Le coin de Critiques
See Paris for Me
A Novel by
Priti Aisola
reviewed by Adam Henry Carriere
I've been to Paris, twice, yet Priti Aisola's deeply felt first novel, See Paris for Me, made me feel as if I'd missed whole swaths of the city entirely. How could that be, I wondered? I traversed miles of those storied streets, I'm a keen traveller, carrier of in-the-know guides and all. (How else could I have found Offenbach's old apartment near le Opera?) But, the further I travelled along Priti's finely wrought narrative, the more I realized the real journey taking place wasn't as much in the galleries, gardens, and dinner tables of Paris (all sumptuously depicted), but rather more so in the hearts of the main characters.
These are the bewildered hearts of Sadhavi and Kanav. Sadhavi is a sophisticated woman married to a UNESCO diplomat, and Kanav is a scholar and teacher Sadhavi meets at a dinner party. Neither life, as introduced nor subsequently unfolded, is on the surface either particularly unfulfilled nor dissatisfied. This seeming self-containment foments an attraction far beyond the more immediate and predictable visceral appetites. It is an unpredictable disquiet, a surprising voice, or cadence, whispering urgently inside the complex boxes of family, career, and even intellect these characters' lives have neatly tucked themselves into. These voices emerge luxuriously, with enormous discretion and almost painstaking poetry, to the point a reader often feels more the voyeur than the observer.
Indeed, peering into Sadhavi's hitherto dormant sensual corridors is no mean feat, as the process, or journey, requires the reader to consider what Sadhavi herself is faced with: Fear that our methodically architected lives can be vastly (and quite quickly) undone by our inner aesthetic hungers, should we let them even announce themselves within. Describing the background of her marriage, Sadhavi lets slip a key point -
"I think it takes a long time to comprehend and assimilate traditions and a way of life alien to one."
If those traditions and way of life give identity and structure and coherence, Sadhavi accepts them loyally, inhabiting an orbit that would discomfit few. Unfortunately for her but pleasingly to the drama at hand, the alien way of life she casually narrates to us is in fact a terrifying shadow falling across her consciousness. This is a woman of the world, educated, privileged, with exquisite tastes as well as sensibilities. The terror is that whichever jardin or musee perused, Delacroix or Monet studied, there comes a tipping point in even the most formidable heart where the simulacra threatens to inhabit our waking lives. The glamour sputters, the objects speak, the feelings must be felt.
‘For a few moments they sat there in silence fraught with the unexpressed. Their bodies were taut and alert, listening for the slightest message from the other, the minutest shift in energy from the other. Deprived of the will to move they sat next to each other in unquiet silence. The unspoken swirled around them in dizzy circles.’
One of the unusual, and powerful, aspects of Priti's effort is her judicious tacks away from traditional narrative. We hear Sadhavi's voice, sometimes as if she were speaking to us huddled over coffee in a quiet cafe, others as if we had stumbled unnoticed into a salon privee. Are we reading her diary, the pages blown open by a cruel April wind for us to have a quick peek? Or are we marvelling at her poetry, scribbled in the margins of a scrap book left on a jardin bench? Sadhavi's voices, their many accents and costumes, both construct and navigate the maze of bewilderment we jointly experience with her as Sadhavi's intangible connection turns to corporeal longing. For this longing to become one with much the art that has formed the contours of her life, Sadhavi must choose, terribly, magnificently.
Even though there are scenes in Budapest, Hungary, and Hyderabad, India, the emotional gyroscope of Priti's first novel is of course Paris - where else? It is difficult to describe the gloriously pernicious effect Paris can have on people of a certain aesthetic temperament, one of those things you either feel immediately upon your first stroll there or miss altogether. It is tempting to say one's appreciation for this ardent tapestry depends on 'getting' the Paris Effect. But witnessing and ultimately experiencing the tempestuous voyage between the tropics of melancholy and exhilaration found in See Paris for Me underscores a universal clarion call, or chanson, that will find a worthy home on anyone's discriminating bookshelf. I'm grateful to Priti for the passport to this destination.
Racing Hummingbirds
Poetry by
Jeanann Verlee
reviewed by Adam Henry Carriere
One (big) part of publishing a literary magazine is having to read a great number of poems and stories. The trick is to not get ground down by either the sheer numbers that eventually make their way to you, or to be vapour-locked into some milquetoasty miasma, where everything looks like an archtypical C+/B- comp essay. Which is when your magazine starts looking like the hundreds of other C+/B- Whateverthefudge Reviews. When folks like Jeanann Verlee start making their way to your transom, however, it's hard not to feel you're doing something right. Despite too many so-called creative writing programs milling out mediocre degrees, too much of American letters being in thrall to if not in the grips of obsolescent academics, and too few aspiring (or wannabe) writers practicing either craft or plain old imagination...there comes Jeanann Verlee's bravura debut collection of poetry, Racing Hummingbirds to reassure you, American poetry has not (yet) buried itself alive in the arid moraine of suburbanality.
