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Friday, May 22, 2020

The Dark Nest by Sue Harper (2)

Continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/the-dark-nest-sue-harper/

  1. nullimmortalis
    May 21, 2020 at 7:25 am Edit
    SKY FOOD
    “And what would be left to eat, once the tins had been finished.”
    A triffic fable morn, a new dawn for this book. an arguably inadvertent greening of our planet by a previous dire apocalypse.
    Reply
  2. nullimmortalis
    May 22, 2020 at 7:38 am Edit
    “While yet her charming face is surrounded with all its virgin glories; and before the plough of disappointment has thrown up furrows of distress upon every lovely feature.” From CLARISSA HARLOWE by Samuel Richardson
    FE159FEE-DB2A-4C4E-9968-407219FA0147THE SHINING FURROW
    A truly remarkable epiphlet for this now perhaps genuine new dawn beyond lockdown, as the woman’s outer surface attenuates into translucency, like an angel, but then transparently where everyone can witness all the bodily inner workings, and a sense of sin-eating for the newly dead provides some healing. It is all rather disturbing what is happening within our bodies, intimate spots, gall spirts and so forth, but instead of gloom, the ending has some inspiring musical ‘dying fall’ of a gestalt returned. From rust to shine.
    nullimmortalis
    May 23, 2020 at 7:16 am Edit
    THE CONNOISSEUR
    “Finally, he began to have the most troubling dreams.”
    Henry has some of his own co-vivid dreams for REAL, and I continue to be stirred by the counterintuitive repercussions between the genders, where one can interpret things with a flair or bravado newborn from this literature. With gratuitous darkness and light. Here, Henry is a bespoke collector of collectible objects for himself and professionally for others. Here, miniature bathing beauties for himself, Art Deco or not, on dolphins or suns, flying freefall or grounded.
    nullimmortalis
    May 24, 2020 at 7:23 am Edit
    THE VIAGRA MONOLOGUES
    I sometimes attach a laugh-out-loud to my reading and reviewing but, this morning, I had for me evoked a split-my-sides! By this story of the narrator’s Joseph Andrews weaponised larger than life only (only?) to shrink back to a mere Shamela …. even a nested Clarissa?

    1. sue ditmar
      May 24, 2020 at 4:06 pm Edit
      Exactly! Well spotted with the play on Fielding! Sue Harper
      Reply
    2. nullimmortalis
      May 25, 2020 at 7:21 am Edit
      Sorry, just this minute, I accidentally read the following work before reading ‘The Salt Pans’, a mistake I shall hopefully rectify tomorrow…
      THE STRANGER ON THE TRAIN
      “colour, space and timbre”
      A fascinating account of Stella encountering the spitting image of her seven-years-dead love called Jamie. And her attempts to emulate brief encounters in railway stations seem to help create an effectively figurative fable about the horrific dangers of breaking today’s social distancing rules… All this in a fiction work that surely must have been written well before we had even heard of Covid-19.

      1. nullimmortalis
        May 26, 2020 at 7:19 am Edit
        THE SALT PANS
        “She started to frequent funerals—rather informal affairs these days, with a hastily scraped hole—“
        These days, too, it seems fitting to harvest salt from tears and sweat. Towards our own soul’s spelunking, too. Another apposite epiphlet to savour.
        And the first SALT Agreement, I note, was signed on today’s date in 1972.
        Reply
      2. nullimmortalis
        May 27, 2020 at 7:27 am Edit
        From rocky spelunking or hawling to the sheer thought of becoming swaddled in smooth, creamy Real Irish linen sheets…
        THE HAUNTED SHEETS
        “I had watched all this aslant…”
        And, with the help of this story about Vera, I aver that it crowns my growing belief that “all this” is a special once-in-a-lifetime book, a book of epiphlets that has come at its optimum moment IN that life. Here Vera is one of my imagination’s lodgers supplied by this book with a dark nest’s bloodstain marring each moment of waking — each morning become a spur to brainstorming visions. From red to lissamine. From spelunk to spunk. Through a mine’s creative lift-shaft mangle. We all grow old and look like ‘grand’ should be our prefix, my dear. I say this when, nearly always, she enters the room just as I finish dealing with each day’s epiphlet.
        Reply
        • nullimmortalis
          May 27, 2020 at 7:48 am Edit
          For ‘prefix’ please read ‘epithet’.
          Reply
        • nullimmortalis
          May 27, 2020 at 8:22 am Edit
          Cross-referenced with chapter seven of Walking Horatio here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/05/20/walking-horacio-mark-patrick-lynch/#comment-19188
          Another book that somehow seems to have come at its optimum moment!

