David Simpson
University of Chicago Press ($14)

by Brian Bergen-Aurand

September 12, 2001, was in some sense a moment of utopian potential; there appeared to be an awakening of international solidarity, global empathy, and planetary possibility in the world’s responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon the previous day. Neighbors, communities, and strangers opened up to help each other and seemed ready to change the very way they viewed the world. It may have been the closest yet human beings have come to altering the relations between those we call “us” and those we call “them.”

That moment was sacrificed, though, in an act of revenge against Afghanistan and the illegitimate invasion of Iraq. The squandering of that potential global solidarity has cost the people of Darfur, Burma, New Orleans, and other places a good deal. Now, with the United States on the eve of another election year and the world on the verge of another catastrophic American military campaign against Iran, it may be time to remind ourselves of the lessons of 9/12 and of the potential we wasted. This is the force of David Simpson’s compelling book 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration.

Simpson, a professor of English at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in Romanticism and literary theory, explored the social, legal, and academic consequences of the contemporary drive to describe our perspectives and simultaneously circumscribe the perspectives of others in his previous book, Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From (Duke University Press, 2002). In9/11, he returns to this cultural matrix of sociological, juridical, and institutional segregation to examine the complex and paradoxical treatment of the events and images of September 11, 2001, and after.

9/11 is a concise and keen analysis. Simpson poses four questions at the start—“Has the world changed since 9/11? If it has, then in what ways? If it has not changed, then who has an interest in claiming that it has? Whose world are we talking about?”—and keeps them circulating throughout the book. He uses a fifth—“How can it be represented?”—to focus the other four in his analysis of the commemoration of September 11, 2001. He closely examines the particulars of “grieving over and laying to rest the bodies of the dead, summarizing and remembering their lives in obituaries and epitaphs, and erecting monuments and buildings that memorialize or mark the sites of tragic events,” and deftly considers how quickly we have acted to suture the disruption 9/11 caused. He also addresses how we remember and treat the bodies of 9/11—bodies of the dead, the injured, the warring, the friends and enemies, the foreigner and the homeland. And he compels us to see ourselves through other eyes, especially those of foreign theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Zizek.

According to Simpson, many things have changed since September 11, 2001. One of the most important has been the official policy toward obituaries, which he puts into a complex historical context in the first chapter, “Remembering the Dead: An Essay Upon Epitaphs.” Commemoration of the dead, especially those who are recognized as having died for a national cause, has historically been limited to people of high rank and military honors. Not until the middle of the 19th century were military deaths recorded “more or less democratically,” where “everyone who dies in combat is recorded or likely to be recorded” by name. Remembering civilian casualties has been a different affair. The New York Times’s “Portraits of Grief” marks the change: unlike past commemorations, it remembers those who died on September 11, 2001, as civilians, “but civilians who could be and were readily identified with a national cause.” In this way, Simpson argues, the consecration of our dead has reached an “unprecedented intensity,” especially when politically useful. Yet this change in our response to the deaths of our ordinary people has not led to an increase in sympathy for or with the deaths of other ordinary people. As we subsequently launched attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, and others outside the United States (as well as on many inside the United States via the Patriot Act), we strove more fully to divide the homeland from the foreigner, to secure the border between us and them. As much as our responses to those who died on September 11, 2001, have argued for their significance, our actions since have suspended the possibility of our “suffering with and for others.” We feel more than ever the need to bury our own dead but remain detached from an ethics of response to the burial of others.

In the second chapter, “The Tower and the Memorial: Building, Meaning, Telling,” Simpson shifts his analysis to the complications of reconstructing the World Trade Center site and creating the Freedom Tower. Perhaps this is where time is truly of the essence, since this commemoration will speak to “generations to come who do not have a living memory of 9/11.” Formal and informal debate on the design and its meaning began almost immediately: leave them fallen, rebuild them, replace them—but with what? Simpson reconnects this debate to the history of towers, cathedrals, railway stations, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, the naming of the United States, and contemporary disagreements about irony, polemic, and jingoism. He synthesizes a reading of the naming of the memorial and its adjacent spaces from cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s distinction between concentration and distraction and a consideration of allowing “the debate to continue,” asserting that the less determined this memorial remains and the less prescribed its message of “freedom,” the more profound it can become. The best hope for the reconstruction of the site and the memorial, according to Simpson, remains in an openness and unspoken signification, but he fears it will not happen, at least in the present historical context. “Hence, among other things, this book” and its plea that we take our time.

Returning to “Portraits of Grief” and other attempts at commemorating those who died on September 11, 2001, in the chapter “Framing the Dead,” Simpson locates the difficulty of these efforts in the dual meaning of “to frame”: to contextualize or historicize, but also to set up or blame. In light of this ambiguity, what might it mean “to frame” those who died on 9/11 and after, here and abroad, neighbor and foreigner? Simpson answers:

All those oddly imposed terms such as heroes and sacrifice and ground zero have been parlayed into an unjustified and internationally condemned military and political adventurism that not only arguably dishonors the dead in profound ways but also endangers the living across much of the world. The dead, in other words, have been framed to the purpose of justifying more deaths.

The dead, democracy, freedom—they have already been redacted for us, their meanings given. Exceptions have been disqualified: “Identification with or sympathy for the sufferings of others has always been hard to generate,” Simpson reminds us. Then, he turns to all the frames that have come after September 11, 2001: Afghanistan, Iraq, battles over “sacred ground,” Ted Koppel’s controversial reading of the names of the American dead in Iraq on Nightline, the expansion of the American prison complex, the publication of photographs of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force base, and especially the images from Abu Ghraib. Focusing on the Abu Ghraib photographs and how they interrupted the flow of the culture of commemoration, the tradition of suspicion, and the inertia of compassion fatigue, Simpson rehistoricizes the images, comparing them to World War II photographs, Vietnam War images, the Rodney King video, and postcards recording lynchings in the American South. Building on Susan Sontag’s observation that the photographs, surprisingly, “show ‘us’ among ‘them’” rather than simply showing the humiliated foreigner as the object of a controlling, distanced gaze, Simpson argues that the Abu Ghraib photographs profoundly differ from the other frames because they dramatically “narrow the gap between them and us.” They are the rare exception to official memory, exposing us to the suffering of others who are never shown, whose “Portraits of Grief” do not exist; they disrupt our objectivity, our self-assurance, and our certainty in judging, condemning, identifying. “They open a disturbingly ambiguous territory in between, where the question remains a question not yet resolved and not easy to resolve.” They are only a beginning, like 9/12, but they are necessary, if we are to take our time and consider what all these bodies mean.

