solitude of Prime Numbers is exactly such a book. Giordano’s debut novel is the story of Alice and Mattia, two awkward and painfully lonely teenagers. Alice is marked by a childhood skiing accident that leaves her limping and deeply insecure about her body. In those cruel teenage years, she develops an eating disorder in an attempt to regain some control over her body. Mattia is haunted by suffocating guilt after the disappearance of his twin sister when he was nine years old. Alice and Mattia connect over their pain, their awkwardness, and their acute sense that they don’t fit in. But their bond is fragile, subtle, and built on a silent agreement that neither reveal the source of their pain to the other. Even in their connection, they remain isolated and lonely, never fully able to overcome what keeps them emotionally locked into their own worlds.

Eventually, their lives go in different directions and they separate, without ever openly communicating what they feel for each other. But despite being thousands of miles apart, neither Alice nor Mattia is willing or able to let go of their unusual bond. Reunited by a chance encounter, they are faced with a decision: to truly let the other in or return to a life without the other.

Giordano masterfully paints a world full of pain, loneliness, and love. While the humor in The Solitude of Prime Numbers is very subtle, it is there, in the background. It makes the tragedies bearable, the loneliness less hopeless. So yes, this novel is sad and depressing. But it is also incredibly powerful, and it will make you chuckle softly from time to time as you follow Alice and Mattia in their struggle to survive their childhood experiences.

Review by Annette Przygoda

His Own Where

By June Jordan
The Feminist Press

June Jordan was the very best kind of revolutionary: someone whose love and fearlessness were boundless, someone who never told anything less than the absolute truth, someone who measured out joyfulness and rage in equal parts. A prolific essayist and poet, Jordan died of breast cancer in 2002, leaving behind her an extraordinary body of work as beautiful as it is impassioned.

His Own Where, first published in 1971 and recently reissued by The Feminist Press, is something of a departure for Jordan, who wrote very little fiction. One of her earliest books, the novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and offered considerable evidence that Jordan would go on to be, as the poet Sapphire notes in the book's new introduction, "a political essayist without peer." But His Own Where is even more remarkable for the purity of its language, its sheer exuberant beauty, and the distinct and brilliantly original craftsmanship in every sentence.

The story itself is deceptively simple: Buddy and Angela, two poor African American teenagers in 1960s Brooklyn, meet, fall in love, and run away (from adults, from Angela's abusive parents, from Buddy's oppressive school) to the temporary sanctuary of each other. But there's not a single wasted word in this skinny book, not a sentence that's less than perfect; every phrase is marked by a poet's ear for the possibility of language. Buddy and Angela "become the heated habit of each other." You can feel each sentence in your mouth, rich and dense and begging to be read aloud. Jordan captures perfectly the intense, manic joyfulness of falling in love for the first time.

There's not a moment in the book that feels dated (with the possible exception of a scene where Buddy purchases multiple cups of coffee and chocolate bars with $1.75), and even now, forty years after its original publication, His Own Where feels like something that's never been done before. His Own Where does more than just talk about love; Buddy and Angela deal with the often menacing and oppressive forces of the adult world, the constraints of prejudice and oppression, and the difficulty of surviving in a difficult and sometimes unsurvivable city.

But there's nothing bleak or hopeless about this book. Love and hope abound on every page, and there's plenty of gleeful humor—most notably, a scene where Buddy organizes the boys at his school to campaign for comprehensive sex education (luckily that sort of thing would never have to happen today, now that all young adults have totally unrestricted access to information about safe sex and contraceptives). Buddy "be worrying about old people when they think that love be dangerous."

Start here, if you've never read Jordan, and then dive right in to her magnificent, searing, and gorgeous essays; and if you're not burning down the master's house when you've finished, you're dead to the world.

Review by The Rejectionist

The Love Ceiling

By Jean Davies Okimoto
Endicott & Hugh Books

As I started to write the review for this book, I realized that this is one of two books I have recently read about artists, more specifically painters—The Danish Girl being the other book that centered on artists/painters. I found the story of The Love Ceiling intriguing because the protagonist is a sixty-four-year-old wife, mother, and daughter of a famous artist father and long suffering Japanese-American mother who has recently passed away from cancer. Like many women of the so-called sandwich generation, Anne Kuroda Duppstadt has finally given herself permission to pursue her passion—that of becoming a painter—when she finds herself once again tending to the needs of her family: her thirty-two-year-old daughter moves home after discovering that her partner, Richard, has been cheating on her with a colleague at the hospital where he’s a resident, and Anne’s husband is not handling his impending retirement well and struggles with bouts of depression. This leads her to reach the conclusion at a certain point in the novel that “there is a glass ceiling for women... and it’s made out of the people we love.” Amidst all of this, Anne finally finds the courage to stand up to her domineering father, a man who demands center stage at all times and told her many years ago that she didn’t have what it takes to be a real artist.

