Kristin Lavransdatter Meets Feminists and Black Metal

Oh, no. The Devil was probably not so convinced that he was going to lose his soul. But when she lay here before, crushed with sorrow over her sins, over the hardness of her heart, her impure life, and the blindness of her soul . . . then she had felt the saintly king take her in under his protective cloak. She had gripped his strong, warm hand; he had pointed out to her the light that is the source of all strength and holiness. Saint Olav turned her eyes toward Christ on the cross - see, Kristin: God's love.

I thought The Wife, Book 2 of Sigrid Undset's Nobel Prize-winning Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, ended at page 571 of my omnibus edition. But then I got to page 571 and realized it ended at page 701 . . . aw hell. So as it stands, I still have about 40 pages left. I'm at the part where Ereland's just been arrested for high treason. I will read the rest this December, along with The Cross, but I feel like I've covered quite enough for now.

So to start off, I bring you several passages from a modern work of historical fiction, Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus, as a point/counterpoint to Kristin Lavransdatter. Like KL, it is the story of an aristocratic woman who behaves illicitly and eventually becomes a nun.

What I do know, though, is that as I pulled up my gown and helped him find his way inside me he opened his eyes for the first time and for that brief instant we looked at each other, no longer able to pretend that what was happening was not happening. And there was in that look such intensity that I thought however wrong it might be it was not evil, and that while man might not be able to forgive us, it was surely possible that God might. And I still believe that, just as I believe that Erila was right that innocence was sometimes as dangerous as knowledge, though there are many who would say such thoughts simply prove the depth of my damnation.

She's married to a gay man; he's a poor unknown painter.

My Dear Alessandra,

By the time you read this we will be gone. And you, God willing, will be delivered of a healthy child. Tomaso is in need of me. The damage done to him is terrible, and with his beauty gone and his body broken, his need is even greater. I cannot rid myself of the accusation that my lust in some way created him, and so it is my duty to tend to the pain I have caused. My duty. And yes, still my desire. If you and I stayed together, I would feel that pain for the rest of my life and would be an embittered companion for you and the child.

Her brother Tomaso was tortured on the strappado by Savonarola's thugs for his sexuality. Her husband was his lover.

I have heard that some men like the idea of taking nuns. Of course, it is the grossest of crimes because it is adultery against God. I suppose for that reason alone one can see how those who live for sensation would find it most potent, which is why they usually have to be mad on war or drink before they can do it. But he was neither. He was mad on tenderness.

She's now a nun and is about to have great sex with the aforementioned painter. And will never feel guilty about it.

Before the manuscript left my hands I studied those crowded circles of [Dante's] hell. Suicide is indeed a grave sin, in some ways the gravest. But I find it almost comforting how Dante portrays it. The appropriate punishment for the appropriate sin: for those who would choose to leave the world before their appointed moment, hell has them bound back into it together. . . I have memorized the geography of Dante's hell well. The wood of the suicides is near to the burning ground of the sodomites. Sometimes they rush in, beating down the flames that ignite constantly all over their scarred bodies, and, as Dante would have it, on occasion there is time for them to stop and converse a little with other damned souls about art and literature and the sins for which we have all been condemned. I would like that.

For my October post, covering the first book of KL, I wrote about what I called the "anachronistic feminist": a female protagonist in historical fiction who displays remarkably modern attitudes towards sex, gender, race, social justice, and so forth. On the one hand, you can't really take them seriously as women living in a distant time and place - they feel more like the author imagining herself in a given historical epoch and describing what she, as a twenty- or twenty-first-century woman, would have thought and done. It's as though we can't take people from the past seriously as products of their own eras. If only they had stretched their minds a bit, they could have been as enlightened and liberated as we are!

And yet, the anachronistic feminist also reflects the author's genuine attempt to create a heroine the reader can sympathize with. The past is an alien place. But how far should the author go?

Much as I loved The Birth of Venus, I think it's a great example of this "anachronistic feminist" concept. Alessandra is a great character, but the way she deals with sex and religion feels way off for her time period. But because she does feel so modern, I liked her so much better than guilt-ridden, self-flagellating Kristin who cries herself into religious visions and faints after a conversation with a priest on sin and redemption. But Kristin (who is still no saint) probably represents her era much better than Alessandra represents hers.

It's the paradox of historical fiction.

