|
I was recently sent a review copy of a book of stories, Philosophy Thinly Clothed. The author, Heather Folsom, is a “writer and psychiatrist living in the San Francisco Bay Area” . . . The book is like a clear, personal, supremely literate message from Mars. One wonders: Who IS this person? Why has no one ever heard of her? What in the world is she doing in these extraordinary, risk-taking tales? In the Acknowledgments page the author herself thanks a friend for “dissuading” her from her “goal of posthumous publication.”
The stories in Philosophy Thinly Clothed are marvelous, imaginative, funny, wild . . .
One of the most brilliant, enjoyable books I have read in years. . . . “The Rat Suit” alone is worthy of Kafka, and there are many other extraordinary tales.
None of these stories is “realistic” in the usual sense of that word: they are fables, allegories, “fictions” in the Borgesian sense. None of them is very long. Yet we have the sense throughout of a “reality” staked out, claimed, and named. They are inhabitants of a new yet utterly familiar psychic territory.
The stories are widely varied in subject matter. Many are complex and delicate in their feelings; all have amazing moments and odd twists of plot. (This is particularly true of the extraordinary “Mammæ Potentes”—“Breasts of Power.”) . . . Themes of magic, sincerity, watching, criminals, suicide, “revolutionary activity,“ friendship . . . emerge frequently. There are many moments of risk and escape . . .“The Last Criminal” . . . one of the finest in the book, contains perhaps the most remarkable passage ever written about the mother/daughter problem:
In perhaps the finest story in the book, “The Rat Suit,” a woman becomes a rat, the very thing she most fears. My friend, the poet Jake Berry, remarked about this piece, “One thinks of Kafka, but in his story [“The Metamorphosis”], Samsa wakes up transformed. It happened to him. Here, the woman in the story makes it happen. It's horrific and powerfully affirmative at the same time.”
|
