Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (King Penguin)
by Angela Carter
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|
| published
|
1987
by Penguin (Non-Classics)
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| binding
| Paperback |
| isbn
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0140105883
(isbn13: 9780140105889)
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| ebook |
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| pages
| 144 |
| date added
|
02-27-07
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Read in October, 2007
recommends it for:
neologists and mesmerists
Angela Carter writes ghost stories. She doesn't settle for spooks, spirits, and apparitions, though, unless you consider those terms by their etymological roots. She chooses to consider how we appear to each other; lest that seem to simple, however, she uses only the most spooky, the most spirited appearances: these ghosts consist of the illusions that her narrators invoke when encountering another character. Her tragedy is not necessarily of the bloody demise or the rotting terrain (although...more
Angela Carter writes ghost stories. She doesn't settle for spooks, spirits, and apparitions, though, unless you consider those terms by their etymological roots. She chooses to consider how we appear to each other; lest that seem to simple, however, she uses only the most spooky, the most spirited appearances: these ghosts consist of the illusions that her narrators invoke when encountering another character. Her tragedy is not necessarily of the bloody demise or the rotting terrain (although she does evince both, with terrifying detail and nuance): it lies more in the incapacity of one person to recognize and respond to the humanity of another.
Her narrator in the title piece evokes this most clearly. This short story sets a first-person narrator, reflecting back on a recent relationship in a distant land, and moves from intimate recounts of trysts and features into a direct, confiding address to the readers:
"I speak as if he had no secrets from me. Well, then, you must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself. Yet, on those terms, I knew him perfectly. At times, I thought I was inventing him as I went along, however, so you will have to take my word for it that we existed. But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we both emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us. I do not want to practice such sleight of hand. You must be content only with glimpses of our outlines, as if you had caught sight of our reflections in the looking-glass of somebody else's house as you passed by the window."
She uses that disassociated sensibility - of encountering a person, a scene, a world through reflections (off a strange surface, no less) - without naming it so directly in most of her vignettes...for they are vignettes, mostly, figured on the turns of setting and mood more than the twists of plot or character. Still, the word 'vignette' seems fabulously inadequate in her case, as it tends to minimize, disregard, or off-set - and it is here, on the edges of our vision, that her art flourishes.
Rather than returning to the blurred borders of her own awareness, as Lydia Davis does in The End of the Story, and structuring her progress that way, Carter conceives of the method at the start and lets us divine it throughout the rest of the book. The remaining eight pieces are variously more gruesome, fraught, and brutal than the first, which remains the most shimmeringly frangible bit of the lot, filled with gaps and ellisions, circumnavigations and lacunae that give it significance. It reads almost as if the rest of the stories suffer under the weight of over-determined meaning, that the settings and sequences of events in the rest of the book have swallowed up all the elusive incriminations of the opener (which is only fit).
{continued under the heading of The Bloody Chamber", due to space limitations}
...less
Read in October, 2007
I realized that there are pieces of Angela Carter's writing, which I have only discovered in her short stories, where her prose takes on a florid, swooning quality similar to that of Anais Nin's, whose writing I don't appreciate. It annoyed me to no end that one of my favorite writers was revealing this quality to me, but when I came to the last few stories in the book (Master, Reflections, and Elegy for a Freelance), at last the Ms. Carter I love arrived. Her fangs came out, so to speak. In her...more
I realized that there are pieces of Angela Carter's writing, which I have only discovered in her short stories, where her prose takes on a florid, swooning quality similar to that of Anais Nin's, whose writing I don't appreciate. It annoyed me to no end that one of my favorite writers was revealing this quality to me, but when I came to the last few stories in the book (Master, Reflections, and Elegy for a Freelance), at last the Ms. Carter I love arrived. Her fangs came out, so to speak. In her storytelling, she is at her best plying a kind of gothic surrealism. "We live in gothic times," she writes in the afterword. And it was like she was speaking to me from beyond the grave, here in 2007, as San Diego is on fire, and beyond, the state of the world is like a bad dream. ...less
Even though I mooned around feeling the incredible deepness of this book when I was sixteen, I still think it's good.
book data (includes all editions)
avg rating
(all editions):
3.91 (57 ratings)
avg rating
(this edition): 3.96
(51 ratings)
number of reviews: 4
other editions
[close]
Fireworks (Virago Modern Classics)
isbn: 1844083675
[close]
Fireworks (Paperback)
isbn: 006090920X
[close]
Fireworks: Nine Stories in Various Disguises (Hardcover)
isbn: 0060148527