Kristin feels very embedded in her time, I think, with all of Sigrid Undset's detailed descriptions of physical setting and her extensive knowledge of fourteenth-century Norwegian politics. Maybe Undset intended Kristin to be a role model and/or an author surrogate, but I found myself thinking about something I read once (in one of Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware books), about how culture influences how madness is expressed but does not create it. I'm not saying Kristin is mentally ill, but I do get the impression that most of her overwrought religiousity is the cultural wrappings of a genuine problem with narcissism or something to that effect. (Although if Undset did intend to create a character we should all look up to - FAIL.) And it's what makes her more believable than Alessandra, the liberated woman centuries ahead of her time. Undset is very precise in setting the scene and recreating the customs and thought processes of fourteenth-century Norway. And Kristin does not rise above. She's intimately tied to it all.

Yeah, she's annoying. Yes, she does go on and on about her horrible, horrible sin of consensual, monogamous heterosexual sex before marriage. But . . . she's real, and real people usually are flawed or messed up in some form or another. So far, the volumes of Kristin Lavransdatter aren't proving to be the best books I've ever read, but something has to be said for Undset's ability to create a character who actually lives in her own time period without overly romanticizing it or trying to change it. You know, I kinda like these books!

---

Other posts by Kristin Lavransdatter read-along participants:

Amy at New Century Reading
Claire at kiss a cloud
Dawn at She is Too Fond of Books
Emily at Evening All Afternoon
Frances at Nonsuch Book
Gavin at Page247
Jill at Rhapsody in Books
justabookreader at Just Reading Book Blog (Part 1)
Lena at Save Ophelia
Lu at Regular Rumination
Richard at Caravana de Recuerdos
Softdrink at Fizzy Thoughts
Tuulenhaiven at What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate
Tuesday at Tuesday in Silhouette
Valerie at Life is a Patchwork Quilt
Wendy at caribousmom

---

According to Richard, after slogging through "the entertainment no man's land" of Kristin Lavransdatter, "a novel about fucking genocide of all things has provided quite the welcome distraction." (*sigh* Was it really that bad?) As for me, I LOVE Gothic/symphonic metal. But every once in a while, I have to shake things up. I usually do not listen to black metal, but Opera IX used to have a kickass female singer and I have to respect her as a female performer in a highly male-dominated genre. And I actually do like a couple of their songs. Unfortunately, she's not in this particular tune, but it's all about the destruction of Europe's goddess-centered pagan religions by the guilt, fear, and piety of medieval Christianity. In short: another counterpoint to Krisitin Lavransdatter! Try to enjoy! (Lyrics)

(Very Brief) Hiatus

This review of Gert Jonke's The System of Vienna is trying to kill me.

BUT I WILL KILL IT!

~ witty Andrew Jackson reference

Sunday Salon

Gonna be a really brief one today. I HAVE to get this review of Gert Jonke's The System of Vienna done. It's not due until December 10, but it's going to be my first contribution to The Front Table, so I want to get it to the editor early so that I can make any necessary changes and come out with the best review that I can. It's a very complex book, but I have pretty good handle on what Jonke's trying to say with it. Hint: ENTROPY.

I got through the first part of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, but I'm going to have to put that on hold for now. I received a copy of The Wall in My Head from Open Letter Press, which I'll be starting as soon as I'm done with the Jonke review. Then I need to start Book 2 of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy.

So for now, I'll just leave you with this great song from Delain, a great symphonic metal band I just found.

Teaser Tuesday

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square by Gert Jonke
Page 67 - In any building you enter the doors will open when you go through the hallway or the stairwell; doors open everywhere, people look out or come out, step resolutely right in your path, look at you suspiciously and ask what you're doing here. The lives of these people in Hernals are just this kind of constant "opendoorclosedoorslyness"!

Something Purple. . .

For the second meeting of Padfoot and Prongs's Good Books Club - held every third Sunday of the month, beginning at 7pm - we had chosen Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. It's the story of two boys and an evil carnival that tempts and destroys. It is also a rumination on growing up and the loss of innocence. Totally seemed like something I'd like.

Alas, it became the first book in a long time I've ended up abandoning. (Around page 112.)

Awhile ago, on the Twilight Sucks! website forum, I came across a thread discussing Silk and Steel, a fantasy novel by one Ron Miller. All commentators agreed that this was EPIC PURPLE PROSE. All florid, nonsensical description, going on and on and on, and yet never actually describing anything.

(Click on the image to enlarge. Also, here is another discussion, plus additional pages, on Livejournal.) Yes, folks, not only was this actually published, but apparently Arthur C. Clark thinks Ron Miller is teh awesomeness.