I’m not sure why this is the case, but I rarely have the opportunity to read a book that features a sixty-four-year-old protagonist. Being a forty-something single woman, I wasn’t sure I would relate to this character, but I found myself immediately drawn into her feistiness, sense of humor, and honesty that is revealed as the reader progresses through the novel. I also enjoyed the author’s description of the natural beauty of the surroundings through the eyes of an artist (Anne is a gifted landscape artist). Painting with words came to my mind as I was reading this book.

I also had to admit to myself that I made the mistake of assuming that the internal life of a sixty-four-year-old wouldn’t be as interesting a read as that of a younger person, but that was definitely not the case. I found myself inspired by Anne’s character as well as that of an older female artist she meets at an artists’ workshop that she enrolls in to reclaim her dream of being an artist. In that sense, reading this book was also an educational experience for me because it challenged my assumptions about what it is to be an older woman in our society—that no matter how old you are, you can still be a vibrant, active participant in life.

My only criticism of the book is that one scene involving dialogue between Anne’s daughter and a friend in a coffee shop stood out as somewhat superfluous and unnecessary to the story line. Other than that, I found The Love Ceiling to be an excellent read. The book made me realize that sometimes it may take a lifetime to confront the demons of our past, but if life is a journey, it’s not how long it takes you to reach these epiphanies, but what you learn along with way.

Review by Gita Tewari

I Am Love

Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Mikado Film



The story is simple—and familiar, at least to feminists: years after being plucked from her home, stripped of her individuality, and thrust into a loveless marriage, a woman is shocked back to life and inspired to flee. But from A Doll's House to Titanic, it's not so much about the story itself as it is about how it's told. The "doll" of I Am Love is Emma Recchi (Tilda Swinton), a Milanese transplant who, upon arriving from Russia years before, inherited both a husband and the wealth of his prosperous family business. Being the matriarch-in-waiting of the elite Recchi clan is a privilege for Emma, complete with a sprawling mansion and a slew of servants, but one that comes with the price of a stifling lack of privacy, not to mention the complete loss of her identity.

Of course, it's not clear that all this is going on in the film, at least not at first. The way director Luca Guadagnino decides to approach Emma's story is the opposite of obvious, even experimental at times. For the first twenty minutes or so, it's not even clear that it's Emma's story, as the camera maintains a cold detachment from everyone, even allowing objects to partially obstruct its view, like a hidden surveillance. As the Recchi clan gathers around the dining room table for a formal dinner, Emma fades into the background, almost more so than the family's servants. Then, after Emma meets her son's friend and potential chef Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a seemingly innocuous introduction, Guadagnino starts to ease us closer and closer to her, finally arriving at a crescendo of close-ups when she samples his food for the first time. The meeting of Antonio, who will soon become her lover, and the way it is shot, beautifully marks Emma's transition from a sterile, colorless life to something brighter, more vibrant, and more immediate.

Emma and Antonio's scenes together are a sensory assault, the robust, invasive music and the sounds of nature rising in counterpoint to a similar crescendo at Emma's most dramatic revelations. Their first kiss is impressionistic, and their love scenes are experiential rather than voyeuristic. While revealing, they are not graphic or gratuitous but sensual and deeply erotic. (Afterward, my friend remarked that Hollywood could take a couple of pointers from Guadagnino on how to shoot sex.)

I Am Love is terribly rich, and not just for its style. Although it is Emma's story, there is so much more going on in the film. Emma's children provide interesting foils for her: daughter Betta (Alba Rohrwacher) is following her heart into the arms of another woman, while son Edo (Flavio Parenti) is about to enter a marriage based mostly on sex. It is fascinating to realize, as the film progresses, just how much of their spontaneity and spirit was inherited from their mother.

