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rushthatspeaksReview copy sent by the publisher.
Okay, so. There is one way in which this book is one of the most pretentious things that has come by me in some while, although there is also a way in which I understand what the author is trying to do. Only it doesn't work. Mostly.
Tanith Lee has in the past written under the pseudonym Esther Garber. In this collection, she claims to be writing both as and with Esther Garber, and both as and with Esther's half-brother, Judas Garbah. The foreword goes into this a bit: it's one of those things where these aren't really pseudonyms to her, but rather characters, since the stories she's written under those names are (mostly) autobiography of the pseudonyms. This, combined with the power that a pseudonym can have to change a writer's voice, allow them to free themselves of various inhibitions etc., means that she wants to allow the pseudonyms full authorial credit while nonetheless admitting to them as pseudonyms.
As I've said, I kind of get this. Except for how it comes across, which is, well, pretentious beyond imagination. Because, the thing is, if you the author are going to insist that I suspend my disbelief in this particular set of directions, then you the author must have a sufficiently different authorial voice, a set of things that cannot be said other than in this way, in short must have a sufficiently different set of actual personae to justify it. And while this collection is not, in fact, in the voice I mentally think of as 'usual Tanith Lee', it is not in anyone else's voice either. Except a sort of sub-Angela-Carter something-or-other. Also, as far as I can tell, the things she can't say except in this way involve a lot of semi-explicit gay and lesbian sex.
... I must have missed something. How is it that Tanith Lee requires pseudonymity to write, semi-explicitly, about gay and lesbian sex, in a book whose foreword is dated 2009? Tanith Lee was writing kinkier things than this in the 1970s and I have read them.
In short, this collection is centered around a gimmick which does not work, and which fails to support stories that do not work either. Esther's pieces are mostly about Unattainable Women Who Might Be Ghosts Or Something, and Judas's are about Dangerous Young Men Who Throw Him Down Stairways; there is a lot of weirdness about the way people are about the ethnic backgrounds of the pseudonyms in a way that just feels off to me in some direction (exoticizing?), and I think it says something that the one (one) readable story in the collection is credited to both Esther and... Tanith Lee.
That said, if the one readable story in here has been anthologized elsewhere, it's actually pretty good. It's called 'Death and the Maiden', and involves a young woman who gets picked up by the wife of a famous pre-Raphaelite-type painter, only to discover that she's been picked up to seduce the woman's daughter. The painter has spent years instilling in his daughter an ideal of Pure Womanhood stolen from Coventry Patmore by way of The Taming of the Shrew, and the mother will at this point do quite a lot to get her daughter to break her self-and-parentally-imposed role and think for herself for a minute. As it turns out, things are extremely much more perverse than anyone, including me, expected, and not in the directions you are thinking of or I was thinking of. In fact, I sat back and blinked at the end of the story and said 'huh, I haven't seen that one before and it was genuinely vaguely creepy'.
But it is not worth picking up the rest of the collection to get. Maybe if you see it in a library. The rest of the collection ranged from 'boring' to 'I think Colette already wrote that' to 'I think Angela Carter already wrote a parody of Colette writing that', to, in one impressive case, 'I think Angela Carter already wrote a pastiche of Isak Dinesen writing a paraphrase of Colette writing that', which is to say seen it, and, I guarantee, so has everybody else, even if you have not read the specific works to which I'm referring, because cliche can be a very universal language.
Does anybody want this book? I'll mail it to you.
Okay, so. There is one way in which this book is one of the most pretentious things that has come by me in some while, although there is also a way in which I understand what the author is trying to do. Only it doesn't work. Mostly.
Tanith Lee has in the past written under the pseudonym Esther Garber. In this collection, she claims to be writing both as and with Esther Garber, and both as and with Esther's half-brother, Judas Garbah. The foreword goes into this a bit: it's one of those things where these aren't really pseudonyms to her, but rather characters, since the stories she's written under those names are (mostly) autobiography of the pseudonyms. This, combined with the power that a pseudonym can have to change a writer's voice, allow them to free themselves of various inhibitions etc., means that she wants to allow the pseudonyms full authorial credit while nonetheless admitting to them as pseudonyms.
As I've said, I kind of get this. Except for how it comes across, which is, well, pretentious beyond imagination. Because, the thing is, if you the author are going to insist that I suspend my disbelief in this particular set of directions, then you the author must have a sufficiently different authorial voice, a set of things that cannot be said other than in this way, in short must have a sufficiently different set of actual personae to justify it. And while this collection is not, in fact, in the voice I mentally think of as 'usual Tanith Lee', it is not in anyone else's voice either. Except a sort of sub-Angela-Carter something-or-other. Also, as far as I can tell, the things she can't say except in this way involve a lot of semi-explicit gay and lesbian sex.
