Joanna Ruocco

Most surrealism is blokey and sexualized; The Mothering Coven is to surrealism what Belle and Sebastien are to cock rock. Same instruments, very, very different result. It is surrealistwee. Not a common genre, so far as I know.

I say this in part because I rarely get surrealism, and I'm not sure I get Ruocco's book; but I enjoy it *far* more than most surrealism or magical realism. The language is charmingly soporific; I learned lots of new words and about a few new people (Dorothy Canfield Fisher, for instance). I like that she makes no effort to invest these people with interiority or anything like that; they are *characters*, not people, and that's more than enough. Also, the small scenes are charming and interesting enough that I always wanted to read the next one. But I imagine some of you would find it more than a little off-putting:

"Like most paleozoologists, Agnes believes that the human chrysalis exists. It has taken on the commodity form."

This is very witty, blending together Marx and Weber and then attributing the thought in such a way that it's not really clear if Agnes really believes it, or if the narrator is having some fun at the expense of Marx and Weber and the way that science has replaced sociology and politics as the source of certainty for many educated people. But does it work for you, dear reader?

Because sometimes it doesn't work for me. Another character is trying to put together an inventory of the episteme because, you know, Foucault 'n shit. Then the book ends with some unnecessary, and unjustified, metatextuality.

"[A long sentence about a gentle knight on his charger.]
Is that a story?
'It is a lengthy sentence,' says Mrs. Borage, 'a sentence from an aberrant present, one of the many lapse futures which forked from a long ago moment. It is in that somewhat attenuated process of never coming to have passed.'
'An awkward phase,' says Ms. Kidney, not without sympathy.
'There is a tense for that,' says Agnes, thinking.
It's on the tip of our tongues."

Yes, this comments on the structure of the book itself, and highlights the constructedness of fiction etc etc (DID YOU KNOW THAT BOOKS AREN'T NATURAL OBJECTS??? WHO KNEW???) and that would be fine, but coming as it does on the last page, it feels more than a little tacked on; more than a little like the tic of the Brown writing program than something that makes sense in this particular book. I'll reread it at some point, and just skip straight from "What say the ghosts? They have just exited the Holland Tunnel, heading north" to "'Mrs Borage, are you coming?' calls Anges."… (plus d'informations)

Dan takes a long time to get going, I admit. It's entertaining enough for the first hundred pages or so, as Melba is accused by the various men of small town Dan, and in the process we learn a little bit about the place. But then, yowzers.

We turn out to be watching someone trying to piece together their consciousness as their self-consciousness falls to pieces. Melba is accused, among other things, of being or impersonating someone else, who may or may not have existed, but does have a grieving, insane husband. Her mother suggests that she's falling apart because she doesn't shop enough. If she shopped more, she'd have more things to build her personality with.

She would be able to hold herself more firmly in the flow of time; one of most remarkable passages in the book lightly parodies Benjamin's 'angel of history' (the school principal is Principal Benjamin, I'm not getting this from nowhere). Melba's mother tells her that, one day, Melba is "going to see something startling and not in a good way. You'll see a piece of straw driven like a skewer through a man's neck by gale force winds... you'll throw your arm across your eyes and those little hairs [on her arms] will act like Velcro on your eyeballs... that's the future, Melba. That's what not meaning gets you, eyeballs on your arm. Why won't you buy depilatory creams? They smell wonderful, like scorched lemons. They're cheap. You never shop, Melba. It's killing you, not just in the future, right now."

I admit, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing: theory-done-twee, irony with an emotional kick. I thought Ruocco might struggle to bring everything together at the end, but she succeeds perfectly, taking Melba back to her birth and the book, literally to its end. Dan turns out to be a kind of machine for making metaphors literally--including the idea, which I still find fascinating, that constructing a narrative in time, and constructing a self in history, have a lot in common. But most importantly, what could be a real snow-globe novel--self-enclosed, disturbing nothing outside itself--turns out to be constantly pointing at the world we actually have to live in.… (plus d'informations)

Finished last week and I honestly don't know what I think about this novel. On one hand, it's so totally weird and un-normal as to make it interesting on purely the level of not knowing what might happen. At various times it reminded me of Brautigan novels or Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman. But there was also a part of me that felt unsatisfied by the fact that none of it ever seems to resolve into anything tangible. I finished it and thought "what was the point of that"? Who knows, maybe that was the point. I guess I can see some people loving this novel and others completely hating it.
I remain ambivalently in the middle of that spectrum.… (plus d'informations)

Alack! I mostly liked only the stories I heard at a reading. The rest were too esoteric for me. Here’s what the editors write on the Birkensnake submission page:

We’d like to see narrative taken apart and then reassembled into something almost, but not quite, what it was before. If the story gets sort of broken in the process, that’s okay with us.

If that’s your sort of thing, go for it. I don’t think that way, so it didn’t work for me. I knew it would be out of my normal reading when I picked it up, but didn’t realize how much outside.

Full review at my blog: http://reading.kingrat.biz/story-reviews/birkensnake-two… (plus d'informations)