In stories such as these, and throughout film history, the unfaithful woman is typically punished for her infidelity. When an unexpected tragedy befalls the Recchis at the height of Emma's affair, it seems that this will be her fate as well. Interestingly though, she takes this devastation as an almost needed inspiration to follow her heart and abandon her marriage.

I Am Love is certainly an experience. The director and cast are so deeply committed to inhabiting the film's world and telling its story that you can't help but get pulled right in with them. Like the best films, it makes you feel like you've been somewhere, or at least been through something, and it takes a while after the credits have rolled to readjust your eyes and return to the real world.

Review by Caitlin Graham

Dreams in Prussian Blue

By Paritosh Uttam
Penguin India

For a long time, it seemed to me as if all Indian writers in English wrote “serious” things—complicated stories, language that needed some getting through, “big” themes, weighty tomes. And then came Chetan Bhagat and the many followers in his footsteps, who unleashed upon us a spate of poorly-written novels, mostly to do with engineering institutes and adolescent angst. It seemed as if one could either have five-star hotel caviar or roadside vada pav; if you weren’t in the mood for the first and couldn’t stomach the second, poor you!

Luckily, times are changing. In the last couple of years, Indian writers in English are attempting every possible genre, including murder mysteries and graphic novels. There is a growing market for well-written, yet easy-to-read fiction, which is probably why Penguin has brought out a new series, Metro Reads, dubbing them “fun, feisty, fast reads.”

One of this series, Paritosh Uttam’s Dreams in Prussian Blue, would probably not qualify for the "fun" bit, given its somewhat serious story, but it fulfills the rest of the criteria. Dreams in Prussian Blue is the unconventional love story of art college dropouts, Naina and Michael. The novel sticks to a small group of characters and does that well—while Michael is the anti-hero, Uttam takes the reader to the darkness behind seemingly "nice" and bland characters as well.

The bonus is that while the story is novel and the characters real, the language is simple enough for the average reader. A live-in relationship, a selfish artist, a naive young woman who realizes that love and fresh air may not be enough, the Indian art world, nosy neighbours and traditional parents who can no longer hold on to their children—the plot moves forward quickly, and kept me engrossed wanting to know what happens (and plenty does!). The dialogue works too, with the lingo of the twenty-something crowd captured well.

It so happened that the last few weeks, I’ve been snowed under work and reluctant to take on anything too complicated. Dreams in Prussian Blue fits perfectly into that sort of mood—when all you want is a good story.

Review by Aparna V. Singh

Cross-posted at Apu's World

Half Life

By Roopa Farooki
St. Martin's Press

Love stories aren’t really my thing, but Roopa Farooki’s newest novel, Half Life, shows many shades of love in a way that warms the heart, wets the eye, and expands the mind. The book opens with Aruna Ahmed Jones’ seemingly crazy and impulsive decision to leave her year-old marriage. She does this quite literally by stopping mid-breakfast, throwing on a light jacket, and making her way through the Tube to London’s Heathrow International Airport where she hops the next plane to her hometown of Kuala Lumpur, and back into the arms of lifelong friend and ex-lover Jazz Ahsan. We soon learn that two years ago Aruna left Jazz in a similarly rushed and unexplained exit, and the story progresses by attempting to resolve the characters’ (and reader’s) unanswered questions about her ostensibly hasty retreats.

To go into any depth about the somewhat unsettling plot would be to reveal too much; indeed, I recommend the reader skip even the publisher’s description on the front cover flap and dive headfirst into chapter one. The core of this story revolves around the destructive nature of family secrets and the reparative qualities of truth. Half Life is full of subtle yet astute observations about the personal and social functions of one’s identity as a person of a particular class, gender, nationality, and mental health status—and exemplifies how all are historically and geographically situated. Without being too obtuse or heavy-handed, the story is, ultimately, about finding one’s authentic self while avoiding being a detriment to those one cares for deeply.

Language makes the ordinary extraordinary, and Farooki’s gift is in the ease with which she perfectly captures the complexity of a moment with a casual, pithy description. Literary hat tips are littered throughout with tender references to such masterful figures as the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore, British poet Wilfred Owen, and Jacobean dramatist John Ford—all of whose influences can be readily felt while turning the book’s pages. Farooki is obviously a thoughtful writer, and the story is executed with well-planned precision. Half Life is penned in a visceral style similar to that of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies or Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows. Farooki’s witty wordplay constructs a melancholy emotionality that mirrors the interplay between the main characters. The ubiquitous sense of suspense maintains reader’s interest even after the elements of surprise are effortlessly divulged.

