The Hundred Headless Woman (La femme 100 têtes)

The Hundred Headless Woman by Max Ernst
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The drawings in Max Ernst surrealist collage novel recollect Victorian black and white woodblock illustrations: nude women, besuited men, fantastic creatures, games, crimes, and conveyances encountered by Germinal/Perturbation, the hundred headless woman on her visit to a troubled dried-up earth, accompanied by Loplop the Swallow, "the Bird Superior".
References to mystery and religion throughout plus overt mention of impressionist painters of the era (Seurat, Cezanne, Rosa Bonheur) and other figures, Jules Verne, Mata Hari. Might be a fine college thesis and probably has been. Fascinating but still mysterious and worthy of rereading.

According to Andre Breton, The Hundred Headless Woman : La Femme 100 tetes

will be preeminently the picture book of our day, wherein it will be more and more apparent that every living room "has gone to the bottom of a lake" which, we must point out, its chandeliers of fishes, its gilded stars, its dancing grasses, its mud bottom and its raiment of reflections. Such is our idea of progress that, on the eve of 1930, we are glad and impatient, for once, to see children's eyes, filled with the ineffable, open like butterflies on the edge of this lake while, for their amazement and our own, fall the black lace masks that covered the first hundred faces of the enchantress.

"

View all my reviews

Small Rain *****

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Who would expect to be so completely absorbed by the stream of consciousness thoughts of a man trapped in a hospital bed threatened by a puzzling and serious vascular medical condition early in the epidemic when medical cautions abound (limited visitors) and PPE is at a premium. The narrator/patient is a college poetry teacher and, to my delight, mentions a handful of poets especially Gerald Oppen and Geoffrey Hill, Frank Bidart, Sylvia Plath and a Valeri Petrov Bulgarian translation done by Richard Wilbur. I was in my element. His husband is a Spaniard and the two of them speak English and Spanish on alternate days. The book also treats the myriad indignities of the wounded body, the magnification of time as one awaits meds, the helplessness and hunger. When the poet patient is finally untethered and released, awaiting a ride home, he says to himself: "Try to remember this, I admonished myself, since I knew it would fade. All happiness fades, or does for me, misery digs deep gouges in memory, sets the course of the self, I sometimes think, it lays down the tracks one is condemned to move along, whereas happiness leaves no trace...Why should only suffering be a vale of soul-making, why shouldn't the soul be made of this moment, too, this unremarkable moment, remember this." And his book does just that, leaving a record of not only his suffering but of kindness, love and poetry.

View all my reviews

Tell Me Everything

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tell Me Everything, revisits many of the familiar denizens of the small town Maine surrounding Lucy Barton which the author created in other volumes. The quirks and abundant conversations continue in this book, although this time Bob Burgess and his feelings for Lucy are the focus, when the story has a focus, as it meanders through myriad people's lives. Olive Kitteridge is extant as is William and many new characters who wish to leave their mark on the world. I enjoyed it, but it it had stiff competition from my other selections this month. It's a red-letter fall for new titles.

View all my reviews

The Offing *****

The Offing by Benjamin Myers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Offing reminded me a bit of another favorite, A Month in the Country, its emphasis on the English countryside and the arts discovered by young Robert Appleyard, the son of a coal miner, who has left school and is tramping through the byways of the seaside towns to the south, sleeping rough and picking up odd jobs after the war. He meets Dulcie Piper, an opinionated nature buff thrice his age, motherly and foul-mouthed, who lives in a shabby cottage surrounded by overgrown weeds. Many of those weeds she uses to concoct nettle tea and imaginative meals. The boy stays on in an abandoned shed at night watching the dipping shadow-shapes of bats chasing moths, (while) field mice carved the tiniest curving tunnelled run through the grass, and a barn owl watched on silently from its treetop promontory." He works to improve her land while she teaches him to read poetry, imparting her bohemian thoughts and independent philosophy, pointing out "the drab municipal buildings being constructed from cheap concrete. (By) Men, mainly. Where once we built towers to heaven, now we build frumpy sweatboxes for pen-pushers...The janitors of mediocrity. The custodians of drab and peddlers of dreck. We live in chaos and out of chaos comes war." Robert finds a mysterious poetry manuscript in the old shed which he learns was written by Dulcie's late lover, an esteemed poet. What happened to her? Myers has created a lyrical and lovely text about two disparate people forming a lasting friendship: "sitting here now by the open window, a glissando of birdsong on the very lightest of breezes that carries with it the scent of a final incoming summer. I cling to poetry as I cling to life." Me, too.

View all my reviews

Broken Open

Broken Open by Martha Gies
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Martha Gies writes a spellbinding tale of experiences in her itinerant life plus stories of the equally fascinating souls she met along the way. Whether assisting Great Kramien the Magician in his act, studying with Raymond Carver, interviewing graveyard shift workers when driving cab (see her first book Up All Night), or talking to an ex-Black Panther father or a nuclear physicist, she speaks wisely and compassionately interviews her subjects with a bit of humor for herself. It is very much a Northwest book describing growing up on an asparagus farm worked by hundreds of braceros when the U. S. welcomed and documented foreign workers and the author's myriad jobs in different parts of Oregon and Washington and farther afield. The writing is polished, as one might expect from a writing teacher, but also hones exquisite recollections: "the thousands of stars above the Andes suggesting a white blaze just behind the perforated sky; the afternoon I bent among dense ferns to ladle clear, bubbling spring water into my pail and discovered the pink pearlescent shock of a large abalone shell left by a recent guest." She includes a passionate telling of her own spiritual journey preaching to county jail inmates, and her eventual conversion to Catholicism, work with the homeless and visits to pastoral ministries in Latin America. No humdrum moments in Gies' life tales--I highly recommend this collection.

View all my reviews

Ilium

Ilium by >Lea Carpenter
4 of 5 stars

I needed a breather from required reading and picked up Lea Carpenter's book as a perfect antidote. A young innocent falls in love with a CIA agent and during their honeymoon, he asks her to act as an art appraiser to gain access to a Cap Ferrat mansion on the sea where a prominent Russian agent resides. Innocence, suspense, location: Ilium fit the bill with allusions to the Odyssey, revenge and other aspects of Greek mythology while zipping along at spy novel pace. The ending brought together some vagueness earlier about "the hit" planned by CIA operatives. Three and one-half stars, ideally, but the book delivered on its promise.

View all my reviews

Hold Still ****

Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not only are the author's stunning photos and a collection of family history snapshots included in this memoir, the writing is exceptional. And an interesting story of growing up in the South coping with dramatic family events and race and politics. And always creativity and art.
Linking to current creative monster discussions, Sally Mann (Photographer) talks about the distinction between the images she produced and their creator (accused by some of immorality). "Do we deny the power of For Whom the Bell Tolls because the author was unspeakably cruel to his wives? Should we vilify Ezra Pound's The Cantos because of its author's nutty political views? Does Gauguin's abandoned family come to mind when you look at those Tahitian canvases? If we only revere works made by those with whom we'd happily have our granny share a train compartment, we will have a paucity of art."
Highly recommended.

View all my reviews