... I must have missed something. How is it that Tanith Lee requires pseudonymity to write, semi-explicitly, about gay and lesbian sex, in a book whose foreword is dated 2009? Tanith Lee was writing kinkier things than this in the 1970s and I have read them.
In short, this collection is centered around a gimmick which does not work, and which fails to support stories that do not work either. Esther's pieces are mostly about Unattainable Women Who Might Be Ghosts Or Something, and Judas's are about Dangerous Young Men Who Throw Him Down Stairways; there is a lot of weirdness about the way people are about the ethnic backgrounds of the pseudonyms in a way that just feels off to me in some direction (exoticizing?), and I think it says something that the one (one) readable story in the collection is credited to both Esther and... Tanith Lee.
That said, if the one readable story in here has been anthologized elsewhere, it's actually pretty good. It's called 'Death and the Maiden', and involves a young woman who gets picked up by the wife of a famous pre-Raphaelite-type painter, only to discover that she's been picked up to seduce the woman's daughter. The painter has spent years instilling in his daughter an ideal of Pure Womanhood stolen from Coventry Patmore by way of The Taming of the Shrew, and the mother will at this point do quite a lot to get her daughter to break her self-and-parentally-imposed role and think for herself for a minute. As it turns out, things are extremely much more perverse than anyone, including me, expected, and not in the directions you are thinking of or I was thinking of. In fact, I sat back and blinked at the end of the story and said 'huh, I haven't seen that one before and it was genuinely vaguely creepy'.
But it is not worth picking up the rest of the collection to get. Maybe if you see it in a library. The rest of the collection ranged from 'boring' to 'I think Colette already wrote that' to 'I think Angela Carter already wrote a parody of Colette writing that', to, in one impressive case, 'I think Angela Carter already wrote a pastiche of Isak Dinesen writing a paraphrase of Colette writing that', which is to say seen it, and, I guarantee, so has everybody else, even if you have not read the specific works to which I'm referring, because cliche can be a very universal language.
Does anybody want this book? I'll mail it to you.
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 06:41 am (UTC)I think I am more depressed by failed kinky pseudonymous Tanith Lee than by many other writers who might have tried the same gimmick and fumbled it. Re-read of The Book of the Mad stat.
(With any luck, someone will reprint "Death and the Maiden" in a best-of and I will be able to check it out there.)
no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 06:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 07:09 am (UTC)My verdict is still out on Mortal Suns if she ever finishes Immortal Moon, which at the time she said in interviews was the second half of the story. I love Akhemony's not-quite-mix of archaic Greece and Pharaonic Egypt and the way it feels both well-known and alien in the same way as our ancient world—the closer you look, the less familiar it really is; I love also that the science-fictional elements do not alter the sense of timeless ritual past into which history is crashing. The love story has a nice non-trajectory and then it just stops. But it works much better for me as a genuine epic than something like A Heroine of the World (1989), which I think must be playing off conventions of Tolstoy I don't know or something, or even some of the Tales from the Flat Earth. For a while it was my favorite of her recent novels, simply because it set itself up like a certain kind of story and then wasn't.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 02:05 pm (UTC)I love Akhemony's not-quite-mix of archaic Greece and Pharaonic Egypt and the way it feels both well-known and alien in the same way as our ancient world—the closer you look, the less familiar it really is
Me too. The two moments of disappointment for me in Mortal Suns--disappointment so strong I was like, "You've betrayed me, Tanith Lee!"--came when I realized I was a chapter from the end and there wasn't time for the narrator's love story to do anything I felt worthwhile, and--
When she reached the last pages and said, paraphrasing here, "And then I got So-and-so to trust me enough to give me my feet back, learned the languages here, charmed my way into societal acceptance and became a poet/prophetess/healer, but I'm not going to write about any of that." I would have flung the book into the wall, except that I was in mixed company at the time. I remember thinking, "What the hell, [narrator]?! That's the book I want to read! Why did you just make me sit through a whole book about your assface husband ruining his own life, when you could have told me about interesting stuff!"
I may still be a little bitter. The mutant eagle crackbaby was a nice touch, though, I will give her that.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 06:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 07:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 06:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 06:43 am (UTC)I cannot handle A Heroine of the World. Aagh depressing like whoa aagh.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 03:25 pm (UTC)Dear god yes. Since I read them in the 70s, I've forgotten the worst of the snake ones, but the memory lingers. It says much that I gave them away very early on. But I nearly failed 2nd year Japanese because I got my hands on Delirium's Mistress just before the exam, and there went two days that should have been devoted to reviewing kanji and keigo.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 06:45 am (UTC)That is a completely reasonable reason to nearly fail an exam. The Gods Are Thirsty nearly screwed me totally in a European history course, because of course the main outlines are right but she made up many of the details and her version is more likely to stick in the brain.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 03:12 pm (UTC)Also it caused me to buy Andrzej Wajda's Danton (1983), because Patrice Chéreau makes a great Camille Desmoulins.