In the final and most important chapter, “Theory in the Time of Death,” Simpson revisits the three threads of his book—the continued importance of theory, the necessity of taking our time, and the bodies of those who died as a result of 9/11—and critically reconnects them to questions of ethics, empathy, and the utopian potential of both 9/12 and Abu Ghraib. Theory remains indispensable because it “offers an important alternative understanding, outside the neoliberal consensus, of what may be entailed in moral vigilance and moral action”; Simpson notes that it is theory’s own immigrant status that makes this possible. It eschews both the melodrama of propaganda and the pornography of torture, and assesses the moral risk of a “rhetoric of urgency” that urges us to forget rather than commemorate, to believe we are right until we are proven wrong, and to sacrifice others for ourselves. Taking our time might make it possible for us to imagine a politics of compassion, following an ethics summarized by Slavoj Zizek in which “‘the only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity with all victims.’” If 9/11 seemed to show the difference between “us” and “them,” then Abu Ghraib disabused us of so rigid a dichotomy. As Simpson asserts, every time we meet Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, we are reminded of ourselves; every image of the other reminds us that he is “one of our own.”

Ultimately, Simpson’s book is about the war in Iraq and the impending war in Iran. It provides one of the strongest analyses of how 9/11 has been represented and put to use, and its force lies in questioning decisions about who is with us and who is against us (much like the excellent independent film collections Underground Zero and 11’ 09” 01). Mr. Kurtz may be dead, but the horror of his postscriptum—“Exterminate all the brutes!”—remains scrawled in an unsteady hand across the contemporary landscape. In the end, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration leaves us with one question: Can we stand by, ignoring the suffering of others, while yet another unjustified and internationally condemned military and political venture frames those who died for the purpose of justifying more deaths?

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008

Roland Barthes
translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier
Columbia University Press ($24.50)

by Spencer Dew

What if, wonders Roland Barthes, in response to one of those “large, pompous, arrogant, pedantic questions” which so dominate intellectual and especially academic life—“‘Is there a writing specific to women and a writing specific to men?’ ‘Do you think that the writer seeks truth?’ ‘Do you think that writing is life?’ etc.”—one were to answer “‘I have bought myself a shirt at Lanvin’s,’ ‘The sky is blue like an orange,’ or… if this question is put to you in public, you stand up, take off a shoe, put it on your head, and leave the room...”

Such refusal and retreat—“the violent action of the [Zen] koan”—offers an example of Barthes’s subject in this lecture course. The Neutral is that which “baffles the paradigm,” suspending the conflictual basis of discourse by outplaying the various binaries (gender, subject/object, active/passive) ordinarily imposed by language. Barthes traces the Neutral through dreams of self-destitution or withdrawal from the world, finding its echo in Proust’s experience with the madeleine, “something like a Western example of satori.” The Neutral can refer to “intense, strong, unprecedented states… an ardent, burning activity” and to “‘slow understanding’: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems,” and that intoxicatingly vivid, crisp-edged perception brought about by urban dusk, the hour in which “tiny, perfectly futile details of street life” are received with stirring purity and “the pleasure of being alive.” “I don’t construct the concept of Neutral, I display Neutrals,” Barthes says of his approach. It is not a definition he is after, but a gathering of instances.

The book is a transcription of a course painstakingly prepared in notebooks and index cards, a series of lectures proceeding through a “sequence of fragments,” specific figures or traits considered in turn. Examples of the Neutral are sought “not in language but in discourse,” and in this process Barthes meanders through an astounding array of texts, his citations laced with pleasure—all taken from the library of his vacation home, “a place-time where the loss in methodological rigor is compensated for by the intensity and the pleasure of free reading.” He considers the signifying silence of mysticism, Sade’s dirty laundry, the aesthetic rules of the tea ceremony, Swedenborg’s solitary writing rituals, relevant threads of Kafka and Blanchot, even the post-mating exhaustion of the Alaskan fur seal. Yet Barthes cautions—neutrally—that his “knowledge is never cohesive”:

I know nothing and do not pretend to know anything about Buddhism, about Taoism, about negative theology, about Skepticism: these objects, insofar as they are doctrinal, systematic, historical bodies, such as one might find in histories of thought, of religions… I am outside mastery. . . My aim = to be neither master nor disciple but, in the Nietzschean sense. . . ‘artist.’

This exemption from the responsibility of contextual knowledge is echoed in another exemption, from immediate exchange or dialogue—what Barthes refers to as the “theatrical” “jousting” of the seminar, which the logistics of this giant lecture class do not allow. Instead, Barthes’s practice of responding to select written comments at the start of sessions exemplifies what might be called a textual pedagogy, one in which the teacher is a text, not so much answering or conversing as echoing or, at best, responding. In reference to an angry anonymous note, Barthes observes “commentary, criticism, writing might in fact be the way to answer him who wants me not to answer”; the work of “actively reading” exorcizes “the relation of power” that speech imposes. Yet this is not abstinence-only education but, rather, a practice of particular and pointed refusals and an insistence on the responsibility—political and ethical—of such refusal. Barthes cites the wisdom of Eurylochus, that disciple of Pyrrho who, “hard pressed by his pupils’ questions that he stripped and swam across the Alpheus.” This “gesture of the nonreply,” what Barthes hears as the “Ciao” of Eurylochus, exemplifies the Neutral, and—so argues this book, in Barthes’s typical erudite and sensuous fashion—suggests an urgently needed corrective to our current state of being in the world. For Barthes, the search for the Neutral is “my own style of being present to the struggles of my time,” and, ultimately, an “ethical project,” an elaboration of Barthes’s larger engagement with writing, discourse, ideology, and culture.

John Cage once said that he tried never to want anything except “in a set of circumstances where nothing I decide seems to me to concern others.” He tried, in short, “never to refuse anything,” though he could, in a restaurant, select chicken instead of steak. Barthes cites this of course, reveling, as he always does, in the culinary anecdotes of artists, but he sees here something of the Neutral too, what in Taoism is called “wou-wei,” non-action, that “what baffles, dodges, disorients the will of life. It’s therefore, structurally, a Neutral,” akin to the Zen “answers” mentioned earlier. The desire here is to abstain from choosing, to be granted exemption from having to hold a position, a belief.