Honestly, I felt similarly about Bradbury's prose (even though it made a heck of a lot more sense than Ron Miller's . . . um . . . uh. . . WTF do you even call that?). It was too much. I couldn't visualize anything (scenes or actions) and couldn't concentrate. Like, here's an example:

Another and another time under the sky and trees and Will whispering, Jim counting the times around, around, while the night air warmed to summer heat by friction of sun-metal brass, the passionate backturned flight of beasts, wore the wax doll down and down and washed him clean with still stranger musics until all ceased, all died away to stillness, the calliope shut up its brassworks, the ironmongery machines hissed off, and with a last faint whine like desert sands blown back up Arabian hourglasses, the carousel rocked on seaweed waters and stood still.

I realize that on its own, that probably seems like a very beautiful passage, but the whole entire book is like that (at least, up to page 112). I had to read this twice before I figured out what was going on (the evil, enchanted carousel is slowing to a standstill).

I do feel badly about it, though. One of the hosts (either Padfoot or Prongs) talked about having written a "love letter" to Bradbury and getting a reply and everything. Everyone else enjoyed Something Wicked This Way Comes, although one person did admit to skipping about 100 pages in the middle because all the elaborate descriptions just overtook the plot. I kinda felt like that one guy, but oh well.

Instead, I strongly recommend Dan Simmons's Summer of Night. Like Something Wicked This Way Comes, it deals with young boys battling supernatural evil in a small American town in the early '60s. It is also very evocative of childhood and has a strong theme of lost innocence. Actually, I recommend ANYTHING by Dan Simmons - check out my reviews for Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, and The Terror. Guy is 100% pure genius.

Past Good Books Club selections:
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

Sunday Salon

I live in upstate New York - I mean, way upstate New York, far beyond what dopey NYC people think of as "upstate" - known for its Arctic wasteland weather that usually stretches from November to late April. When we lived even further north, a mere two hours from the Canadian border, my siblings and I would walk 1/4 a mile to school in -20. After several weeks of -20, 20 above literally feels warm. I'm not kidding.

This year, however, has been a strange one. First, it rained nonstop all summer long. I mean, SHEETS and SHEETS of rain, like veritable walls of water. This ended in late August. Then things were normal for awhile, until these last two weeks. Shortly after Halloween, the weather became unseasonably warm - we're talking fifties, which we usually never achieve until June and certainly never after early September. Today, however, it is 60. I do not know why. Tomorrow it will go up to 62. Hmmm.

Yesterday, my copy of March Dugain's The Officers' Ward arrived in the mail. It's a French novella, a fictionalized account of Dugain's grandfather's experiences as a disfigured veteran of World War I. I read it awhile back but didn't think to actually buy it until now. (I did my review entirely from memory and a bit of Internet research.) It's not nearly as depressing as it sounds. Dugain had often wondered at the ability of his grandfather and his compatriots to be so full of life and happiness, despite the injuries that forever barred them from being a part of mainstream society. The Officers' Ward is a neat little book, and the perfect antidote to the oh-my-God-kill-yourself hot mess that is Johnny Got His Gun.

I ordered it second-hand from Amazon for $.30, plus $3.95 shipping and handling. I didn't realize it was the large print version, though. That makes it kind of annoying to read - my eyes keep skipping over the page - but that's my fault. I should've read the product description better.

I have also started Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. I'm not even 100 pages into it and I already love it. It is to Henry Miller's The Tropic of Cancer (the misogyny and disgustingness of which I absolutely loathed) what The Officers' Ward is to Johnny Got His Gun. But I probably won't be finishing it soon. I will be receiving a review copy of Gert Jonke's System of Vienna, an fictionalized Austrian memoir of Jonke's experiences in Vienna, from The Front Table. It will be my very first review for them, so I'm kind of nervous, especially since System of Vienna seems like a complex book. I've been looking at the other reviews on their site, and they're all really, really good.

So that's me for this week.

(I wish Henry Miller was still alive just so I could have the pleasure of slapping him.)

The History Genome Project

Season of Ash
By Jorge Volpi
Translated by Alfred MacAdam
Open Letter Press
413 pages
October 31, 2009





And now what will we be, my friend? Russians? I'll confess: Beginning today, I consider myself a stateless person. I was born in a dead nation, in a territory that will lose its name, in an empty time the world insists on forgetting. I consider myself a citizen of Nothingness, I can flash a passport for Nowhere, perhaps I no longer exist. I'm an illusion, a mistake, collateral damage - that's what they call it - a ruin.

