Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
A yarn as 'rattlingly fine' as her pillboxes, 28 April 2009
I've long been an admirer of Catherine Eisner's piquant and highly original fictions in the literary journal, 'Ambit', and of her singularly rich pictorial and sensuous prose (she's an academically trained painter, I understand). Here at last she is given a very much broader canvas for her character studies of women at the end of their tether, though it's the minute detail of their dysfunctional, drug-dependant (and even criminal) lives I admire so much.
For instance a character enmeshed in the sinister deceptions of an assisted suicide says, 'I retain a very clear impression of that dank Wednesday ... the very flanks of the trees seemed dipped in green ink and, I recall, in the heavy morning mist even the moon, withdrawing behind the shop fronts, appeared mildewed.' How vivid! And likewise dipped in poisonous green ink is the mordant pen that wittily dissects here the disturbed minds and secret lives of women. And how good to see that a true account of the female psyche is heard, rather than have fallacious sentiments or stale homilies prevail.
Because it's amusing, too, to see cunning inversions of axioms that once applied to feminine disenfranchisement appearing in fresh guises to point up the dilemmas of alienated women in a new age of angst. Thus a case of post-adoption trauma and an adoptee's search for her true birth identity commences with the narrator's wry inverted epigram, 'A woman without a past has no future.' And the case ends with the banality of a visit to the hairdresser's with a promise of unsought transcendence from the salon owner: 'You like maybe a new you?' These mysterious intimations, half-hidden in the commonplace, and bland reports of unusual sensations and emotions seem to offer the key to Eisner's unique and brilliant style. I'll quote one or two fragments of dialogue and description to give you the general gist.
'All that you imagine is probably true,' says an unfaithful husband discussing his mistress with his wife. 'If it's not made up it must be true,' declares a kid brother lying to his older sister with whom he's infatuated. Later, the same sister writes, 'My long fingers played over the dark fur. The benefit of dark furs is that they accentuate one's naked white throat to greater advantage.'
In a contrasting case of child abuse, a distressed woman reports parental violations in her childhood when her mother kisses her improperly on the lips: 'She felt faint as the blood in her veins rushed furiously into her entire system and away from her head; she was unable to think; her nerve ends prickled and she would have swooned had not her mother held her.' Another young woman, a literary editor, similarly describes sensations with an exactitude that makes them sing in the blood. Of a first love she confesses, 'Taste, touch, sweat, sight, his breath in my hearing ... maybe I had been deprived of my senses too long ... because, weakly, I did not resist with any great conviction when he suddenly kissed me. I felt I was rediscovering the rules of a forgotten game or some lost tincture of alchemy.' And LSD-induced synaesthesia, the editor concludes, when she experiences the 'rubberiness' of her gums from the drug's anaesthetic effects, is 'like a problem in grammar, where the active and the passive voices become confused and there is a difficulty in distinguishing the moment of action from the resultant state and no one knows whether they are the object of the action or the subject performing it.'
The delights and the frights and the heights of the senses under the influence of banned and prescription drugs are explored here in interlinked narratives of fifteen women whose common thread is shown to be the connective unconscious that reveals a powerful ancient magic at work in their lives ... in a world were sometimes for the initiated the supernatural supervenes. Beneath the surface film of reality where hopes are deferred exists a world of desires and dreams fulfilled. Eisner quotes: 'Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.' As the narrator of these interrelated case histories so acutely observes: Dream or psychodrama? Traum oder Trauma? Or serio-comical metafiction? Whatever the case, I award Sister Morphine virtually top marks for a yarn as 'rattlingly fine' as her pillboxes of 100 mg grey morphine sulphate tablets and her dihydrocodeine DF 118s! 'If it's not made up it must be true!'
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