These days, for an intellectual to say “I don’t know” or “I refuse to judge” is “as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence.” Such statements simply do not “belong to the language of the discourse.” The intellectual “is required, summoned to have an opinion on everything, which is to say to be interested in everything,” but Barthes desires the ability to “post a sign on my premises or on my intellectual project: ‘Judgment closed for annual leave.’”

Barthes’s desire doesn’t play into the hands of the hegemony but, rather, voices a critique of an age saturated with information. “I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic).” This push-to-choose is already an ethical and political consequence of contemporary culture, and an unhealthy one. Aristotle’s moderate measure of “the best democracy” as “the one in which the citizen is neither too apathetic nor too participatory” can be read as a profound caution on the current situation. “Political minimalism” would indeed “go against the grain of our current political ideology,” but how refreshing that might be. “We are in an era of political maximalism,” Barthes writes, wherein “politics invades all phenomena” and “political behaviors are radicalized: arrogance of the languages, violence of the acts: political totalism all over (without necessarily speaking of totalitarianism).” In the thirty years since this was written, the situation has only worsened. For Barthes, to “live according to nuance” is the only ethically responsible option, and understanding and being Neutral is a critical component to this sort of life.

The Neutral includes the difficult task of admitting one’s own fear, the harsh recognition of banality within oneself, the “right relation to the present, attentive and not arrogant,” but the talk of retreat from decision and the constant focus on revelry in pleasure might deaden American ears to Barthes’s radical political engagement. It would be a grave misreading to see Barthes’s work as solipsistic, although there is, to be sure, an elaborate coyness to his presentation as well as a guiding faith—as Susan Sontag as brilliantly argued—in the value of pleasure. Intellectual caution thus couples with a desire to savor, resulting in such remarkable images as this, from his autobiographical text Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes: his work, he says, is like a cube of sugar dipped into a tea cup as he enjoys a precious bourgeois ritual with his mother. American readers may miss, as well, the contrarian tone of Barthes’s phrasings. His nuances are well-steeped and designed to be taken slowly. On the formal level his texts are corrective, crafted to resist the co-optation of readiness, the placation of easy use. The world, thick with oppression, requires much consideration and very careful action. This is his mission as a writer and teacher, and it is manifest on every page of The Neutral. Indeed, Barthes finds a predecessor in Montaigne—who, at forty-two, “had a medal struck, with a scale on one side and a Pyrrhonian motto on the other: ‘I abstain.’” As Barthes notes, herein is a powerful lesson about the balanced, engaged life:

one should carefully consult Montaigne: his life and his work, to spot from what or where he did not abstain (because he was a man very engaged with his time and publicly engaged): that is to say, not to revise but to refine the Sartrean doctrine of commitment, handled for twenty years by intellectuals, a bit brutally.

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Neal Shusterman
Simon & Schuster ($16.99)

by Kelly Everding

Disaffected youth everywhere will relate to this dark tale by master story-spinner Neal Shusterman. In his young-adult thriller Unwind, Shusterman imagines a near-future America after a second Civil War, dubbed “The Heartland War,” which pits Pro-life and Pro-choice forces against each other. A strange compromise of sorts is reached. “The Bill of Life” states that “human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen,” after which the parents may “choose to retroactively ‘abort’ a child.” The child designated for unwinding is sent to a harvest camp where his or her organs and limbs are stripped away and used for transplants for more deserving people. (In this futuristic world, the medical arts have improved so that any body part can be attached or transplanted without fear of tissue or organ rejection.) It’s a brave new world, and the reassuring thought is that the child doesn’t really die, but lives on in other people—although sometimes to alarming effect.

Shusterman bravely takes on this twisted idea and injects it with a cast of well-rounded characters, teens who come from different walks of life and circumstances, yet find themselves face to face with the same thing—their impending mortality. Or rather, their disillusion comes face to face with their impending state of dissolution. Connor is a troublemaker and doing lousy in school. His parents, at their wits end, choose to unwind him and when Connor finds out about it, he decides to run away. Risa is an orphan living in a state home. The state chooses to unwind Risa because “space in state homes are at a premium these days,” and she hasn’t excelled at the pace they would like. “It’s all right to be frightened,” they tell her, “Change is always scary.” Risa responds, “What do you mean ‘change’? Dying is a little bit more than a ‘change.’” Lev, on the other hand, has been preparing for this day his whole life, and he’s ready to go. His religious family plans to offer Lev as a tithe, he being their tenth child. On one fateful day these three children collide, literally, and their fates become intertwined as they find themselves on the run from a ghastly system that treats them like chattel. In this alternate future, there is no room for improvement. Once you are marked as a troublemaker, worthless, or just not good enough, you have no chance to prove those who judge you wrong.

Unwind obviously challenges the highly controversial subject of abortion. In this imagined world where abortion is illegal, unwanted babies get “storked”—left at the doorstep of a house or state home. Parents of unwanted babies can legally do this, and the families who get “storked” are obliged to raise the child. Lev is the tenth child due to his family taking in two storked children, but he is still eager to fulfill his obligations as a tithe until he inadvertently becomes a runaway. Slowly he realizes the horrific ramifications of unwinding and takes on an anarchistic role in ending the practice. But as a trope for the teen who can do no right, Unwind really gets to the heart of the matter. People can change for the better (and not the kind of change unwinding entails), if given half a chance. And people should not be defined by a few indiscretions in their childhood, especially teens who test the boundaries of their individuality. As preposterous as the concept of unwinding first seems, it begins to seem alarmingly possible in a world that allows for other atrocities such as the many genocidal bloodbaths happening around the world today.

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edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan
Eos ($15.95)

by Alan DeNiro

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as noted in the introduction to The New Space Opera, defines space opera as “colorful action-adventure stories of interplanetary or interstellar conflict.” Many of the authors collected in this anthology are well known to readers of science fiction, although few are known among a general readership, or even a readership willing to dip toes into non-realistic modes of storytelling. This is curious. In a decade in which a lot of science fiction has migrated toward the mainstream—i.e., when genre distinctions have been seen as more meaningless than ever—space opera has been one of the forms of genre fiction stubbornly kept within the confines of its own long-set parameters. And even though some of its practitioners have been hallowed outside the genre for their non-space opera work—Delany, Tiptree, and LeGuin come to mind—it’s not as if stories with hyperdrive starships will be gracing the Paris Review anytime soon.

