A lyrical exploration of memory, grief and choice.
In Elberfeld’s debut novel, a newly widowed, 50-ish woman looks back at significant moments in her life, reflected through the prism of memory and dream.
As this pared-down novel begins, Annie, 52, has just returned from her husband Pearce’s funeral, facing an empty apartment and her memories. Disjointed thoughts of the past keep arising—not of Pearce, but of Danny, the boy she first loved. If she can get these thoughts “to click into place, they would reveal their secret to her….Why, why had she left Danny behind?” Through reverie and dreams, Annie pieces together the significant moments of her childhood: first meeting Danny, her mean-spirited grandmother, her mother’s early death, Danny’s proposal and why she turned him down. Through this process, Annie finds the strength she needs within herself. In her debut, Elberfeld confers a sense of ominous significance to small events, as memories often turn to dreams or nightmares. A dutiful childhood visit to an old lady in her stuffy parlor, for example, slides into a bad dream: “And the door on the parakeet cage clanged shut and Annie was in the cage and the bird smell and the old-lady smell filled her nostrils like powder and her windpipe closed in.” In evocative, poetic language, Elberfeld captures the evanescence of youth: “[P]ressed between Danny’s body and the body of his truck, Annie stood in the moonless night with the crickets zigzagging in her ears and heart and drank as if she stood at the fountain of life.” Annie’s story is, however, rather slight to bear all the weight of this significance. Her husband was dear and sweet; if he valued security over excitement, how could he live up to her memory of Danny, unchallenged by any of the real cares of adulthood? And while Annie remains convinced that the central issue was her lack of faith in Danny, it’s her inability to stand up for herself that’s most prominent.
A lyrical exploration of memory, grief and choice.Pub Date: March 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-56474-538-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Daniel & Daniel Publishers
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An entrancing book of poetry.
Ungar’s (English/Coll. of Saint Rose; The Origin of the Milky Way, 2007, etc.) new collection may not make her immortal, but it surely establishes her as a contemporary poet of the first rank.
This poetry collection is like a bowl of fruit and cream: it’s so delicious, and it all goes down so easily, that you forget how much nutrition is there. She’s also the rare talent who can take nearly anything and make it into poetry. Everything is ore for her refinery, and she pulls inspiration from numerous and sundry sources, from the natural world to mystical Judaism to an exercise class for the elderly to a student’s essay. (The author is a writing professor.) This last source fuels “On a Student Paper Comparing Emily Dickinson to Lady Gaga,” a poem that no one should ever have tried to write—and that Ungar turns to gold. This clever piece demonstrates the author’s slow turn from skeptical distance to full acceptance of her young author’s thesis; it concludes, “Should I google Lady Gaga? / Or just give the girl an A.” This collection is full of such unlikely experiments—all of which the author pulls off with easy grace. Two poems with “Medusa” in their titles show her admirable dexterity with symbols. The first, “Call Me Medusa,” takes the snake-haired sorceress as a metaphor for the author herself: “I was a brain, eyes and hair. / If not a beauty, are you then a monster? / Some say I was beautiful, raped, punished / for it, then beheaded in a rear-view mirror. / Even cut off, my head could still turn men / to stone.” The second, a poem that gives the collection its title, compares tiny jellyfish to the same mythic figure: “Tentacles resorb, / umbrella reverts, / medusa reattaches / to the ocean floor / and grows a new / colony of polyps / that bud into / identical medusae, / bypassing death.” Thus, Medusa is human and other, dead and deathless, beautiful and terrible and strange.
An entrancing book of poetry.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-915380-93-0
Page Count: 98
Publisher: The Word Works
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.
In Matvejs’ novel, a performer with a traveling circus in the Australian Outback tries to keep her family together in the face of intimidating difficulties.
Rose Vitkovskis loves her life in the circus, despite all its hardships: little money, a sleazy boss pressuring her for sex, constant travel through dusty, dying mining towns, bad weather, etc. Mother of five, she also cares for her much older husband, who has dementia, though she’s in love with a married circus clown. It’s all worth it once she gets in the ring, where she performs on the Spanish web and shows off her trained animals. But when a severe storm scatters the troupe, Rose must rise to a new set of challenges. Though Rose continually refers to the wonder and magic of her profession—her “one passion,” per the title—no book could better cure the reader of a desire to run away and join the circus. Its marvels are asserted but thinly described; instead, the book devotes space to supposedly funny episodes involving a quantity and variety of excrement that readers might not believe possible. Toilets, farts, urine, vomit; feces from human, pig, parrot, horse, goose, monkey, dog; the senile old lady repeating “Piss…piss…piss” and “Chamber pot!”—it never ends. When not playing for laughs, it’s for humiliation, as when Rose is made to scrub some filthy toilets while wearing her circus costume in view of laughing local teenagers. Leaving aside bodily waste, it’s also disturbing to see Rose enjoying her sexual exploitation as she responds to her boss’ “ultimate dominance.” The disgusting elements make it more than a little difficult to buy high-flown statements about wonder and magic and how the real world is a nothing but a jail. Similarly, it’s difficult to buy into the thwarted romance between Rose and Freddy, a circus clown. “It’s the circus that protects our love, isn’t it?” she says. “Beyond this world around the big top, our love could never be.” There’s no such thing as divorce? More unbelievable yet is Rose’s fate after returning to civilization, which involves a naked wish-fulfillment fantasy about her journal being made into a movie.
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1434911261
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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