Ever read a book that is so large, contained so many multitudes, that you just don't know what to say about it? Because any attempt to sum it up would be utterly incomplete?

W.G. Sebald felt that, when writing about history through fiction, there was always the danger that certain vital truths would be lost in the flow of the narrative. At the same time, however, it is questionable whether the historian, writing non-fiction from an objective standpoint, can ever truly represent the personal, human side of the past. Austerlitz is noted for its understatement, its encyclopedic recitation of information, and for its use of photographs (pieces of reality) and memory (subjective knowledge) to attempt to recover forgotten lives. Jorge Volpi, Mexican lawyer-turned-scholar-turned-author, takes a very different approach from Sebald's detached, meandering prose that dances around the Holocaust, occasionally brushing it, but always preferring to ruminate on zoos, circuses, and architecture. Volpi gets down into the thick of things. He is. In. Your. Face. Of course, his history is more recent, ranging from the 1950s up through 2000, and subsequently fresher, without the blur of things long past. Sebald's Austerlitz was a work of memory. Volpi's Season of Ash, released in October 2009 by Open Letter Press and translated by Alfred Mac Adam, has the immediacy of a live news report.

Season of Ash is a history book written as fiction. Thanks to Volpi, I know why the Berlin Wall fell and didn't need the media to tell me last week when Germany was celebrating its 20th anniversary. I know what happened at Chernobyl, and how Soviet communism collapsed into the economic oligarchy it is today, and how Gorbechav's glasnost policy may have precipitated said collapse but really only threw the lid off problems that had been simmering for decades. Yet every protagonist Volpi focuses on is the product of Volpi's imagination. Jennifer Moore Wells, rich, miserable American economist; her greedy, philandering Wall Street husband Jack Wells; her iconoclastic sister Allison Moore; Arkady Granin, political prisoner and fanatical dissenter and his wife Irinya Granina, who is more principled than he is; their daughter Okshana, the lost poet; Hungarian-American Eva Hálasz, a tormented, cynical computer/biology/DNA genius; Yuri Chernishevsky the news-breaking journalist, human rights activist, and murderer; and various others - all of these rub shoulders with the elite history-makers of the recent past, from Bill Clinton to Boris Yeltsin to Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga to Imre Nagy to Norbert Wiener. It's impossible to tell who's real and who isn't.

Now some have argued that History is a neo-Platonic entity that acts on its own and merely sweeps humans along with it. Marxist historiography, for instance, posits that a universal ahistorical force (class struggle) overrides all other variables and tends toward certain inevitable outcomes (i.e. class warfare). It derives from Hegel's notion of the "World-Spirit," an embodiment of transcendent truth that can be discerned in the stories of disparate nations. History, in other words, is an epic narrative built upon a singular base superstructure.

Or is it? History, as the chronicle of human civilization, is ultimately human. In a novel concerned with, among other things, the Human Genome Project, Volpi portrays history as an "organism" made up of individual humans: as its cells that reproduce and perpetuate it, and as its genes that carry the information to move it along and develop it. A revolution is a genetic mutation that enables the species to either adapt or fail. The behavior of a few humans can alter a whole society (for example, Jennifer Moore's recommendation that price controls be abolished, which caused 99% of Russians to lose their life savings). For what are humans but products of evolution and biology, like every other species known to exist?

For centuries we depicted ourselves as central elements in the universe, children of an aloof God who turned control of the Earth and its resources over to us, the only species with the intelligence necessary to figure out the mysteries of life. Once we thought our planet was the navel of the cosmos, and only after countless disputes, did we dare to hand that privilege to the Sun, one star among millions. Our pride has no limits: The idea of being peripheral organisms, the result of chance or luck - mere accidents - still sounds like heresy. Irritated by this lack of meaning, we imagine that our existence obeys a supreme cause and deserves to be justified and reproduced. But neither Earth nor Sun is the custodian of the universe. Our misfortunes do not correspond to a pre-established plan or to the designs of a Superior Intelligence - vain consolation - and, in biological terms, we are barely distinguishable from the nematodes, to say nothing of the simians.

Each of Volpi's characters is concerned with becoming something greater than themselves: Jack and his money, Arkady and Irina and their ideals, Oksana and her poetry, Allison and her ideals, Eva's drive to understand the secrets of life and consciousness, and so forth. The Soviet Union and communism themselves were attempts to perfect the human experience and call down Heaven to Earth - to build a worker's paradise where there would be no slavery and exploitation. But Jack, Arkady, Allison, Oksana, Eva, and the Soviet Union all fell. In the end - what is the point? Why do we continue to strive? Are we bound by our genes? Will unraveling our DNA finally reveal the meaning of our lives, a question once answerable only through religion?