This isn’t exactly a problem as much as a data point: what drives the engine of genre acceptability forward? And—more pertinent in regards to the book in question—how do contemporary practitioners of space opera respond to the challenge of keeping the form relevant? I would hazard a guess that most of the writers in the book are extremely conversant in the history of science fiction, and how space opera—from the earliest pulps of E. E. Smith onward—has shaped larger trends of science fiction, both in literary forms and popular culture. But with a few notable exceptions, the attraction of the form seems to be that it allows writers to sidestep issues of character, supposedly in the service of mimesis (albeit of a speculative sort).

In many of these stories, Earth-like physiology has mutated to a point of no return; virtual realities give way to virtual bodies and vice versa. The anthology has a general inhuman pallor—to put it another way, humanity has been emulsified against the backdrop of far-flung space—but all too often, the fiction suffers because of the unexplored consequences of this stance. Like the protagonist in Greg Egan’s “Glory,” who is a molecular payload shot across space, many of the characters are, in essence, simulacra. People (if they can be called that) have to have their sharp edges smoothed over in order to survive in the recesses of the vacuum. And yet, how does a writer balance the needs of narrative when characters’ motivations are, at best, flat? (“Always so sad, Debra: it’s not good for the brain, you should take a break,” a brutal assassin is told in the first story in the anthology, the inauspicious “Saving Tiamaat” by Gwyneth Jones). Of course, this impulse is spectacularly “retro,” hearkening back to the origins of space opera in the early 20th century. As a lurid offshoot of the larger tree of adventure fiction, characterization was fast and loose, but it was a subgenre that was inquisitive as to its own metaphysics. In the current day, however, the metaphysics seem to come from the minutes of a transhumanist conference.

What’s more disappointing is that in almost no cases is this disassociation from emotion made part of the story (something, ironically, that literary realist stories are often decried for in some genre circles); as an unexamined baseline, the affectless life forms plod through adventures whose outcomes appear meaningless against the larger backdrop of thousands of worlds, hundreds of civilizations. As Ian Macdonald’s meandering narration in “Verthandi’s Ring” tells the reader, “war was just another game to entities hundreds of thousands of years old, for whom death was a sleep and a forgetting.” Again, this galactic void could be part of the observable texture of the narrative, picking up on how the enclosed space of a story—much like the sealed hull of an interstellar spaceship—can only contain so much prose.

In short, if science fiction is to be a vital vessel for tackling larger issues of transhumanism and empire, it has to start in the prose. Alas, for the most part, the prose in The New Space Opera is not up to the task. Serviceable, workmanlike, even drawn at times to compelling new frontiers of the sentence in order to capture elusive futures—but not nearly enough to think that it’s part of a deliberate design. One of the worst offenders is Peter Hamilton’s “Blessed by an Angel,” a long back-and-forth about human choice and technology bookended by an alien impregnation narrative. The inability of middlebrow science fiction writers such as Hamilton to craft even moderately interesting sentences rears its ugly head too often throughout the anthology.

This continual flatness is especially curious since the introduction and the book packaging promise “fun,” a convivial spirit and recklessness that could mask, for a time and in the right conditions, a leaky hull of a story. But even in the stories that have a quickened pace, the narratives prove to be too careful, too bound in their own self-imposed limitations. Mary Rosenblum’s “Splinters of Glass” is a long chase scene under the surface of Europa that is a series of desultory, monochrome twists. Walter John Williams’s “Send Them Flowers” at least has some actual space-time hijinks and knavery, and a protagonist who actually has a meaningful and complicated relationship with a friend—it’s not an interesting relationship in the end, but beggars can’t be choosers. It should be possible—shouldn’t it?—to return to the anything-is-possible vibrancy of early science fiction without the baggage.

One such ugly sea chest of baggage involved stories of human extraordinariness—that humans were wilier and at their core better than every other race in the galaxy. This was often, to use modern parlance, a form of “dog-whistle politics.” Robert Silverberg’s story “The Emperor and the Maula” is replete with these smug tropes of the colonial era; in it, a human woman takes on an entire empire of alien overlords and wins, merely because she is human. What makes this type of story discomforting is that, in the past, human beings stood for white, male human beings, with alien races standing for pretty much anyone else. Countless adventure stories from the first half of the 20th century, not just space opera, reveled in these tales of ultimate supremacy, and yet Silverberg’s story is not able to give this “golden age” dynamic a fresh coat of paint. Although it’s hard to imagine the story had malicious intent, it’s equally hard to give its sheer clumsiness the benefit of the doubt when the villain of the piece is called “the Most Holy Defender of the Race.” Ken MacLeod’s “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?” doesn’t make quite as many stumbles, and the unreliable narrator adds some welcome texture, but the “civilizing the savages” tropes—no matter how cleverly reimagined—are drops of poison spoiling the broth.

After all of this disappointment and cast-off deflation, the exceptions in this book are so, well, exceptional that it makes the entire book worth reading—if for nothing else than to map out how the tired and unambitious stories put the gems in high relief, like settings in a crown. There’s a birthday party in space (“Dividing the Sustain” by James Patrick Kelly) with a genetic twist that I won’t spoil here; there’s also an extraordinary love story and a quizzical but affecting father-son relationship in Tony Daniel’s “The Valley of the Gardens,” where the emotional kernels intersect with fascinating physics and ecology. But the signature story in the anthology is the last, Dan Simmons’s novella “Muse of Fire.” Anyone with even a passing interest in science fiction (or Shakespeare—more on that later) should read it; perhaps most surprising is that it utilizes a series of traditional tropes that, on the surface, are nothing spectacular. But Simmons uses them fearlessly. Rather than putting together his building blocks to create an ultra-knowing, weary narrative like the Egan story, or a shallow recapitulation of colonialist impulses like the Silverberg story (the literary equivalent of putting the toothpaste back in the tube), Simmons uses space opera to explore the conditions in which human relationships—humanity itself—can endure when its culture has died: “Those are the only two public institutions that have survived the end of all human politics and culture after our species’ hopeless enslavement—pubs and churches.”

