Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

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To avoid a citywide panic, the staff removed and buried her body, repainted and furnished the room, and bribed all involved to deny that they had ever met the pair. Machado’s manipulation of literary registers can lead to odd and jarring effects, as in the deeply uncomfortable “The Resident”, which uses the fusty language of the Victorian ghost story for a contemporary tale about an artists’ colony that teems with every horror cliche imaginable. Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Karen Thompson Walker, Barbara Kingsolver and Carmen Maria Machado are examined in . It’s the first time I’ve said it, and it tastes strange in my mouth—real but not ready, like a too-hard pear.

In Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press, 2017), Carmen Maria Machado explores the bodies, demons, and desires of twenty-first century women. However, what readers respond to is not the monstrous content, but rather the texts confrontation with a monstrous silence. Like one of those 3D illusion pictures, depending on how you choose to focus your eyes, the green ribbon is either in the process of tying or untying—a powerful symbol in itself. Each of them claims to have been liberated by the process, to have regained their joy or lost their shame, to have become more themselves.She tells him not to touch it, but during sex he pins her to the bed and takes the ribbon in his hands. Neighbours found their bodies torn open and strewn around their tiny cabin, but never located their infant daughter, alive or dead. He begins to court a beautiful girl from his high school, who has a bright smile and a warm presence. I put up my hands to stop him but he uses his strength, grabbing my wrists with one hand as he touches the ribbon with the other.

It’s sort of tiresome and regressive and, well, done”—here she gesticulated so forcefully that a few drops of red spattered the tablecloth—“don’t you think? Then release the air all at once, permitting your chest to collapse like a block tower knocked to the ground. I wanted them to stay, but they said they were heading up into Canada, where it was rumored to be safer. A finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Shirley Jackson Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Writing (among several others), this book unearths burdens, recounting immense pain through unforgiving lust and a delicate tension exploring the violence perpetrated against women and marginalized peoples. M., responds at first by protectively describing her autobiographical protagonist as simply “in her own head a lot.

On a second read, when I could focus less on the narrative thread and more on the themes woven into it, things became clearer but no less strange. Told from the point of view of a young woman whose name we never learn, the story has a veneer of engaging immediacy beneath which flows a deeply frightening idea. What magical thing could you want so badly that they take you away from the known world for wanting it? I pull him through the trees, and when we find a patch of clear ground I shimmy off my pantyhose, and on my hands and knees offer myself up to him.