Carly Holmes
FIGUREHEAD by Carly Holmes
Tartarus Press 2018
Continuation of my gestalt real-time review from HERE.My further thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/08/01/vastarien-a-literary-journal-issue-2/#comment-13365
Pages 121 – 146 (2nd half of novelette)
Possible spoilers –
“, and the bell was dented where it had been thrown against the wall.”
The end revelation is to be dwelt on before coming to a conclusive assessment about it. Meanwhile, this work borders on melodrama and contrivance, but is this more from the attic above it all where a Mrs Rochester squats with the cheese crust on top of organic things below? No, more instinctively, the work’s clinching adeptness of feeling and objective-correlative is probably beyond melodrama or contrivance as I gathered by becoming gradually entrammelled by Marie’s disarming narration, where two sisters compare themselves bodily from childhood onward, bony hips or more fulsome spread of femininity, linkage with their own childhood into today’s visions (frighteningly real visions or imaginary-mad ones?) via children in trees or among the mansion’s maze, factored into the respective states of one sister’s pregnancy with a bodily fulsomeness where there was once a greater boniness and of the other sister’s recently gutted pregnancy now offered a re-stocking by one of the past’s cruelly treated souls who once reached unwanted full-term as a small human. A large mansion’s inner doors opened or shut to let others out, or keep them back in. There seems something intrinsically meaningful there, but ungraspable. Shattered eggs within the mansion. A poignancy of sound in crushing bones. The poignant moulding of belly’s dome as part of that earlier jigsaw. A story that counted magpies, “as I slapped slices of cheese between bread…”
[It has occurred to me that Colin Insole is a writer recommendable to anyone who enjoys Carly Holmes’ work.]
“Iris purple and stem green.”
Strumpet sounds like something from Shakespeare; each one is cut from the same family cloth, woman born to woman, no specific man described, yet done up to attract men. Painted tarts, from childhood to older, flighty and flirty borne by textured prose, figure-headed, yet only two pages to count…one or two might eventually come back petulantly with a Maria’s Silence as naked truth?
“I carried a bottle of red wine and a tumbler into the garden as dust thickened the edges of our street. I dribbled a little onto the ground as homage to the gods of the earth and drank the rest greedily.”
A symbol of our times.
This is a well-observed, neo-Bowenesque portrait of arguably justifiable paranoia and eventual self-consciousness experienced by a woman narrator bird-feeding in her garden and chatting with the eponymous jackdaw, imperviously watched by the man — as passing-guest in the tourist house next door — in his behavioural manner of a mutant form of the Maria’s Silence syndrome. The ending reminded me obliquely of GHOST STORY.
Another 24 hour period of my being similarly haunted by another pervasive Carly Holmes work of the day!
“She goes into the woods to read poetry”
Three pages of something that is visually like a poem as enjambmented by, say, DH Lawrence, when he was a poet, with some stanzas starting with the incantatory refrain “She goes into the woods…”. Honestly Holmesque, I’d say, with everything I now find myself loving about this author’s work. The lycanthropic shimmer at the end, included. Tactile, fey, faerie and intravenously Gaia.
“Forcing oneself to behave in a way that can only ever circle in on itself, counter-productively. Animals would never indulge in those compulsions, they haven’t the luxury.”
I am like the quilt-jacketed old man in this story? Spotting the fruit of her dressing-gown décolletage? Nope, I am a literary critic spotting there is today more than just a shimmer ot lycanthropy or, at least, a feral quality in this powerful, still fey, but less faerie, story of a man whose wife’s body clock does not match his workaday one, her own own bodily and mental décolletage trending in that feral direction, a marriage in decline, encouraging badgers, and the state of the world beyond just sitting at the altar of the rolling news.
“The rest can be history.”
A story of two pages, a sister to the previous story, here more a flicker than a shimmer, dug to or from a fox earth … earth her own intravenous Gaia? Vermin or vixen? Royal scion or scab or scarifier?
“A person: she became a person.”
Twice-cooked. Short of the permanent measures taken in SLEEP, this is a serious self-therapy method for mothers of young children to become their own women at least for a while, childless and frivolous, with the collusion of the children to become digestive. Biscuits galore and undercurrents of gingerbread houses and fey faery. Jollity and stoicism. Important fable. Even more important within the gestalt so far of this book. A story of one’s bodily foundlings unfound.
FRIDAY
“Bake, and bake, and bake.”
Now thrice cooked, not twice. A poignant portrait of Penny and her dog, Penny, whose carpet holds the impress of her history, in her house, near the literally encroaching hills. I mentioned intravenous Gaia earlier, for now some unknown reason, and here is its obliquely negative human-instigated embodiment, as a significant Friday also encroaches as fast or slow as the “jostling” hills do encroach. The slumped curves she left in furniture, bulges of her feet, and we gradually gather, by her phone calls, and italicised thoughts, what Friday brings. Awaiting either clinching encroachment or a crucial breaking out. Rubbish on street verges verging. Sticky pavements, too. Shadows deformed. But no surrender to sleep. Yet. Or a putting to a different sleep (one this book has already encroached upon), the clinching sleep of someone Penny loved, already sleeping?