Half Life is a substantative beach read that is engaging as it is accessible. But be sure to slather on the sunscreen or find a cozy spot in the shade before cracking the spine. You might just find you’re unable to put this book down once you pick it up.

Review by Mandy Van Deven

Cross-posted at VenusZine

Brainscan #24 and #25

By Alex Wrekk

Putting one’s life on display is, in essence, quite a courageous act. Yet in this time of reality television, it is becoming more of a norm, infused with a sense of banality. Thank goodness for zines, where our need to know intimate details of strangers’ lives is a collaboration of intelligence between people who actually think about stuff, write with a purpose, and use their experiences to connect, grow, and reach out to their community.

Brainscan is an extremely personal zine. Its author, Alex Wrekk, is a zine superstar, and rightly so. Author of the popular how-to guide of zine-making, Stolen Sharpie Revolution, over fifteen years of zine-making under her belt, and the most intimate details of her life photocopied, stapled, and mailed around the world, this is a woman committed to taking her experiences in life and putting them on display in a way that is not for ratings or profit. Rather, she does it for the love of writing, creating, and sharing.

The most recent issues of Brainscan, #24 and #25, (which come as a set when ordered from Alex’s site Small World Buttons) are quite different from each other yet enjoyable in their own ways.

Brainscan #24 is a small collection of vignettes containing snippets from Wrekk’s life, such as her love for good beer and why her zine is called Brainscan. They are musings that give a good overview of Wrekk’s thoughts and attitudes without delving very deeply into any particular subject, making it a quick read and a nice sneak peak into someone else’s brain.

Brainscan #25, on the other hand, is much weightier, and concentrates on the story of Wrekk finding her way back to her true love, Paul, after being in an abusive marriage and growing exponentially as a person. Issue #21 of Brainscan is widely known throughout the zine community as it detailed the breakup of Wrekk’s marriage and is celebrated as a courageous story of overcoming abuse. This current issue touches on some of those subjects but is more of a celebration of finding the strength to love and being true to your heart.

The zine sometimes gets a bit painfully intimate to read, bordering on too much information, but it leaves you breathless with its honesty. It is constructed nicely, both visually and thematically, with flashbacks of Wrekk’s early relationship with Paul interspersed through a chronological telling of the dissolution of her marriage, and journey through learning to love herself and other people in new and radical ways.

Grammar and spell-check go out the window, on par with the zine making genre which rebels in both content and construction to mainstream publishing norms. Reading Brainscan is like you have gone into Wrekk’s house, sat on her bed, and read her diary, but she invites this intimacy, keeping no secrets. This style of writing is extremely feminist as it takes subjects women are told to keep hidden and be ashamed of and puts them out into the world, with a sense of acknowledgment and pride in personal growth, and the sharing of stories, in turn facilitating community dialogue.

Review by Jyoti Roy

The Danish Girl

By David Ebershoff
Penguin Books

The Danish Girl is like a multilayered Flemish painting or tapestry. On the surface, it’s the story of the marriage of two painters, Clara and Einar. However, Einar Wegener was the first male to undergo successful gender affirming surgery. And The Danish Girl is also the story of a search for one’s true identity, and how one navigates that struggle within the boundaries of a relationship.

The novel opens in Copenhagen in the 1920s and the author has painted a rich landscape of the country and culture at the time, which I found almost as interesting as the storyline. We meet Clara and Einar after they have settled into a domestic routine, of sorts: two painters living in Copenhagen trying to make a living through their art. Known for his landscapes, Einar is the more acclaimed and successful of the two, while Clara finds herself painting portraits of well-known businessmen and society types. Clara is a young, willful, and wealthy California heiress who fell in love with Einar while enrolled in art classes at the Royal Academy, where he is a teacher. Despite being six years her senior, Einer was shy and awkward, and Clara pursued him somewhat relentlessly.

As the novel progresses, we discover that Einar has been encouraged by Clara to occasionally dress in women’s clothes when her female subjects are delayed or unable to make their sitting appointments. Einar is a slender, pretty man who is described as "beautiful" in the novel. Clara senses that Einar has a love of all things feminine, and starts to encourage him to dress as a woman, who they start introducing as Einar's distant cousin Lili to their friends. At first, this is a secret game between the pair, but as Einar needs to dress as Lili more and more, the dynamic in the marriage changes, making Clara increasingly uncomfortable. Clara believes that part of loving someone is doing whatever you can do to make them happy, and although she is ambivalent about Einar’s need to dress as Lili, her paintings of Lili start to garner her praise and acclaim in the art world.