The literary vehicle Simmons uses to accomplish this is Shakespeare, and “Muse of Fire” is like an experiment in seeing how large of a stage the ideas and language in Shakespeare can contain. Stories about small cadres of “knowledge workers,” keeping the flickering flame of culture alive during a dark age, are nothing new. The troupe aboard the Muse—a spaceship that travels from world to world performing Shakespeare to huddled masses of humans—find that they have to perform in unfathomable, alien conditions, predicated on a bizarre gnostic cosmology that everyone assumes as a given. And the ante goes up after every performance—not only with the weird worlds the players find themselves in, but also the plays themselves (from Much Ado About Nothing, all the way to Hamlet, and with a performance of Romeo and Juliet as a coda that has to be read to be believed). After the second performance, the story pretty much explodes in scope and risk; the troupe has to journey through a series of gnostic mysteries that mirror their cosmological upheaval. Simmons literally uses the fabric of space and time to try to comprehend what subjugation, as an idea, means—and what subsequent liberation could mean.

“Muse of Fire” is a stunning example of what space opera, at its best, has to offer. Ultimately, the question asked at the beginning of this review—why doesn’t space opera receive more currency?—might be an irrelevant one. There are few stories as good as “Muse of Fire” out there in the world today, period. It’s all the more affecting because it’s a story about how categories and affectations can fall away under the right conditions, the right tests. Space opera certainly has the capabilities to provide those rigorous tests for fiction, that stage where characters can confront awful voids and sublimities. The question becomes whether those rigors—not of science but of human complexity—are roundly bypassed under the auspices of escapism from mundane concerns. More than anything, “Muse of Fire” gives itself the permission to lament—something many other stories in the anthology, for all of their bluster, aren’t brave enough to do.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008

David Chariandy
Arsenal Pulp Press ($16.95)

by Kristin Thiel

Subtitled “a novel of forgetting,” David Chariandy’s first book is also, of course, a novel of remembering. We can’t face one without facing the other. An okay version of Soucouyant would have lingered on the book’s most obvious example of this: the narrator’s mother’s early onset dementia. But Chariandy layers his story, looking at issues of race and punching up the text with descriptions so delicate and perfect that readers may actually find themselves remembering moments from their own lives.

Long known by neighbors as the “wandering lady,” the narrator’s mother, Adele, relieves herself in potted plants and others’ inflatable swimming pools. She forgets her two children’s names and ages, and she eats sweetened lemons, saying they taste like lightning and that the bag of sugar is broken so someone must call an electrician. Late in her illness, Adele prepares a dish that requires flour and olives on the floor, egg yolks on a baking sheet, and a tuna fish can in the blender: “A recipe has slipped a few times in Mother’s head. Becoming sweet, then savory. A dessert, then a main course. Cumin sands and peppermint air.” Her memory loss is dizzying in its creative extent, but for every loss, there’s an inexplicable gain, as she remembers all the varieties of mangoes that exist, traditional medicines and their uses, her home country in the Caribbean.

The narrator’s African- and South Asian–Caribbean parents are immigrants to Canada, and their skin color is generally unwelcome in the neighborhood where they settle. They forget but must pretend to remember when and how to celebrate new holidays, like April Fool’s Day. The reader senses a particular urgency when Adele thinks she has forgotten about her son’s school professional-development day—to her judgmental white neighbors, her forgetfulness could reflect not only on her mental state but also on her race. The narrator recounts other stories tied to this theme: his father eating horseradish by the forkful because he didn’t know what it was and didn’t want to give the disapproving white waiter the satisfaction of being right; his mother and her black friend accidentally ending up on the border without papers; the violation their first landlord committed against their home and property. In a small side narrative, an immigrant neighbor forgets the struggles her family has faced due to prejudice and remembers only that she is “better” than the narrator’s family.

Amazingly constructed details cut through it all. An overturned milk carton is “pattering white” on the floor; the narrator opens an old tin to a “suck of air and an old smell”; a grocery bag is set down, creating a “slump” of vegetables. The narrator smells a greasy fingerprint on an old library book and his typical after-school snack of oranges in the whirl of his childhood globe. Even things a reader may never have seen are described with such truth that they magically become familiar: a smooshed caterpillar is a “slimy patch of Velcro” and the recovered body of a person drowned in a lake of pitch is like a “teabag dripping juices.”

At one point, the narrator checks on his mother in the middle of the night. She’s screaming, which disorients him. He writes, “I don’t know how long the screaming continues before I’m able to find myself again. My image in a black window, some young man stooping over her.” The haunting story Chariandy tells may not be everyone’s, but through his skillful writing, all readers will see something of themselves reflected back.

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Michael Swanwick
Tachyon Publications ($14.95)

by Kristin Livdahl

Michael Swanwick’s impressive world-building and imaginative use of genre tropes makes him one of the best short-story writers in speculation fiction. The Dog Said Bow-Wow showcases those talents, bringing together sixteen recent stories, including three Hugo Award winners. In this fifth and, arguably, best collection of his stories, populated by tricksters, dinosaurs, gods, and explorers, Swanwick takes a variety of old themes and styles and twists them into something fresh and new.

A good example of Swanwick’s genre twisting is “A Small Room in Koboldtown,” a locked-door mystery amped up with a setting where faerie, kobold, and other haunts meet old-style borough politics. The young main character in “The Bordello in Faerie” gets more than he bargained for when he crosses the river to visit the rumored brothel; although the world is that of traditional fairy tales, Swanwick makes it relevant by giving it an unexpected, contemporary twist. “The Skysailor’s Tale” is an alternate-universe adventure story with a plot straight from the pulps—complete with an enormous airship. But it is also the tale of a father reminiscing to his child about his boyhood in Philadelphia, his adventures and misadventures on the airship, and how he met the child’s mother. One of the best stories in the collection, “Slow Life,” is a story of first contact mixing hard science fiction, reality TV, and human and alien existential angst.

The title story and two companion pieces feature Darger and Surplus, lovable con artists whose plans often go astray, usually because of their empathy for the natives they are trying to swindle. While the writing carries all the manner and wit of Oscar Wilde, the setting is a slightly dystopic future reminiscent of Swanwick’s Nebula Award-winning novel, Stations of the Tide.

