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Loading... The Girl in the Flammable Skirtpor Aimee Bender
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adorará Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se gostará deste livro. 1   allthesedarnbooks | Nov 19, 2009 |  The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories by Aimee Bender (1999)  commonwealth | Mar 24, 2009 | This is probably my most favorite collection of stories ever written. They're just so weird and elegant. (  ) miriamparker | Mar 19, 2009 | I love, love, love this collection of short stories. Aimee Bender's stories take place in a profoundly unrecognizable reality grounded firmly through her perceptive insights on the nature of humanity. ( ) k_eliza_b | Sep 9, 2008 | kind of like female george saunders, but not as consistently strong. quick read. recommended by ben, august 2008. annietoes | Aug 16, 2008 |  sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
Amazon.com (ISBN 0385492154, Hardcover)In conventional fiction, war heroes return home minus an arm or a leg--or, to take Hemingway's worst-case scenario, the family jewels. In Aimee Bender's deeply unconventional collection, however, an even more suggestive body part goes AWOL: "Steve returned from the war without his lips." The army doctors have temporarily replaced them with a plastic disc, which impairs his speech. Luckily, this doesn't prevent him and his wife from engaging in some slightly surrealistic sexual maneuvers: "That night in bed, he grazed the disc over her raised nipples like a UFO and the plastic was cool on her skin. It felt like they were in college and toying with desk items as sexual objects."That same combo--sex and off-kilter surrealism--provides Bender with her modus operandi. In "Call My Name," for example, a young heiress tails a stranger back to his apartment, gets her dress sliced off, and then consents to be trussed to a chair while he watches a TV documentary about Mozart. "Quiet Please" features a libidinous librarian who takes on all, uh, comers in the back room. Bender isn't, it should be said, simply a purveyor of French postcards. Her prose is exquisitely shaped, and its singsong rhythms suggest something out of a wised-up, whacked-out fairy tale. Indeed, if the Brothers Grimm had been a little more attuned to the pleasure principle, their fables might have boasted at least a family resemblance to Aimee Bender's. --James Marcus (retirado da Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400) A primeira ronda de testes foi já encerrada. Visite o grupo Open Shelves Classification para mais informação. |
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This collection is probably not for everyone. It's absurd, it's bizarre, it's surreal. Bender mixes sexuality, grief, and the imagination in a way that is at once fascinating and repellent. On first glance, many of the stories seem light, insubstantial, comical. Many of them take on the familiar style of fairy tales. But each one has a dark underbelly, much like life itself. They are confusing, incomplete, imperfect, and completely haunting. I finished the book and I found that I couldn't stop thinking about them. This is a book that will stick with me, and one that I will probably have to read again.
My favorite stories were "Drunken Mimi," a high school love story about an imp and a mermaid, both pretending to be human; "What You Left in the Ditch," the heartbreaking tale of a woman whose husband returns from the war with no lips and her attempts to deal with the loss; and "The Healer," a tale of two mutant girls in a small isolated town, one with a hand of fire, the other with a hand of ice.
Highly recommended for fans of magical realism and inventive symbolic prose. I loved it, in spite of, because of, all its weirdness. I will definitely be looking to read more by Bender. Five stars. (