A worthwhile read for aspiring ethnographers or readers interested in South Pacific culture.
This collection of short stories by anthropologist Mitchell provides a window into the culture of the Pacific Islands.
The Nagovisi people live in West-Central Bougainville Island, which is part of the Solomon Islands in terms of culture and ethnicity but is politically part of Papua New Guinea. Although the stories Mitchell presents are to be read as fiction rather than ethnography, they nevertheless offer a glimpse of a group of people and a way of living with which many readers are likely unfamiliar. The tales, which range in length from a single page to 50, display a variety of storytelling techniques. Some, such as “Crocodile Kills His Father” and the eponymous “A Red Woman Was Crying,” are takes on traditional folktales. In the former, after a woman named Sipita gives birth to the first crocodile, she hides him in a basket and warns her husband not to look inside, just as, say, Bluebeard warned his wife not to open the closet and Pandora was warned not to open her box. Some of the stories give a view of the larger Nagovisi culture and seem representative of what might be told to children, the equivalent of the Western tale of Mother Goose. Others have a more typical narrative structure and, rather than highlighting any sort of overarching mythology or belief system, serve to explicate aspects of day-to-day life in this culture. There’s much of interest here, particularly to readers with an anthropological bent, but even though Mitchell doesn’t aim for this to be an academic text, a little more context would be helpful. The collection would also read more smoothly if the folktales were presented in some kind of lucid order; as is, the contrasts in style can be abrupt and somewhat jarring.
A worthwhile read for aspiring ethnographers or readers interested in South Pacific culture.Pub Date: July 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0983307242
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Saddle Road Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This book is feisty; whether it thrills or exhausts you reveals your own tolerance for outré reading.
Purnell, a performance artist, musician, filmmaker, and writer, dives deep into the pathologies and delights of sex among gay men in this dizzying novel.
In these pages, the unnamed, formerly homeless protagonist, a “jaded judgmental borderline misanthrope” who’s also really funny, describes so much sex with a “nameless void of men” that it’s a wonder he doesn’t rub his fingers raw from undoing his pants so often. There’s sex on the protagonist’s European concert tour, bad sex with a Satanist in America (“if this was Satan’s best sex warrior it stood to reason why Satanism in general was such a PR nightmare”), and an obsession with a straight co-worker that compels the protagonist to masturbate in the office while watching him. Structured in short vignettes, the book is mostly told in a confessional first person, which make the stories feel autofictional. There are so many short episodes of sex that the book reads more like a diary—a vibrant, saucy, dishy, punk diary. One example: The protagonist, feeling lonely, hires a sex worker to act like a boyfriend, so the guy, just doing what he’s paid for, keeps whispering “I love you, boyfriend” in the protagonist’s ear. “He was beginning to feel like a boyfriend in that he was already annoying the fuck out of me,” Purnell writes in a typically knowing, self-lacerating insight. There are moments when Purnell steps back from offending delicate sensibilities to documenting real sadness and drawing wisdom in the process. The protagonist encounters a former boyfriend, “once a big beautiful star” who “has collapsed in on its own weight and turned into a black hole.” This man takes the protagonist to his parents’ home for Thanksgiving to an emotional void; his parents serve TV dinners for the holiday meal. “But this was one of the many holes he had in himself that he always made visible to me,” Purnell writes. The only nagging question this book engenders is why it’s packaged as fiction at all; it reads more like a memoir/manifesto that gay sex is still a rebellious act.
This book is feisty; whether it thrills or exhausts you reveals your own tolerance for outré reading.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-3745-3898-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sometimes surreal, sometimes prurient, sometimes discomfiting—and every page worth reading.
The noted Spanish director delivers a series of contes à clef, giving his merrily transgressive takes on life a good literary workout.
“This collection of stories (I call everything a story, I don’t distinguish between genres) demonstrates the intimate relationship between what I write, what I film, and what I live,” writes Almodóvar, the creator of films such as All About My Mother and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The declaration is a touch cryptic, but what follows is often strange and sometimes shocking, as with his opening story, “The Visit,” in which the putative sister of a man molested by priests in boyhood confronts one of them; he accuses her of dressing like a prostitute, to which she retorts, “I don’t particularly like the way you dress either.” For those who know Almodóvar’s films, the surprise ending won’t come entirely as a surprise. In another story, an actor, León, desperate for a project, contemplates a top-to-bottom rewriting of the classic L’Amore, Roberto Rossellini’s adaptation of a play by Jean Cocteau, its star the luminous Anna Magnani; in León’s vision, it will become a love story between men: “The lover is bisexual....Bisexuality is the great neglected topic of the sexual revolution.” It doesn’t play out. Perhaps the most eccentric tale portrays an aristocratic vampire who comes calling on, again, a priest whose blood flows after self-flagellation; says the vampire, who could have sunk his teeth into the scenario but professes no interest in “vampirizing,” “I am like your mystics; I like to be alone, left to follow my own devices and desires.” Jesus, Barabbas, the singer Chavela, Isabella and Ferdinand, and, yes, the vampire all show up in these oddly delightful stories, no one doing quite what they’re expected to do.
Sometimes surreal, sometimes prurient, sometimes discomfiting—and every page worth reading.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780063349766
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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