The dog looked like he had just stepped out of a children’s book. There must have been a hundred physical adaptations required to allow him to walk upright. The pelvis, of course, had been entirely reshaped. The feet alone would have needed dozens of changes. He had knees, and knees were tricky.
To say nothing of the neurological enhancements.
But what Darger found himself most fascinated by was the creature’s costume. His suit fit him perfectly, with a slit in the back for the tail, and—again—a hundred invisible adaptations that caused it to hang on his body in a way that looked perfectly natural.
“You must have an extraordinary tailor,” Darger said.
The dog shifted his cane from one paw to the other, so they could shake, and in the least affected manner imaginable replied, “That is a common observation, sir.”

Not all of the stories involve fantastic settings. In “The Last Geek” the title character tours the country as a paid speaker, a living reminder of the golden age of traveling carnivals. In “Triceratops Summer,” dinosaurs appear in a quiet community, but they aren’t the center of the story; rather their appearance heralds change and forces people to reassess their dreams and what is really important in their lives. Nostalgia for simpler times underlies both pieces.

Swanwick isn’t always playful or sentimental. There are two stories dealing seriously with war: “Hello, Says the Stick,” a short tale featuring an innocuous-seeming but deadly alien weapon, and “Dirty Little War,” set during the Vietnam War. The latter story is a bizarre but effective blend of a battle and a cocktail party, illustrating the disconnect between modern war and life back home. In “Tin Marsh,” the relationship between two prospectors who are isolated together on Venus turns deadly. Another highlight of the collection is the final story, the mythic “Urdumheim,” featuring the loss of language, a great battle between good and evil, and the Tower of Babel. There is heartbreak in the story—lovers are separated, a way of life is destroyed, death enters the world—but there is also hope at the end.

In a collection so diverse, there is a danger of fragmentation. Despite the variety of form and subject matter, however, the stories in The Dog Said Bow-Wow are linked by the affection Swanwick displays for his characters. This affection gives the stories a center, a heart that carries throughout the collection.

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J.M. Coetzee
Viking ($24.95)

by Spencer Dew

The first part of this book, “Strong Opinions,” is a collection of essays written by a man named C., who, like J. M. Coetzee himself, a South African living in Australia, the author of Waiting for the Barbarians, and an acclaimed intellectual whose novels have earned him a fortune. Yet the text of Diary of a Bad Year is separated into three sections per page, with only the top swath relaying a given essay; another strand presents the narrative, from C.’s point of view, of how he met his attractive young neighbor and recruited her to type his manuscript, and the final section of text offers her voice, or, eventually, her recounting of debates between her and her boyfriend, a computer expert who plots to electronically heist money from C.’s accounts. This is no experimentation for experimentation’s sake, but rather a nimble metafiction designed to illustrate the central problem facing C., the intellectual writer, which is not so much the issues of contemporary relevance on which he is voicing his opinion but the multivalent complications of getting those opinions across.

On the page, Coetzee reproduces “the hurly-burly of politics” at its most immediate level—the vicious interpersonal posturing, the poisonous tangles of sexual longing and difference, the tragedy of failed communication of three people in a room together. We hear opinions on Guantanamo Bay, Machiavelli, national shame, bird flu, mathematics, and sex. We hear of the power of South African poet Antjie Krog and the “gumption” of Harold Pinter’s Nobel acceptance attack on Tony Blair. “What he has done may be foolhardy but it is not cowardly. And there come times when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act, that is to say, speak.”

Yet, through this device of multiple voices and multiple forms of discourse, constructed by Coetzee with tautness and building suspense, everything said by C. in the essays is grounded in the ambiguous mess of relations between him and Anya, his typist, and her nefarious boyfriend, Alan, who also reads parts of the essay collection and ventures his own cynical, self-serving opinions. Unless those opinions are actually pragmatic and wise and it’s the old man, C., who is self-serving, locked in an ivory tower of his own life trajectory, lusting for Anya’s body while underestimating her mind. Anya isn’t innocent either, of course, and mistrust, along with various senses of impotence and doom, provides the engine here, creating a text that relays something more disturbingly true about the zeitgeist than any collection of essays alone could do.

An analysis of talkback radio is never equal to the experience of it, and Coetzee gives us both, ideas clashing with attempts at reception, layers of critique offered and implied. C. spins out academic readings of the world scene, and we see these utterly fail to register as real for Anya, as reader: “Kurosawa. The Seven Samurai. How John Howard and the Liberals are just the seven samurai all over again. Who is going to believe that?” While Anya’s responses start as naïve or dismissive, they become increasingly astute, just as C.’s own integrity is undermined by his lascivious obsessions; his daydreams of Anya “opening her womb in gladness to the gush of his male juices” come across as untethered as his stance of “pity on fundamentalists,” which Anya reads as a deadly mistake linked to the rarified remoteness of academic climes. Violent fundamentalists, she says, “despise your pity. They aren’t like you. They don’t believe in talking, in reasoning.”

To make matters more complex, Anya, who dabbles in modeling, likes to be looked at, and longed for, except when she doesn’t—an infuriating encapsulation of the problematics at play in human society. Neither provocation, nor passion, nor ignorance, nor articulation is total in this text, a state of affairs that echoes C.’s description of his own “political thought”: “pessimistic anarchistic quietism.” He holds to “anarchism because experience tells me that what is wrong with politics is power itself; quietism because I have my doubts about the will to set about changing the world, a will infected with the drive to power; and pessimism because I am skeptical that, in a fundamental way, things can be changed.”

The connections between the twined arcs of essays, events, and opinions are cringingly pronounced, continuing on into the book’s second part, a supplement of less politically charged pieces—an idea suggested by Anya, who wanted, for dubious reasons, to read the writer’s reflections on things like dreams and birds. The strips of text below this “Second Diary” chronicle what happens after the submission of the first manuscript, including a disastrous dinner party where Alan gets drunk and arrogantly boasts about his scheme to rob C., a scheme he didn’t carry out only because of the begging of Anya. Or so he says. Everything must be doubted, evaluated, and reconsidered from multiple points of view.

