Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Thomas Glave - The Torturer's Wife
I found Thomas Glave's first collection of short fictions, Whose Song? (2000), very difficult to read—not just in its depressing subject matter (violence, based on sex, perceived sexual orientation, and race) but in its extremely fragmented, incantory style.
The subject matter is just as despairing in the stories included in The Torturer's Wife (2009), but they are mostly comprised of complete sentences rather than sentence fragments. Some of the sentences are very run on and idiosyncratically punctuated, so there are still syntactic challenges for readers. The ratio of pain to pleasure experienced by the characters is very high, though before being burned alive, beaten nearly to death, or committing suicide (on a slave ship in the Middle Passage) there are some joys of same-sex love for the African and African-Caribbean characters.
The title character of the title story seems to be a non-black Latina (I'd guess Argentine, though she could be Chilean or Peruvian). There is no joy in her story, as she is engulfed by guilt and imagined body parts of those her husband has tortured and killed raining on their house while he is away. (She also hears the voices of those dropped from helicopters into the ocean.)
Like "The Torturer's Wife," "He Who Would Have Become Joshua, 1791" is something of a ghost story with Latin American magical realism effects. The African boys who love each other just fly away from the hellhole that is a slave ship hold.
Like "The Torturer's Wife," there is something post-apocyalptic about the rather abstract landscape of "Invasion: Evening Two," the story most like those of Nadine Gordimer to whom the book is dedicated. (The featured blurb is from Juan Goytisolo, whom I did not know could read English.)
Especially the way Glave read it, the opening of the opening story, "Between" is funny. There are successive interior monologues of a young black man and a young white man who pair up. The gimmick is that there is no indication of which is which (they do have names: David and Jonathan). When violence interrupts the idyll, as it invariably does in Glave's fiction, the reader does not know if it is intra- or inter-racial. The disabling injuries are the same, which is probably Glave's point.
The failure to name characters recurs in other stories, though not in the (literally) searing "Out There," in which an openly gay Jamaican man returns to the house of his dead mother and is burned alive in an exorcism by townsmen. (That story is told by a middle-class gay Jamaican who had been the incinerated man's friend and whose yen for lower-class Jamaican men had not (yet?) led to life-threatening or -ending trouble.)
"South Beach , 1992" is the AIDS story in the collection. It has a certain gallows humor about the ramifications of one partner in a gay couple testing positive for HIV (in the days before the protease-inhibitor revolution)
I was unimpressed by Glave's attempt to write (homo)erotica, "The Blue Globes," and liked "Milk Sea: sentience" and "Woman Impossible Task" even less but a ration of six hits to three misses is high.
The subject matter is so often horrific that for all its lyricism and incantory power of the best of his stories, and the seeming cheerfulness of the author (at a local bookstore appearance), my recommendation has to be hedged with concern about how depressing much of what occurs in them (including the David's and Jonathan's racializing of each other) is. Toni Morrison's Beloved provides a similar caution.
More about the author: Born to Jamaican parents in the Bronx, Thomas Glave grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica. He earned an MFA at Brown University (2008). He is an assistant professor of English at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where he teaches creative writing and courses on Caribbean literature. While in Jamaica on a Fulbright fellowship to Jamaica, he helped found the Jamaica Forum of Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-Flag) In addition to The Torturer's Wife (City Lights Publishing, 2008), Glave is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories (City Lights Publishing, 2000), , the essay collection Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (University of Minnesota Press, 2005; winner of a Lambda Literary Award), and is editor of the anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Duke University Press, 2008).
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