Review: A Kiss for a Dead Film Star

A Kiss for a Dead Film Star
by Karen Vaughn

Title: A Kiss for a Dead Film Star
Author: Karen Vaughn
Published: 2016
ISBN-13: 978-1942083382
Publisher:  Brain Mill Press
What’s Auntie Reading Now? picture
Brain Mill Press blurb:

Isaac Rubenstein has no choice but to kill himself.
He’s in love with Rudolf Valentino, and now Valentino is dead. His acolytes are committing suicide all over the city. The window to definitively display his devotion is closing, and for once the New York tenement apartment he shares with his mother, his grandmother, and his siblings is quiet. It has to be now.
Unless he doesn’t, because his grandmother calls out for him right before the blade touches his skin. Unless he does, and the cuts bleed away his heart’s blood.
In Karen M. Vaughn’s romantic and darkly funny melodrama, Isaac Rubinstein does both. Dies, and is united with his beautiful Valentino. Lives, and finds a reason to live.
A Kiss for a Dead Film Star is a astonishing debut collection of stories that inspire weird love and uncover surprising caches of eroticism. Psycho-medical-magical realism intertwine with old and new New York City, epic love stories, and tales best told in the smoky alleys behind bars or beneath the covers. Karen Vaughn’s capacious imagination and remarkable voice glitter—this collection is a comet that comes around rarely.

#ReadingIsResistance to lack of imagination.  Karen Vaughan’s short story collection, A Kiss for a Dead Film Star, is filled with characters who are, well … characters.

Take, for instance, the histrionic Isaac Rubinstein in the title story, who grieves the way only a star struck teenager can.  Rudolph Valentino has died, and Isaac must make the perfect symbolic gesture to show both Valentino, and the world, just how much Isaac adored his movie star.  The breathlessness of Isaac’s panic and need to make this gesture, is there.  Vaughn’s writing makes the reader feel great anxiety for the fate of this wistful teenager.

In “Still Life With Fossils,” dinosaurs talk to each other from the afterlife, welcoming them to a tribe only they can experience.  This story takes the question, “Is there life after death,” in a very unexpected direction.  It’s my favorite in the collection.

The spooky story “Limbs,” takes being different from everyone else to a new level.  Take a family of migrant Mexican farm workers and then give them a secret they have to hide at all costs.  Frightening.

I’m glad to have read this little collection of stories.  Each has a different voice with intriguing themes.  Months after reading, they still haunt me.  Especially the dinosaurs.

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Review: Kitchen

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

Title: Kitchen
Author:  Banana Yoshimoto
Published: 1993 (US Translation)
ISBN-13: 9780671880187
Publisher:  Grove Atlantic
What’s Auntie Reading Now? picture
Grove Atlantic‘s blurb:

Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen is an enchantingly original and deeply affecting book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine of “Kitchen,” is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikaga is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father) Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart. In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, “Kitchen” and its companion story, “Moonlight Shadow,” are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.

#ReadingIsResistance to the mundane and mainstream.  To the idea that love, death, and everything inbetween follows rules.  And to the idea family is constrained by blood lines.

I’m finding the more broadly I read authors who are less like me, the more entertaining my world becomes.  And I’m finding Japanese authors have wriggled into my readers’ heart.

Enter new (to me) author Banana Yoshimoto, who says on her website she chose the nom de plume because she liked banana flowers.  Which is so completely different from the racist term I had most often heard regarding Asian Americans.  And while Banana Yoshimoto is not Asian American, but Japanese, that racist epithet is what I immediately thought of.  I worry about what that might say about me.

Kitchen is a tenderly written book about death, love in many forms, and what family comes to mean.  The title symbolizes the place Yoshimoto’s narrator, Mikaga, becomes most comfortable.  The kitchen is what becomes home, regardless of circumstance.  A well kept, well stocked kitchen is balm to jangled nerves and the problems which plague every human being.

I came to Japanese writing through Haruki Murakami, the voice of Japanese magical realism.  Yoshimoto’s book has hints of magical realism, but it’s grounded in the realities of lives filled with grief from mutual loss, and happiness from mutual kinship.  And just under the surface are the oblique references to what can only be referred to as … otherworldly.  I’m not sure that’s the right word, but it will have to do because those are the themes touching on the indescribable.  It’s the evanescence we all chase after as we seek answers which are bigger than we are.

Mikaga finds comfort in her kitchens, which ground her and give her space to deal with the just on the tip of the brain/heart/lips thoughts of heavier concerns.  Kitchen may be about love, and death, and family; it’s also about finding a resting place among the chaos.

Review: The BFG

The BFG
by Roald Dahl

Title: The BFG
Author:  Roald Dahl
Published: 1982
ISBN-13: 9780142410387
Publisher:  Puffin
What’s Auntie Reading Now? picture
Puffin blurb:

The BFG is no ordinary bone-crunching giant. He is far too nice and jumbly. It’s lucky for Sophie that he is. Had she been carried off in the middle of the night by the Bloodbottler, or any of the other giants—rather than the BFG—she would have soon become breakfast. When Sophie hears that the giants are flush-bunking off to England to swollomp a few nice little chiddlers, she decides she must stop them once and for all. And the BFG is going to help her!

Such delightful word play.  And a story about unlikely friends who join forces to save the children of the word from those nasty bone-crunching children of the world.  There’s nothing more to say other than don’t deprive yourself of this wonderful little story.

Review: Who I Am

Pete Townshend
Who I Am by Pete Townshend

Title: Who I Am
Author: Pete Townshend
Published: 2012
ISBN-13: 9780062127242
Publisher:  Harper Collins
What’s Auntie Reading Now? picture
Harper Collins blurb:

From the voice of a generation:

…smashed his first guitar onstage, in 1964, by accident.
…heard the voice of God on a vibrating bed in rural Illinois.
…invented the Marshall stack, feedback, and the concept album.
…stole his windmill guitar-playing from Keith Richards.
…detached from his body in an airplane, on LSD, and nearly died.
…has some explaining to do.
…is the most literary and literate musician of the last fifty years.
…planned to write his memoir when he was 21.
…published this book at 67.

One of rock music’s most intelligent and literary performers, Pete Townshend—guitarist, songwriter, editor—tells his closest-held stories about the origins of the preeminent twentieth-century band The Who, his own career as an artist and performer, and his restless life in and out of the public eye in this candid autobiography, Who I Am.

With eloquence, fierce intelligence, and brutal honesty, Pete Townshend has written a deeply personal book that also stands as a primary source for popular music’s greatest epoch. Readers will be confronted by a man laying bare who he is, an artist who has asked for nearly sixty years: Who are you?

I entered Who I Am with trepidation.  Autobiographies can be dangerously self-centered, filled with rationale for bad behavior.  Often, they can be poorly written.  Neither is true with Townshend’s book.

At times it reads as a recitation of events from a calendar.  But what struck me most about Townshend was his honesty about the triumvirate of a rock god’s life, and his struggles with hidden memories of child abuse, his spiritual practice, and his love and devotion to making and writing music.

Process is one of those nebulous words which gets thrown around.  Reading about others’ processes helps me understand mine.  Townshend proudly discusses how much work went into his process, and how much joy it brought him.

He is also deeply honest about what an absolute horror he was.  And his struggles to come to grips with any of it while living the privileged life his music afforded him.  It’s also clear that without his music, Townshend’s life would have been one of complete and utter misery, with little hope for even a moment of joy.

Where would our world of music be without the influence of Pete Townshend and The Who?  I’m glad we’ll never have to know.

 

 

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