Arts
Reflections of the Rainbow Queens
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An Exotic, Erotic Tale
Book
Review:
Aureole
by Francesca Susanna
Aureole
is a book for the brave ones. What is done here is simply not done. It
is like a many-tiered tiramisu wedding cake, delicious and rich, each
layer revealing something new, lush, sensuous. It is not a novel exactly,
nor really a book of short stories. It is more a series of erotic etudes,
each one powerful and beautiful like a very first kiss.
Read as a novel, Aureole fails
utterly. It is easy enough for a writer to say, "Oh I meant to do
that," when what they are doing is not entirely successful. Aureole
has almost no plot, and the people are flat and pretty. This is especially
true of Anju, the beautiful girl from India, who comes as alive as the
statue at the Met with which the narrator identifies her. She appears
in the section called "Anju Flying Streamers After." She seems
based on, or at least suggested by, a real person, Bhanu Kapil, a friend
of Maso's. Anju is "like the sweet apple, Anju-...Anju grasping beauty/
Anju burning/ Anju swaying, incense, all is sweetness..."
But who exactly is Anju? She has been completely
romanticized right out of humanity to the point of petrification, a statue
of an Indian goddess found in the Met. If this is the whole experience,
the narrator's whole understanding of her - she doesn't even get a personality!
- what does that say about the narrator? Nothing, because the narrator
is bereft of all character and personality as well, so the ruminations
on Anju do not reflect on anyone, lover or beloved.
Aureole is experimental and sexual.
The pieces are formed by the language, by Maso's love of language. The
sentences do all the work. They don't describe the feeling or the place
or the person; they evoke it, they are it. Language makes a concrete appearance
as a dictionary of French slang from which two young women read as they
make love. They learn that they live in the Corkscrew House (the lesbian
world)
and that their breasts are little shock absorbers. Images are given to
the reader in close, tight shots in grainy black and white - lentils,
a hand, an apricot.
In interviews as well as in her work, Maso
embraces her role as an experimental writer without flinching. She deliberately
writes to shatter the conventions of fiction such as character, plot and
description. "A work of fiction should be a genuine experience,"
she said in an interview several years ago. Aureole is an experience
of longing and desire, specifically a woman's desire, which is so often
shadowed by the idea that desire in a woman is unseemly, improper, something
to be kept hidden.
Parts of Aureole are more poetry
than prose, other parts are prose-like but never prosaic. One section,
"Dreaming Steven Lighthouse Keeper," is written in the style
and rhythm of a comic sailor's ditty, about a solitary man whose children
have drowned in the sea, whose wife is gone, and who spends his days masturbating
to thoughts of the beautiful women in Provincetown having sex together.
The song is dark, hilarious, and heartbreaking.
Aureole is infused with a rosy,
golden light and it is this light, the aureole, that Maso explores without
ever getting to the heart of the matter. In her preface, which will hopefully
be removed should there be any later editions, Maso tells us that that's
what she meant to do.
It would be a mistake to read Aureole as
a novel, let alone in one sitting. It is best taken in small bits, read
over the course of time, a month or even a year. And, like a big tiramisu
cake, it should be shared in bites, with a lover.
Francesca Susanna lives in Burlington.