An original, evocatively tactile tale of a mother who is a were-tree, her children, the brother and sister, in two minds about this blessing or predicament.
Intravenous Gaia now in overdrive!?
Slightly connected…
My favourite passage from one of my long-term favourite books: MARTIN PIPPIN IN THE APPLE ORCHARD by Eleanor Farjeon:
http://www.ligotti.net/showpost.php?p=8900&postcount=1
“…strapped into a hoist, heaved into position, I gazed upon the sea for the first time…”
…as I once did upon the wordsea of literature. This book’s flagship story is the pungently punctuated, innuendo-riddled narration of a flighty, feisty figurehead once carved from the mother heartwood of the previous story, on her last voyage, with her Sapphic yearnings for a younger figurehead on another ship – deploying, for me, the essence of ‘hawling’ as mind over matter, imagination over mind, straining, by dint of preternatural will power, her own ship’s sinews towards what may be a kamikaze kiss. Adorable.
TEETH YELL?…
Yellow Wall Paper syndrome replaces ME?
This is an ultra-powerful narration by a woman, a broken version of the feisty Figurehead, this painful and stylish screed breaking her own version of Maria’s Silence, her teeth, she’s told, holding her madness, now being gradually extracted and later the innards that set her back into the wallpaper, I guess. Effectively imprisoned by her husband and doctors in this lunatic asylum for women where she seeks female companionship against the onset of the world that put them there. Horrific and hopefully cathartic. A major work within a major gestalt, never to be extracted.
“, passing coded messages from yellow gaze to yellow gaze.”
A tale of significantly accretive heartwood’s onset of reclamation of the numbered houses in the Close, with creative tension between those who welcome this onset and those who try to escape it. Some of us even welcome back foundlings of childhood fairy story lore – from our own heartwood’s past. One of whom gnaws on a biscuit… I sense that those who “set their faces to the dark heart of the wood” opened this book first.
=================================
A SMALL LIFE
“Fish nuzzled the water’s surface from below, ghostly shapes in speckled bronze and silver floating up through the murk.”
Were they Tench? And meanings float up, too, through the river of this powerful story, through its riparian renewability, always a new river to touch the next time you touch it. Written in a linear literary style with the feel of the balanced stars of Lawrence, a style that I often admire, evolving, though, into a non-linearity, whether it be of this review’s earlier assumption of man harassing woman or now vice versa? It’s you, not me. Daring to face the curse of Humphrey’s Google temptation. Pearls for teeth. Men pretending to be dogs. Meanwhile, this particular story starts with a striking description of seeing the land differently from a boat. And of the seemingly healthy gestalt of a boatful of men in coxed and coaxed unison. The aspirational gestalt of all the books I continue to review, as separate from their authors. The ghostalt then created by an impingement of a single woman, with all that event’s sexual implications. The male narrator’s fight with alcohol while trying, forgive the cliché, to find himself, together with the act of minding his own business, with slippage back and forth. Then the, for me frightening, human-shaped landscape glitch or monster as symbol or something pretending to be thus, as if imputed to be born from the author herself? The at-arm’s-length of the literary intentional-fallacy made closer and closer to self? A mighty work.
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/07/21/is-it-a-tench/
This is your sacrifice to save your community, feeding him just enough of yourself, “the startled shift of small life”, a bodily re-wilded nightmare of freely given residues of flesh and blood as meat to the jaws of some prehensile precedent of geopolitical evil (I infer) or even of a predatory reader reading what is still written here … a meaty tunnel to thrust into …a recurrent altruistic spell of fiction to keep today’s claws sheathed at least for a while before they sink into the words again? This book is never one to be read lightly. Even when its end is in sight. Because you know it will make you read it again.
“This is your moment of power and he lets you indulge it. He knows you won’t turn and leave him. You never have.”
“They wanted this one so much.”
A coda to this book denoting its overarching spirit’s Proustian selves from youth to age, doubled as a required aching coda to THEY TELL ME, just to look forward to there being no ache at all. A bridge or arch or fey faery cap. A Tooth Fairy as catalyst, or whatever oversees this book disguised as one. Ache becomes agony, each versioned self a catharsis for the others. Hooded in heartwood. Too many biscuits. Never has there been, I suggest, such a Dentist story. One that finishes this book with a promise of returning to milk the ones earlier, a book that has a mighty blend of Elizabeth Bowen, Angela Carter, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Clarice Lispector, Colin Insole, Melanie Tem, Silvina Ocampo, but essentialy unique, Holmesque, and, as I saw someone recently echo my ‘ultra-powerful’ word about this book, I sense it indeed has that sort of transcendent power, a power that now fully starts working even as I write these final words about it.
End