          nullimmortalis
          May 28, 2020 at 5:59 am Edit
          PARACHUTE SILK
          “There were tucks and frills and peplums, so that Vera (who was a tiny thing) looked almost lost in it,…”
          I have spent the morning looking at images of peplums. Here a widening dress that was an autocorrect for wedding. Or vice versa. Whatever, THIS launch was not cancelled. My Mum and Dad, incidentally, got engaged during the war, too. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t later been parachuted into their lives… And what of those other tucks and frills?
          nullimmortalis
          May 29, 2020 at 7:24 am Edit
          IRENE ADLER AT THE REICHENBACH FALLS
          From Bohemian love to Crimean apogee, from her bound breasts to a chest full of money, and via a dubbing by today’s figurative symptom of scrofula, the eponymous lady forms here, for the first time, a new truth about her involvement with Sherlock. Ending with probably the most striking poetic image ever of the Volga, here in her likeness. A work, as part of this whole book, that is perhaps, since Conan Doyle, the strongest candidate in my long-term public search for works truly turning fiction into truth.
          nullimmortalis
          May 30, 2020 at 7:19 am Edit
          BEWARE WHAT YOU WISH FOR

          “So far so good.”
          …and that’s all we REALLY can wish for. But we somehow return to the end of this reviews’s first half with The Gears Of Time, this now not being the first half but the second, or hour, or day… or even eternity whereby we remain out of synch with even ourselves. Only fiction has sufficient gears for the optimum gestalt to be created therefrom, and luckily Samantha and Jimmy are in fiction, and hope thus remains for them. The remains of the day, if not eternity… whether it be an androgynous Genie out of a clock or Jimmy out of a lissamine bush.

          nullimmortalis
          May 31, 2020 at 7:46 am Edit
          “…coffins, where black death 

          Keeps record of the trophies won”
          Percy Bysshe Shelley
          THE HOMUNCULUS
          “, she felt better than she had for months: empty, lissom almost.”
          Shelley has an operation clearing a blockage… somehow reminds me of Dickens’ walking coffins…giving birth to the death of the one who first helped give her birth, a theme and variation upon Mary Shelley? A synergy by mutual ventriloquism so fitting for this book wherein often grotesque or sexually vulgar absurdisms reveal more truth for our times than the reality of bodily distances.
          Reply

. nullimmortalis
June 1, 2020 at 7:14 am Edit
RAPUNZEL
I find this synergy quite INCREDIBLE, and it perhaps shows how pre-tuned I am with parts of this book even before I have read them! Rapunzel and her dark nest of hair….
For example, in the last day or so, I have happened to propound this about its sister story in Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (see my appended comments to this blog post: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/05/30/lady-of-shalott-and-covid/)…
And there are several references to Rapunzel in my real-time reviewing over the years.
This Harper story concentrates on her hair, ALL her body hair as an accretively hirsute pelisse, as it would!! — another absurdist effigy of our unbarbered lockdown times!
Reply
  • nullimmortalis
    June 1, 2020 at 8:06 am Edit
    nullimmortalis
    June 1, 2020 at 8:35 am Edit
    Cross-referenced later with the latest Interlude in Armageddon House: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/armageddon-house-michael-griffin/#comment-19222
    nullimmortalis
    June 3, 2020 at 7:47 am Edit
    1674E510-AF04-49B2-8426-67318B7059F8THE FIELD OF REEDS
    “It was time for her to begin the second of the Plagues of Egypt. […] She bought them surgical masks to wear.”
    This is the Famous Fable of Fenella’s Fierce Furloughless regime in the University department that she runs and the revenge of her staff, involving Ancient Egyptian cartouches, natron baths, sharp hooks and Ushbati. And this book’s key to a doorway… woman as mother or mummy with bandaged wound….
    nullimmortalis
    June 4, 2020 at 7:19 am Edit
    THE SHAMAN
    “I’m not judgemental but my current owner would just as soon have MDF as my oak burnish!”
    Georgie – another in the eye-line of this book’s veneer of female epithets or names – grows her hair long, yet washing her hands less, as she becomes this epiphlet’s eponym: the animism of furniture speaking with their own recriminatory souls and other once cherished househeld items, eventually the animism of natural lissamine outsides, and making themselves ripe for an eventual gestalt’s ‘Repair Shop’. We are all competing shamans, perhaps?

