K-Ming Chang

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A surreal novella about the intensity and eroticism of girlhood friendships, the ecstasy of desire and disgust, and matriarchal mythmaking.

Seven, who works as a cleaner at a chiropractor’s office, reencounters Cecilia, a woman who has obsessed her since their school days. As the two of them board the same bus—each dubiously claiming not to be following the other—their chance meeting spurs a series of intensely vivid and corporeal memories. In the defamiliarization that follows, the narrator begins to experience queerness itself as an alienation from normative time.

Smart, subversive, and gripping, Cecilia is a winding, misty road trip through bodily transformation, inextricable histories of desire and violence, diaspora, and obsessive love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This short read is much more affecting than most its length are. That is a funcrion of K-Ming Chang's bravura performance with English as a weapon:

When I reached up to touch my face, I felt no protrusions, no new bones inflecting my surface, and yet, when Cecilia and I looked at each other, we saw them: beaks mountaining out of our mouths, rooted to the shadows of our jawbones. Beaks shining like the perfect darkness preserved inside a belly.

You are on notice: Pay attention to the words chosen, pay attention to the images described, or this very slightly surreal...in its literal meaning, the meaning of the parts it's made of, "overreal, above real, on top of real"...narrative of two girls discovering love, passion, intense vibrant hypercolored Experience, will simply squash you, split the space where you are and move through it.

An intense experience will be had; your choice of framing for the act of being engaged with this story will determine its positive or negative perception for you. I am resolutely positive about the experience because anyone who can, and will, and does explore the sensation of Obsession to burnout is my idol.

That will trigger very strong and not always positive memories for some readers. Be aware of this fact particularly if you have been, or are being, stalked.

Readers who prefer direct action will not resonate to the Proustian aide-memoire of this novella. The story, as in plot, is spare to the point of threadbare: Old friends with a past connection of unrequited lust, requited love, and sensual obsession, meet at one's place of work, chat, then get on a bus to go home...not together. Just that isn't gonna drag the hoi polloi into this tent, there to be entertained. The story is of the rung-bell resonance of girls loving each other before womanhood imbues loving, intense intimacy with a bodily expression's inevitability. The immensely divisive choice of piss as a focus of fascination, desire, disgust, and connection is definitely going to upset some people. It is, I think, an example of how little female desire is examined in our literary landscape that this choice has occasioned such a response across the spectrum of readers. Women, even sapphically inclined ones, are still called on to present a particular strain of pure, clean, unsullied neutered bodiless Love and not filthy, sweaty, bodily based Lust...that's reserved for intimacy, things done and thought in private. Shame, in other words. In porn, these acts are Done To women as a form of punishment or humiliation. K-Ming Chang's Seven is not humiliated or punished. She's so obsessed that this is an urgently desired act of further possession and imtimacy. There's more than a whiff of body horror to the way bodily processes and even body parts are casually discussed, possessed, and even deployed throughout the read.

The author's choice of making her girls of Chinese descent, living in the US diaspora, is...to my surprise...not foregrounded. I expected it to be more of a focus because so much is made of the author's own ethnicity. It was something I didn't really notice until I'd read the story and was thinking about responses to the author's realier works (eg, Bestiary, Bone House, Gods of Want), where ethnicity is apparently made more of within those stories. Haven't read 'em, can't speak with an informed eye, but this story doesn't make a meal of it as I suspected it might.

I definitely don't think this read is for everyone, but the right reader will be unfazed by childbirth evocations and livers of others as property to be treasured. The right reader will immerse their awareness in the meaty world of loving someone so much that consuming them is desirable, not in the Hannibal Lecter sense I hasten to say. The right reader will give their readerly ears to the very idiosyncratic music of K-Ming Chang's creation.

It's me. I'm the right reader.… (altro)

This was on my 22 for 22 list, I was so exited to read it. The synopsis does not match the book though and I’m actually a bit resentful that what I was promised was so far from what was delivered.

There is a brilliant story and an inventive writer here, but it’s buried by relentless - and I mean relentless - obsession with the body. Is that strong enough? No. This book is gross. I got the sense that Chang delighted in disgusting readers as much as possible.

“My tongue slipped into her nostril and a pebble of dried mucus dissolved on my tongue. I knew everything she smelled that day”

I read that K-Ming Chang was a sophomore in college home for summer break when she wrote this, and honestly, I think that immaturity was evident. Maybe she’s avant garde. Either way I learned that scatological books are not for me.

*scatology - interest in or treatment of obscene matters especially in literature

I did not know this term existed until Bestiary. I hope not to read anything labeled as this again.

P.S. I can’t fault anyone who rated highly. Kudos for finding the story through the viscera!… (altro)

I received this book as a freebie from somewhere. Wow, what a yungun, the writer is only 24. The writing here is full of fables and bizarro dream-like imagery, almost a bit too much at times - with sequences of confusing sentences that left me distracted when those sentences didn't really seem to fit together... contradicting sentences almost. And a lot of the other imagery is harsh. These stories are like dreams as they are a little hard to hold on to, sometimes just a few pages, hard to piece together. Read this if you're in the mood for scattered magical realism or nightmare fuel poetic imagery, much of it body focused. These bits and pieces are intense! This reminds me of Helen Oyeyemi's books or a bit of Ocean Vuong's 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' if Vuong used a lot more magical realism. My favorite stories are probably the last three: 'Virginia Slims', 'Mariela', and especially 'Meals for Mourners'. There is a lot of imagery packed into this book!… (altro)