The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories
by Aimee Bender
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Book Summary Information
Author: Aimee BenderEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-08-17
ISBN: 0385492162
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories
Book Review: Strange, yet pleasant, surprise
Summary: 5 Stars
Scrolling the wires of the newspaper where I work, I often come across unusual books that I would never think to pick up in a bookstore. This is one of those. However, this book is not for the normal, nor is it for the person who needs to see something through to its completion. Yearning for something completely different? These short stories are engaging, witty snippets of the character's lives and indeed it seems as though we are allowed a glimpse into their reality but are not given the full explanation for all we encounter and this is what I loved about the book. Aimee Bender has a remarkable ability to "tell it like it is" and by that I mean she writes the strange thoughts we all have but would never admit. She is descriptive and has a knack for stating the unobvious. I thought I'd try these short stories before I went to her novel and it was worth the trip. She leaves you wondering "what the heck just happened here" and yet you are satisfied with what you've been given. Keep an open mind and dive in.
Summary of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories
A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips?Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending.
Here are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped--and sometimes twisted--by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the debut of a major American writer.
In conventional fiction, war heroes return home minus an arm or a leg--or, to take Hemingway's worst-case scenario, the family jewels. In Aimee Bender's deeply unconventional collection, however, an even more suggestive body part goes AWOL: "Steve returned from the war without his lips." The army doctors have temporarily replaced them with a plastic disc, which impairs his speech. Luckily, this doesn't prevent him and his wife from engaging in some slightly surrealistic sexual maneuvers: "That night in bed, he grazed the disc over her raised nipples like a UFO and the plastic was cool on her skin. It felt like they were in college and toying with desk items as sexual objects."
That same combo--sex and off-kilter surrealism--provides Bender with her modus operandi. In "Call My Name," for example, a young heiress tails a stranger back to his apartment, gets her dress sliced off, and then consents to be trussed to a chair while he watches a TV documentary about Mozart. "Quiet Please" features a libidinous librarian who takes on all, uh, comers in the back room. Bender isn't, it should be said, simply a purveyor of French postcards. Her prose is exquisitely shaped, and its singsong rhythms suggest something out of a wised-up, whacked-out fairy tale. Indeed, if the Brothers Grimm had been a little more attuned to the pleasure principle, their fables might have boasted at least a family resemblance to Aimee Bender's. --James Marcus
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