C.—who can be plenty polyvocal and self-critical on his own—entertains an idea suggested by his critics who hold that rather than being a novelist with the occasional academic post, “at heart he is not a novelist after all… but a pedant who dabbles in fiction.” The efficacy of this is the central issue of the book, the bad year of the title being a year in which the world continues to sink into ignorance and violence, into fanatical, self-centered empires and extremist, close-minded insurgencies—a year in which whether intellectual or artistic discourse (or this brave and masterful fusion of the two) will make any difference is as yet unknown.

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Stephen Dixon
Melville House ($16.95)

by T. K. Dalton

Certain writers writing about writers writing (or, worse, writers writing about writers who are trying to write and not writing) remind me of a story from Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School, the one where Sammy, a new kid, won’t take off his raincoat inside. His teacher tells him to take it off, but when he does there’s just another one underneath, and Sammy seems a little smaller. He keeps stripping, and with every layer he diminishes, until finally what’s revealed is not a boy but a rat—a dead, smelly one. Fortunately, I do not smell a rat beneath the many layers of Stephen Dixon’s 27th novel, Meyer. Each layer peeled away from Meyer Ostrower reveals neither vermin nor litter but something increasingly alive, ever closer to the core of his being.

The book chronicles the 68-year-old Meyer’s dissatisfaction with what he’s been writing. Unwilling to rehash old material and increasingly uncertain about certain memories, he improvises moving, sweet variations on his life: the first time he met his wife Sandra, his own death from excessive snow shoveling, the improbable seeds of an affair with an attractive younger neighbor. He examines everything with equal care, from the small (is that stain from coffee or cat piss?) to the large (what to do with his ashes?). With nothing as important as the current thought and any thought as good as the next, Meyer recalls and revises years of experience, making each moment utterly real.

Meyer is more than a glorified desk diary, however. While his internal world is compelling and charming, when Meyer steps outside it (or when it interrupts him), we see increasing amounts of his loved ones, not to mention our own selves, in his fantasies and worries. Sex with his wife is just one instance. Their passion is driven less by novelty than by comfort, but when narrating life after Sandra, Meyer imagines telling off a well-meaning matchmaker, “You know what? I’d rather not. . . I don’t want to start in with someone new. Nor do I want to try having sex with anyone else.” Though their sex itself might best be described as logistical, and though Meyer certainly has immature moments, their romance is settled, mellow, and sage.

Meyer is candid about the most serious topics, a winning trait that rubs off on (or has rubbed off from) the people closest to him. Here he debates the actual date of his mother’s death with his sister, Naomi (she says March, he says February):

“If you say so,” she says. “You sound very positive, and you’d remember.” “I have it written down in my datebook for that year, the day she died.” “You still have that book from three years ago? What, for tax purposes, in case you get audited and have to show it to them like a diary for certain things?” “No,” he says. “Because it has phone numbers and addresses in it I haven’t transferred to this year’s datebook.” “Why don’t you transfer them, or just get a regular address book?” “I have one but it’s for the most part filled up. As for transferring them to later datebooks: not enough space; I’m also too lazy to; and I know where these numbers are in the ’02 book: all in the front. But other things are in it too. PIN numbers, for instance.” “You keep your PIN numbers out like that?”

Read aloud, it sounds like an episode of Seinfeld guest-written by the late Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. The rhythm of their conversation feels absolutely natural, flowing so easily from the monumental to the mundane that the absence of white space between dialogue is hardly noticeable. Peel away the chatter and we arrive at the reason Naomi called in the first place: Meyer’s niece is engaged. (“To that guy you don’t like?” “I never said I didn’t like him. I just said his family is very strange and I only hoped it didn’t rub off on him.”) This huge piece of news doesn’t keep Naomi from nagging him over the datebook, and—brother to the end—he defends his eccentricity. They hang up in the same fashion (“Goodbye, my dear brother. I love you, even if you can be annoying.” “Same here,” he says, “about the first part.”), and their intimacy is only deepened by the air time given to his three-year-old datebook.

Our intimacy with Meyer, on the other hand, grows in moments such as a random phone call from a man looking for a dentist named Myron Ostrower. Synapses fire: Meyer recalls his stepfather, a dentist named Irwin Ostrower who refused to use gas while filling his step-children’s cavities and whose ego was bruised when, as adults, they went to different dentists. He recalls his stepfather’s diagnosis with Parkinson’s, the slow loss of patients as he practiced with shaking hands, and emptying Irwin’s office with his sister. The chapter ends with this oddly chilling sentence: “Meyer, after his stepfather died, kept one of the mouth mirrors, which he’d never used for anything, a curette for his nails, and two forceps, which he uses sometimes as pliers or to retrieve things like paperclips that have fallen under the space bar or keys on his typewriter.” Perhaps the shivers come from a sudden intrusion of reality. For the bulk of the book, Meyer, with his relentless if unproductive imagining, shields us from that.

From what, though? Well, it ruins nothing to say that between its preoccupation with death and its protagonist’s exhaustion with old material, the true subject of Meyer is not writer’s block but mortality. “To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote, and our hero is staring down death, unfettered by sentiment or cynicism. When Meyer does this best, he creates a seamless, real world that we forget is twice removed from the flesh and blood holding open the pages. Look at this scene, completely imagined by Meyer, in which he’s caught staring at a stranger and then apologizing for his bad manners with a clichéd excuse. The woman, not fooled, says to Meyer:

“Listen, I don’t mean to be rude either, but I saw you looking at me a number of times tonight, and it didn’t appear to be the way you said it was—the do-I-know-her story—and I just have to say I’m not interested.” “You mean in me?” and she says “Come on; really.” “Okay, you’re right. My story is bullshit, though I am a teacher and I have had a couple thousand students, half of them women, and I admit I was and am interested in you. But the age difference, not to say my stupidity in acting out, and I don’t even know if I have the expression right, my absurd fantasies sometimes—too much for you, true?” “To be honest, the age difference is huge. Even if I wasn’t with someone now, I’d never consider seeing a man so much older than I. I would, though, if I thought him interesting, and I’m not saying I think you are, except for your honesty, and that could be a part of the whole act too, have a coffee with that person or meet him for a harmless lunch.” “So have coffee with me one day or a harmless lunch.” “Too late for that now. Excuse me, and good talking to you,” and she sticks out her hand to shake. “My name’s Meyer, by the way. Meyer Dumbo Ostrower,” he says, shaking her hand, and she says “Funny,” smiles as if she did think what he said was funny, and goes into the living room.

