The Color Master: Stories by Aimee Bender
My rating: 4/5 cats
and now i see what all the fuss is about. she has a real flair for the fantastic, for the magical fairytale quickstep where suddenly a story about apples becomes a story about sexual assault. it’s dream-logic perfection.
like all good fairytales, the magical elements are just glossing over those painful universal realities we don’t like to examine too closely: the sorrow of a couple ruining themselves, the unwillingness to look too closely at our loved ones, the lies told to avoid confrontation, the gratitude of a necessary favor that still leaves a hollowness.
and she manages to just pepper this collection with perfect observations:
That’s the thing with handmade items. They still have the person’s mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone. This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed then they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.
there’s a darkness in these stories, and it is unsettling. you can’t just move on to the next story with anything like a clean slate. you have this pall hanging over you, and it haunts you from one story to the next.
she has such a knack for voicing the unvoiceable:
…it is brutal to imagine the idea of meeting a new person. Going through the same routine. Saying the same phrases I have now said many times; the big statements, the grand revelations about my childhood and character. The cautious revealings of insecurities. I have said them already, and they sit now in the minds of those people who are out living lives I have no access to anymore. A while ago, this sharing was tremendous; now the idea of facing a new person and speaking the same core sentences seems like a mistake, an error of integrity…The next person I love, I will sit across from in silence. We will have to learn it from each other some other way.
i don’t feel like i can do this book justice right now, so i will just list some of the standouts:
Lemonade is one of the best, and also the one that i am most afraid of. it’s a panicked stream of consciousness in the mind of a highly sensitive girl and her terror at how she comes across to others to the extent that she is blind to how she is perceived by those she wants to be close to.
Tiger Mending, which all i can say to that is this
Wordkeepers which is the funniest, but also the truest and softest to my heart.
Faces, which is just pure poignant delight. that ending…oofa.
Americca—another heavy-magic story that kills me with its ability to pare itself down into all that brutal childhood wonder and self-imposed structure and that whole part with the octopus cap is probably the best example of child-think i have ever read.
i am definitely going to backtrack and read her older titles.
not my finest review, but i still have difficulty reviewing story collections, even one that i enjoyed as much as this one.
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