    nullimmortalis
    June 5, 2020 at 7:32 am Edit
    Possible plot spoiler here, one to which becoming accretively acclimatised would be advisable…
    THE MYSTERIOUS LOVER
    “, so he kept a respectful distance most of the time.”
    The finest possible vignette as a portrait of a woman gradually falling in love.
    In love with Man as a version of the Miltonic Lucifer.


    nullimmortalis
    June 6, 2020 at 7:17 am Edit
    DENTAL HYGIENE
    “And Jasper had a fastidious dislike of putting his mouth close to anyone else’s.”
    A story, probably written yonks ago, but so appositely disorientating to us all today, when do it yourself dentistry has become all the rage. And, on a personal note, the startling concept of finding milk teeth in Clarissa’s mouth made me somehow think obliquely of putting myself under my own pillow, till rescued by a fairy. (Jasper’s eventual round table solution to his own problem, however, at the end, seemed quite far fetched.)
    2. nullimmortalis
      June 7, 2020 at 7:22 am Edit
      SOFA STORIES
      “: ‘there are hinges in everyone’s lives,…’”
      Strangely, it was only yesterday that I heard for the first time someone refer to our current situation as a hinge in time. Meanwhile, this is possibly the most moving and memorable Harper epiphlet yet, as Sarah pulls out miniature versions of herself from the back of the sofa, the would-have-beens one of whom she now becomes Alice-like. Suspiria — the name of the first would-have-been she found in the sofa — is appropriately the Latin word for sighs. Sighs as stories, sofa stories as settees or settles. This book, for me, is today’s ultimate settle, by ironically and creatively often unsettling me!
      nullimmortalis
      June 8, 2020 at 7:31 am Edit
      BACKWARDS
      Much of my literary life has been based on retrocausality, and here is cream on it — with Augustina reading people’s backs, a sort of dorsaliency to supplement palmistry or phrenology. This Harper work must surely have induced me to create this thread in 2009 entitled ‘Women With Their Backs To Us’; http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=31619#post31619
      Reply
      • nullimmortalis
        June 8, 2020 at 7:35 am Edit
        About halfway down the first page of that old thread (where many of the images have vanished because of internet entropy), there was a then new brief fiction by myself with Women With Their Backs To Us as its title.
        nullimmortalis
        June 8, 2020 at 8:00 am Edit


        nullimmortalis
        June 9, 2020 at 7:26 am Edit
        CARGO CULT
        “—its hinges gave a little squeak, as though they wished to conceal what was inside.”
        This enticing epiphlet — telling of the amenable attic billeted by an epiphyte called Sally, and visions of her life’s cargo of memories as lost objects and lost people gradually turning up in there towards an eventual epiphany of evacuation — somehow reminds me at least obliquely or figuratively of how I started this book in a deep lockdown and now there is at least a prospect of my soon sallying forth again… and, indeed this book has so far been most helpful in getting me through this period with my daily breakfast reading of it.

        nullimmortalis
        June 10, 2020 at 7:19 am Edit
        FIRST BURY YOUR MARTIAN
        “One day, in the early 1970s, I was walking my dog in a wood.”
        Jack, not Horatio. And indeed, I don’t think Horatio has so far dug up anything like what Jack dug up here! Although paranoiac conspiracy theories might be common to both dogs’ carers as narrators in their own stories, I guess. This Harper story is wonderfully Harperesque, especially with its burial-swaddled birth of a supposed alien and its implications…
        “a sort of hinge in my life”
        2. nullimmortalis
          June 11, 2020 at 7:16 am Edit
          THE MERMAN
          “A little further off he spied an island with a lighthouse.”
          To the lighthouse, our eponymous merman with a fishtail spars adaptable sexuality with a shapely woman and her Clarissa nest (here called ‘something’ in italics)…
          [It seems incredibly apt, with enormous synchronicity, that a five year memory turned up automatically on my Facebook timeline (as such ‘memories’ do on a daily basis) earlier this morning HERE with this caption that I wrote five years ago on today’s date: ‘My personal Fishtail, now complete. Or almost. Yay!’]

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