Soviet biologist (and Season of Ash character) Trofim Denisovich Lysenko once contorted science and crammed it into politically correct Marxist parameters (genes and chromosomes, it seemed, were a "bourgeoisie lie"), earning him the acclaim of Stalin himself. Volpi refuses to do such a thing to history: twist it until it reveals the truth of Volpi's own political ideology. History is human. The course of individual human lives sometimes reveal the course of history. Season of Ash is a grand epic, but that is the thread that binds the whole big story together. For better or worse, people act, and history is made.

Enough freezing me with fear,
     I'll invoke Bach's chaconne
          and a man will enter when it's over
who will not be my beloved husband,
     but together we will be so fearsome
          that the twentieth century will be shaken to its root.
Not wanting to I confused him
     with the mysterious envoy of destiny,
          the one with whom bitter suffering would arrive.
He'll come to my Fontanka Palace,
     very late, on that night of fog,
          to toast the New Year with wine.
And he will keep in his memory Epiphany night,
     the maple tree at the window, the nuptial candles
          and the mortal flight of the poem. . .
But it is not the first bouquet of lilies,
     nor the ring, nor the sweet prayers;
          It's death, that's what he brings me.

---

Now regarding our recent discussions on Kristin Lavransdatter and the definition of historical fiction and women's roles in it: do you think Season of Ash qualifies as historical fiction, even though it depicts very recent events? Why do you think Season of Ash is likely to be seen as more literary and "serious" than the romance and domesticity of Kristin Lavransdatter? Or do you disagree with that - do you think both novels are likely to be regarded as being of equal artistic value? Historical fiction - discuss!

And also: this photo essay on the aftereffects of Chernobyl.

Sunday Salon

Friday was a victory of sorts. I finally got my review for Alta Ifland's Elegy for a Fabulous World finished. Thing is, though, I'm not sure how much sense it makes. Ifland's short stories are more analogous to poetry (she has also written a book of prose poems) and that made it difficult for me to write about them. Plus, my concluding paragraph sucks - I cannot write conclusions. But I did enjoy Elegy for a Fabulous World and strongly recommend it to anyone interested in a unique take on the American immigrant experience.

Today was also Day 2 of my town's biannual used booksale. (I missed Day 1 yesterday due to a funeral.) I got The Judgment Day Archives, a novel from the late 1980s by Soviet emigre Andrei Moscovit. The publisher's copy compares it to Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, but it doesn't seem very well-known. There are no customer reviews on Amazon and Google couldn't turn up much information. Oh well, I guess I'll be the first. If it is a great book, then I'm glad to have the opportunity to give it some exposure!

Next Sunday is the second monthly meeting of the Good Books Club, hosted by Padfoot and Prongs. We'll be discussing Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I'm still waiting for from the library.

I'll also have my review of Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash out this week (courtesy of Open Letter Press). I'm not sure if I'll begin Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives next or Virginia Wolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Maybe the Wolf - I'm still Bolañoed out from 2666.

"the child's innocent seeing with the sorrowful knowledge of myth"

Elegy for a Fabulous World
By Alta Ifland
Ninebark Press
192 pages
October 7, 2009






Yet truth has always remained for me of an untouched brightness, which is not, as most people believe, the opposite of the colorful world of lies, for they both take their strength - the lies their color, the truth its brightness - out of hatred for the real. . . Truth is not real, and to tell the truth means much more than to present the facts as they are. To tell the truth means to refuse the accepted pacts between facts and the realists who see them.

The title of this post comes from Sven Birkert. Similarly, Dubravka Urgesic describes the work of Alta Ifland as a universe "made of opposites: it's warm and chilly, deeply humane and strangely absurd, gentle and rough, humorous and sad." Born in Communist Romania in 1967, Ifland immigrated to the United States in 1991. She studied French literature in France, writes in both French and English (her third language), and was awarded the 2008 Louis Guillaume Prize for Prose Poems for the bilingual Voice of Ice. (Here is a sample.) Her latest book, Elegy for a Fabulous World, published in October 2009 by Ninebark Press, builds upon this earlier foundation with a series of highly poetic short stories, beginning with her childhood and homeland and ending in a small American town. Each tale is an extended, standalone prose poem. Though several characters reappear, each piece feels discrete and distinctly different from the others.