The brilliance of this scene isn’t so much found on the page, though it’s there too: sharp prose, biting dialogue, a desperate older man with whom the reader empathizes helplessly, an understandably exasperated younger woman forced to spell out her rejection in sans serif capital letters the size of the Hollywood sign. It hurts, but by this point in the book Meyer is like an uncle, and at this point in the scene he’s imagining, he’s a drunk uncle in the grand tradition. Like Sir Toby Belch, he deserves what he gets. Unlike the scurrilous rascal of Twelfth Night, however, he’s honest. Even if he ends up being cast as a pathetic geezer in his imaginings, the imagining itself helps. Meyer battles anxiety in the face of an increasingly imminent end, and this ultimate procrastination of the original deadline might have led to the only flaw of the book, a jarringly long final chapter. Then again, by then, goodbye is something all of us—Meyer, Dixon, and his readers—will be comfortable postponing for just a bit longer.

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Philip Cioffari
Livingston Press ($15.95)

by Donald Lemke

A book entitled Catholic Boys inevitably invites a few clichéd presumptions; innocent schoolboys, lustful priests, and the ensuing tensions and scandals are expected and delivered. In this debut novel, however, author Philip Cioffari retains a certain degree of inventiveness by focusing on his conflicted protagonist rather than the lives of the schoolboys themselves.

Alex Ramsey is a former police detective who lost his job shortly after his teenage son, Evan, was killed in a car crash. He now works as a security guard, where he encounters a case more complex than any assignment on the force. A young Catholic schoolboy named Arthur, roughly the age of Ramsey’s deceased son, is found beaten, raped, and hung from a tree near the apartment complex where he works. The former detective is soon entangled in a search for the elusive killer. Along the way, he unveils an intricate web of lies spun from some of the highest members of the church.

Most clues in this mystery are revealed as Ramsey himself uncovers the evidence. The reader, however, has a head start in the case. In his prologue, Cioffari wisely gives a brief glimpse into the events that transpired on the night of the murder. A gang of young, homophobic boys called the Brandos were with Arthur shortly before he died, beating and stripping him from his clothes. Although this mountain of circumstantial evidence steers the reader toward an obvious assailant, Ramsey, almost ignorantly, chooses a number of different paths for his investigation.

One path leads Ramsey into the arms of a young stripper named Krissie, the girlfriend of the Brando leader and, coincidentally, the woman responsible for his son’s death. Like all the characters in this novel, both Ramsey and Krissie have a morbid desire for forbidden things. They both have needs that can’t be filled by a mourning, drunken wife or a rabid, brutal boyfriend. But just like a priest choosing between desires of the flesh and a promise to the Lord, the choice to succumb to temptation isn’t easy. As Krissie states, “I had an ethics teacher, a priest at Fordham, who used to say all the choices we made were choices between evils of one kind or another. His definition of moral being was the man who consistently chose the lesser evil.”

At times, Coiffari’s choices feel more deliberate than those of his characters. Ramsey’s disregard for the most obvious assailant in the case is less about the experience of the former detective than an obvious diversionary tactic by the author; likewise, the interaction between Krissie and Ramsey is an overly contrived circumstance. Still, Coiffari’s language at times is the most forgiving, even if its lofty eloquence sometimes gets in the way of this swift and simple mystery.

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Myriam Gurba
Future Tense Books/Manic D Press ($14.95)

by Jacklyn Attaway

Desiree Garcia remembers 1992 as the Year of the Crazy Girl: while jumbled images of Heidi Fleiss, Lorena Bobbitt, and Amy Fisher were splattered on the television, she painted her nails black, listened to Bauhaus, and resisted urges to jerk and randomly shout “cunt!” Desiree, the off-beat Chicana narrator of Dahlia Season’s title novella, is a goth girl, a budding lesbian, and an obsessive-compulsive with a touch of undiagnosed Tourette’s; she not only struggles with her own fears of being a severely disturbed person, but also has a knack for attracting the mentally unstable. Indeed, crazy girls (and boys) appear throughout Myriam Gurba’s debut story collection, set in early ’90s Southern California.

Herself a former high school misfit, Gurba portrays her characters beyond their yearbook photos. With candid warmth, she seems to flip the pages of memory back to her youth, expertly depicting the desires of two SoCal street gang girls named Angel Malo and La Dreamer. She also deftly describes a Mexican hippie boy with a limp who casts a love spell on his American cousin and a Long Beach girl with a penchant for cross-dressing and gay cruising. Gurba’s characters may be strange, but they never stray into sideshow stereotypes. With honesty and humor, the author creates a believable world of hybrid subculture and youth turmoil.

Dahlia Season is overflowing with teen angst: in “Just Drift,” an indomitable high school student with a scheme to raise his English grade finds himself faced with a pregnant girlfriend; in “Primera Comunión,” a tomboy finds herself condemned by fate (and an overly superstitious family) to be evil. There are girls with first crushes on girls and girls who are cutters in both “White Girl” and the title novella. But what makes these recurrences pleasurable is the sense that Gurba’s characters are operating in the same space. Sisters from “White Girl” reappear in “Dahlia Season” but with different names; Cholo boys from “Just Drift” become pedestrian gangsters in “Primera Comunión.” The Black Dahlia, famous murder victim and flower, appears in both “Cruising” and the title novella as a symbol of dark womanhood.

A highly cohesive collection, Dahlia Season unfurls with a refreshing view of Latina identity; Gurba never shies away from delving into the complexity of modern ethnic American culture. For instance, in the title novella, Desiree’s parents send her to Mexico hoping the trip will instill in her their Hispanic values, but the girl’s dark makeup and witch boots confuse her Mexican relatives. When Desiree returns to the U.S. with a new appreciation (or fetish) for her Mexican heritage, her death-rock friends tease her for braiding her hair and listening to mariachi records.

Just as she portrays Desiree as a cultural hybrid, wearing Christian icons of bloody martyrs and painting her face to look like the DC Comics interpretation of Death, so does Gurba interweave English and Spanish slang, creating a distinct voice with a conversational tone. A feast of life and culture, Dahlia Season may earn Gurba a place on the list of accomplished Latina writers like Julia Alvarez, Christina Garcia, and Sandra Cisneros.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008