I did not read this collection by accident. Jeanann had previously shared a number of her pieces from this volume with DM (others appeared in New York Quarterly, PANK, decomP, and FRiGG) and truth be told she had us at Dear Editor. Yet, I was not prepared for the tempest swirling across nearly every one of this volume's 100 fulsome pages. To read Racing Hummingbirds is to take an A-Ticket ride on a roller coaster of imagistic magic. Form, language, allusion, and voice interact, collide, shape-shift, and duel, pistols-at-dawn, throughout an utterly arresting mosaic of poetic consciousness that left me breathless after every reading.
But it is the voice, the symphony of voices conjured by Jeanann, that so struck me. I was schooled in a rich, vigorous creative pedagogy that was particularly keen on the authenticity of voice. So to turn page after page and be treated to such a panoply of tone was indeed a rare treat. Here is a waltz-like gala of expression, enunciation, articulation, and vociferation, all wrought in poetic terms both intensely personal and disturbingly universal. At times you are sitting in an ill-lit kitchen as a soprano weeps on your shoulder, or passing the verbal ejaculations of a soap-box muse in the park, trying but failing not to listen. Other times, you are being belted, pelted, and near felt-up across the din of a crowded coffee shop. Or finding a secret love note stuffed in an old pair of jeans, written too long ago to write back, leaving you near broken at your own inabilty to reply. Uncannily, you feel as if every poem of Jeanann's you read is actually being heard, somewhere, someplace, other than before your eyes. That is no mean poetic feat, James.
You won't attend many workshoppes that value or encourage laugh-out-loud poetry, so it is with deep appreciation I note Write Bloody Books' willingness to take on collections like Jeanann's. To be sure, there is much discomfiture to be found in this volume. But there are also sly giggles, embarassing cackles, and enormous guffaws in even the most searing of passages. Such is the vivacity - and vibrancy - of Jeanann's many voices that these all swirl madly together, without incongruity or cliched irony. A blockbuster poetic voice her own self, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz (also on Write Bloody's fine list) calls Jeanann "perhaps one of the best known & most beloved poets who is currently organizing & performing in the New York City Poetry Slam scene today, making her mark as a raw and detailed "poet of witness," sharing her stories with fearless candor and stunning talent."
We couldn't agree more. In an era of desultory literary voices and pallid emotional landscapes, Jeanann Verlee's Racing Hummingbirds explodes across the tongue, and the consciousness. It is must-read poetry.
Excerpts from Racing Hummingbirds which first appeared in DM XXXII Kismet can be found here.
You can purchase this fabulous collection at your nearest independent bookseller or direct from Write Bloody Books.
The Stark Electric Space...
reviewed by Adam Henry Carriere
Anyone reading this magazine knows well just how many literary journals and such there are out there. Whether online or in print, the number of these imprints seems to grow by the second. While it is marvellous (not to mention exceptionally democratic) that so many writers have so many places in which to shop their wares, the fact also remains many of the online species come and go with alacrity - while the inverse is true of the maddening herds of taxpayer-subsidized vanity projects pouring forth from auld Anglais auditoria. Vanity, you say? Folks, when your actual paid readership (that which occurs aside from in-kind library sales, entry fees to contest that throw in a free issue or two for your trouble, and contributor copies) almost never exceeds a hundred or so copies (less the dozen or two in change schlepped to the Always Weary Poseur tent) you're not a 'national journal,' you're a vanity rag. But that's their problem. And a lot of taxpayer's.
But there's light on the other side of the literary moon. With apologies to folks already in-the-know about this whirlygig, allow me to introduce to you The Stark Electric Space. Collected, published, and printed under the Graffitti Kolkata imprint by the redoubtable Subhankar Das (whose poetry has graced DM's pages) TSES is a breathing refutation that print literary journals are by and large bereft in visual presence not to mention creative energy. Down here in the 21st Century, the visual is every bit as much living content as digits and letters, a complement and a collaborator to ink that simply isn't going anywhere, no matter how many of the ivory ossuary crowd pretend otherwise. TSES embraces this reality with relish and aplomb, as much a visual treat as it is a deeply satisfying read.
While many of the authors found in TSES are from the literary treasure troves of today's India, the simmering masala Subhankar has concocted is well flavoured with art & writing from around the world. This is a truly cosmopolitan, international effort that radiates creative energy, the kind of volume I find informs as well as challenges my own ink energies, the kind that is at my side when boarding the next flight. Really, in all the right ways, TSES (and its radiant brethren website, graffiti kolkata broadside visit here) each represent delightful excursions, jetting past the visual and editorial conventions weighing so heavily on current American letters in a sleek flurry of smart, shrewd creativity, transporting passengers to new visions, fresh voices, and where this interesting century's story-telling is likely headed toward. A splendid time was had in all.