There's the opening tale of Fedea the gravedigger, who is ruthlessly tormented by the neighborhood children, creating an atmosphere of both innocent fun and menace that put me in mind of the Holocaust and other examples of brutal herd behavior. "The Nonexistence of Adelaide Bauer" couldn't be more different: it's pure surrealism, focusing on the otherwordly title character and her absurd suitor, and infused with something metaphysical - seen in the ruminations on the state of existence, on the complimentary relationship between unrelated halves, and on the relationship between words and voice. ("The more he talked, the more he seemed to become one with his words, a fictional character in a dialogue he was now writing. His body was made of dream-matter, dwelling in a galaxy of its own, in which time was nothing but matter's ceaseless longing to be. . .") "Always Onward Street" describes the ironically-named street where Ifland/the narrator grew up and, at the same time, the collective character of her Communist homeland.

Part 2, Here and There, applies the narrator's unique outlook - a blend of fantasy, realism, skepticism, and faith - to her new country. This perspective, as developed in the previous section, comes from somewhere outside physical reality. It is, as the narrator put it in "All My Aunts and Uncles," an example of the "artistic lie," of the "mystification" of events that do/did have an objective existence, but which have been processed and rearranged through the narrator's imagination. It is a Cubist way of seeing things: multiple angles all at once. From a whimsical analysis of authority in "Sawdust Power" and the ironic observation of American business/religious customs in "American China," a central theme becomes apparent, carried over from the old country. Ifland/the narrator believes in subjective honesty, a seeming incongruity that reveals itself through the double-sided nature of many of her stories. (For instance: the detached, faintly amused depictions of abuse in "My Life as an Orphan," the simultaneous coziness and alienation of "The Random Bus," and the prevalent dark humor.) She is skeptical of truths simply told to her and faithful to her own truths, which allow for paradox and dream-reality.

(Ifland is not the only narrator, of course, and not all of the stories are autobiographical. Still, each one expresses something Ifland believes to be true, I would interpret each protagonist as a variation of Ifland herself.)

Despite what appears to be an overall time-space progression (towards adulthood, to a new country), the individual stories of Elegy for a Fabulous World do not exhibit the traditional linear movement of exposition → rising action → climax → falling action → resolution. In a blog post on Scheherazade and E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, Ifland disputes the "Anglo-Saxon cause-effect logic" which Forster purports to be the universal framework of the fictional narrative. The essence of Scheherazade is not that she survives each night through the power of suspense, Ifland argues, but the perpetual growth of story out of story, altogether composing "a Borgesian labyrinthlike view rather than a linear structure underlying the logic of 'next.'" Ifland's own stories are fragments and observations which build upon one another and altogether compose a window to a world. The point, then, is not so much to tell a tale as it is to observe and reflect, and the result is the portrait of an artist.

In summation, I'm not sure if I would classify Elegy for a Fabulous World as entirely fictional. It is not the quick read it seems at first, as each story demands a rereading to catch everything going on and to discern its relationship to the other stories. I see Alta Ifland's work as prose poetry, regardless of how long each piece is, and I think what I've been describing in this review is a poet's sensibility. Overall, I enjoyed Elegy for a Fabulous World and have found it to be a work I can easily return to. It is a unique perspective on the immigrant's narrative and is valuable for its aesthetic value alone. In short: strongly recommended.

Wordless Wednesday

I interpret this particular image as a normal vampire surrounded by Twilight vampires. (Click here for more Wordless Wednesday.)

Teaser Tuesday

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from. That way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

Season of Ash by Jorge Volpi
Page 247 - Nothing disturbed Eva during her walk with Ohlander more than the episode she witnessed near the wall. In East Germany, bananas had been luxury items, a privilege of the higher-ups in the Party - common citizens had to content themselves with seeing them on television

Sunday Salon

Happy post-Halloween everyone! We had perfect Halloween weather yesterday. Not only was it unseasonably warm, it was also dark and cloudy (but not rainy), with the slate gray of the clouds as back drop for the black bare trees. Our area literally looked like this:

And this:


I found these on the Gothic Image Gallery. It's melodramatic as hell, but for some reason I just love the Gothic aesthetic.

I got my Kristin Lavransdatter post up yesterday, along with my Vampire Playlist. My very first Slaves of Golconda post was also done this week for Susan Hill's The Woman in Black. Over the next few days I'll be reviewing Alta Ifland's Elegy for a Fabulous World and Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash, and hopefully I'll get a third review post in, maybe for Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller.

In the meantime, I will attempt to stop eating this candy.