The subject matter of The Danish Girl could have been treated as a spectacle, or voyeuristic experience, but it is treated sensitively by the author. The author sensitively renders Einar’s sometimes painful experiences with his changing identity, and we experience the distinct worlds of these two separate individuals. I was surprised to discover that this novel was first published in 2000. The story is especially topical given that transgender experiences are now being discussed on shows like Oprah, which signifies that the issue has become mainstream, or at least an acknowledged part of our cultural dialogue.

The Danish Girl is being made into a movie that is scheduled for release in the United States in 2011. Nicole Kidman will star as Lili. If reading is supposed to take you on a journey of the mind and expand your understanding of the world, The Danish Girl is certainly deserving of high praise.

Review by Gita Tewari

Ondine

Directed by Neil Jordan
Magnolia Pictures



Ireland's coast with its cloudy allure and spectacular beauty provides a considerable level of mystic in Colin Farrell's latest film. Ondine tells the story of fisherman Syracuse (Farrell) after he catches a woman in his nets. She miraculously chokes and stammers back to consciousness to both her and his surprise. Her entrance into his life sets off a series of events altering their lives in unimaginable ways.

Syracuse's daughter, Annie, is convinced the woman (Ondine) is a Silkie, a mythical creature from the sea. Her enduring belief in the fantasy begins to affect both Syracuse and Ondine. The two begin a romance that adds to the dreamlike feeling of the story, until reality literally crashes in on them. It doesn't seem clear if everyone will live happily ever after or not.

Writer/Director Neil Jordan did an excellent job scouting the location for the film. From the opening scenes of the film the Irish landscape took on a character all its own. The green hills combined with the haunting look of the sea combine to create a feeling of enchantment.

References to various well-known fairytales were not subtle throughout the script. Mermaids, Snow White, and Alice and Wonderland were all mentioned to make sure the audience understands the fictitious premise of the film. Even the villain enters like a bogeyman with ominous music playing when we first see him.

I'm not convinced we need another fairytale-meets-real-life movie. Especially one that follows the formula of a woman being put in danger because of a man and then said woman is saved by a man. This type of plot line puts the title character into a passive role that depends on the actions of the male characters. Ondine continues to perpetuate the illusion that if a woman finds the right man everything will work out for the best.

Adding to the damsel in distress scenario, Ondine portrays a sexualized innocence. This is made clear in one scene when she is frightened while steering the boat. She hunkers down in a ball and reaches a bare leg for the steering wheel. We see Syracuse watching her from a camera angle aimed through her legs in an attempt to be sensual, but it left me feeling uncomfortable. Her fear was apparent, which doesn't seem like a great time to emphasize her sexual appeal.

A truly bright spot in the film is Annie. She suffers from kidney failure and is sometimes relegated to a wheelchair. Despite these setbacks, her spirit is full and strong making her the character to admire. She exhibits independence and curiosity that is often stifled in young girls. It is her tenacity that kept me interested in the progression of the film. Alison Barry, the young actress who played Annie, did an amazing job, especially considering this was her first film.

Although I'm not overly enthusiastic about the premise of the film, I do think it was well made. The setting and some of the performances keep Ondine from drowning. However, I recommend waiting for the DVD and watching the film when you are in the mood for fantasy.

Ondine recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and will be out in limited release June 4th.

Review by Andrea Hance

Savor the Moment

By Nora Roberts
Berkley Trade

Sometimes when I finish a book, I can't help but feel that the experience has made me better in some way. Maybe that sounds really cheesy, but it's true. That's one of my favorite things about reading great classic literature: it just leaves you awestruck. I loved the wildness of Wuthering Heights, the subtle, brilliant emotions of Jane Eyre, the intricate story of A Tale of Two Cities, and the straight-up genius wit of Les Liaisons dangereuse.

There are modern writers who can move me, too, like in My Sister's Keeper. Avid readers know this. This is why we read. And then there are some books that, after you read them, you feel like part of your brain has been lobotomized. I give you Nora Roberts' Savor the Moment.

Maybe that sounds harsh, but I think it's justified. I like Nora Roberts, I really do. I've read almost all of her books. I've come to expect a formulaic, predictable story from her, but I'm okay with that. Hell, that's precisely why I read the romance genre in general. What I'm not okay with her trying to sell me shit. And I'm sorry, but that's what she's doing in this Bride Quartet series.

I wasn't particularly kind to the last installment in this series, Bed of Roses, but again, I was justified. Emma was effing annoying, and the way that Roberts expected the reader to accept that her behavior was rational and not insulting to all women was insulting to all women. I had hopes that the rest of the books would be better because my biggest problem with Bed of Roses was Emma's perfect life. Laurel, the heroine in Savor the Moment, is not perfect. But does Roberts delve into Laurel's issues in any depth? Does Roberts show us anything about Laurel outside of her love for the hero, Del? No. Seriously, folks, she doesn't. Laurel apparently has a background that I would have liked to learn about. But I never got that chance.

Come on, Nora. It's bad enough that you're writing four books about freakin' weddings. As if the wedding industry in this country isn't absolutely ridiculous in the way that they put all the focus on one day, you give us four women who make their livelihood out of catering to these self-absorbed people.

Not only that, but you present them in a really annoying way. These women never make freakin' mistakes. Ever. They always know exactly how to talk down a bride, or exactly which flowers they'll like, or exactly what cake they'll want. Every. Single. Time. Throw in some screw-ups every once in a while and we'll talk.

The worst is Mac, the photographer. This woman sounds like the kind of photographer that makes me hulk out. In the first book she did a pregnancy session where she made the pregnant lady get naked. Anyone who knows me knows I hate those kind of pictures with a passion that will never die. And I'm sorry, Nora, but it sounds like Mac has little to no imagination as a photographer. The bride is a florist? Let's shoot her in a garden! The groom is an English teacher? Let's shoot him with books! The couple met as children and shared a fondness for cookies? Let's shoot them with cookies! Please. I know wedding photographers that do amazing, amazing work and never result to that unimaginative shit.

But your worst transgression is the complete and utter failure to portray these women in a real way. They are obsessed with weddings, and even when the four friends are together, all they talk about is work or relationships. Oh, yeah, and sex. These women never shut up about sex. When they have it, they have to make mention of it. When they're not having it, they make mention of the others having it. Seriously, I don't know women like this. Don't they ever talk about important stuff? Current events, the economy, feminism, celebrity gossip, books they've read, etc? Nope. Just men. And weddings. And sex with men.

Look, I get that you've got a theme here. Each woman in this series needs to get a man in each installment of the series. But for the love of God, what is wrong with dating for a while? Emma and Laurel were with their respective men for about two months tops before they're distraught over whether or not the men want to be with them forever. For fuck's sake, what is the rush? Why can't a couple admit that they're in love more than five minutes before a marriage proposal?

As you can tell, I did not like this book. At all. But I will still read the last book, because I'm a masochist. And an optimist. Parker, the last heroine to be paired up, has the potential to be more multidimensional than all her man-crazy friends. She also comes across as truly independent and strong. But Nora, you've gotta step it up. You're getting lazy, here. Don't think we haven't noticed.

Review by Lindsey Simon

Cross-posted at The Bookshelf

Erotic Poems

By E.E. Cummings
Edited by George James Firmage
W.W. Norton

Love, sex, and springtime are fundamental themes in E.E. Cummings’ lifetime body of work, and in Erotic Poems, editor George James Firmage brings together pieces by Cummings’ that are especially sexual, exalting of fertility, and written in a voice that is at once fresh and wise, evocative of the dumb yet utterly precise instinct to procreate.

These poems, and the line drawings (also by Cummings), were selected from the poet’s original manuscripts and are diverse in their eroticism, tone, and form. Representing a spectrum of sexual desire, thought, and impulse, the poems range from humorous to romantic, graphic to tender. Some are raw, even violent, while others are philosophical, and still others are playful but intelligent. My favorites led me to laugh, delighted by both the humor and the poetic genius in the verse, or else moved me to a deep sentimental ache at the beauty and tragedy of love and the existential anguish in its inevitable loss.

A particularly evocative poem entitled "ix." has a dark shadowy edge evoking the violence of both desire and of life itself, as well as a melancholy awareness of eventual extinguishment of life. It begins:

nearer:breath of my breath:take not thy tingling
limbs from me:make my pain their crazy meal

Then climaxes with:

flower of madness on gritted lips
and on sprawled eyes squirming with light insane
chisel the killing flame that dizzily grips.

And finally concludes:

thirstily. Dead stars stink. dawn. inane,
the poetic carcass of a girl.

This is not your run-of-the-mill erotica! From the sound of the words themselves to the use of unconventional syntax and spacing, the poems in this collection wind up to a climax after following a cadence that varies in texture, from rocky to sinuous.

Perhaps my favorite poem, because it hit me so squarely in the heart, is "vii." After the lovers have made love and:

all the houses terribly tighten
upon your coming:
and they are glad
as you fill the streets of my city with children.

Resting now, the lovers embrace, and it is Cummings' description of the melding of their bodies and hearts that, for me, so poignantly captures the sense of oneness between them:

you are a keen mountain and an eager island whose
lively slopes are based always in the me which is shrugging,which is
under you and around you and forever: i am the hugging sea.

The line drawings are themselves poetic, expressive, and emotional. Their style is reminiscent of Egon Schiele, Chagall, Picasso, and the deco illustrative style of the 1920s. (Interestingly, Cummings worked as a portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine from 1924 to 1927.) The drawings are a great complement to the poems, as each holds large and complex movement, lovers' limbs and torsos twisting and twining around one another, floating in passion.

The book itself has been beautifully and simply executed; when I took Erotic Poems out of its mailing envelope, I had the sense of receiving a valentine. Its white cover is sparely punctuated by rose and black text and a shadowy crease evocative of the furrow at the center of an open book, or the entry point in clean white sheets ready to be mussed. The fashion in which the poems are headed—with non-sequential Roman and Arabic numerals—didn’t make much sense to me, but that wasn’t really a problem. There were poems that seemed to continue into one another and a few that could work as a triptych. While this may not necessarily be intentional on the part of the poet or the editor, it is indicative of the streaming and deeply subliminal nature of Cummings’ poetry and this collection in particular, which reveals the interior erotic landscape of both body and mind.

Review by Matsya Siosal

Song Over Quiet Lake

By Sarah Felix Burns
Second Story Press

In Song Over Quiet Lake, Sarah Felix Burns tells several intertwining stories of loss, love, and healing. The novel centers on an unlikely friendship between a young white woman, Sylvia, and a Tlingit elder, Lydie Jim. Both are students at the University of British Columbia, and they meet when Sylvia is assigned to be Lydie’s tutor. Although their relationship is formal at first, they gradually become deeply drawn into each other’s lives.

Sylvia learns the painful story of Lydie’s past: snatched away from her family at a young age and forced to attend a residential boarding school, Lydie has spent her entire life struggling to salvage enough dignity, rootedness, and love to take care of her own children in the face of a world determined to tear First Nations families apart. In return, Lydie learns about the tragedy in Sylvia’s past: the younger brother who was kidnapped as a toddler, leaving Sylvia’s mother frozen in time and grief, unable to love her two remaining children.

Sylvia and Lydie narrate most of the novel, but interspersed with their voices are the voices of the other characters in the web—Sylvia’s erstwhile boyfriend River, Lydie’s sons Jonah and Mitchell, Sylvia’s mother Miriam, and several others. Serving as an overlay to the personal stories, the broader historical narrative shows up in the voice of a priest who was once one of Lydie’s boarding school teachers. Well-intentioned but passive, the elderly priest relives his memories of complicity—his participation in the residential school system, his failure to stop a cruel practical joke that resulted in a young boy’s death, his refusal to demand that Canada grant asylum to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

All the characters in Song Over Quiet Lake are victims of the ravages of historical or personal tragedy, and they are victims of the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma. They are struggling to move forward with their lives, to emerge from past sorrows in order to build something new. They are also struggling to be able to give at least a little bit to each other, like the song (referenced in the novel’s title) that Lydie’s mother gave to Lydie as a young child. Even when Lydie returned from boarding school having lost her native language, with the result that she could no longer speak with her mother in words, they could still sing together and know they had each other’s love.

The novel’s dialogue is limp and stilted, and the prose as a whole lacks life. However, the characters are convincing and moving, and their complex, interwoven lives tell important stories about national guilt and communal resilience.

Review by Ri J. Turner