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| b. 1969 - still alive |
"On my twentieth birthday, I bought myself an ax."
That opening sentence won me over, I read it standing near shelves of books and leaned into them for support as a little wave of euphoria broke over me, then I took the book home and stared at it, afraid that what followed wouldn't feel as good. What followed was the story of a girl obsessed with numbers, she is someone who has to knock, literally, on wood for reassurance throughout her day. This book is like one of those old songs by Belle & Sebastian, the ones that glorify the weird girl. If this were a song written by B&S's Stuart Murdoch, it would be titled 'Mona and Her Amputee Identity Disorder.'
Let me first say that I loved the hell out of this book. Maybe it wasn't written as well as I've heard Bender's other stories are written, (I've never read her before, so I've nothing to compare this with) but I've found that the more personal a book becomes to the reader, the less the actual writing matters e.g. Jean Rhys, early Lorrie Moore. And what is 'good writing' anyway? I think this book is definitely one you have to take personally or else it will fall flat. I like its imperfections and the spots where the story falters, its lack of depth at times. I am glad Aimee Bender wrote this the way it is.
There is a fable in the prologue of this book. The people in it, a family, have to chop off various limbs to get eternal life. Then, because they are hideous, they get kicked out. They made their sacrifice now for nothing, because they will eventually die anyway. The baby of the amputee family was excluded from amputation, but when she's twenty, her leg falls off and she is accepted by the other amputee family members as, in her deformity, one of them. This fable doesn't play out literally in the story, but its general implications are apparent and we find that they don't work out so well in reality. Instead, a better ending is found, one that doesn't include self destructiveness as redemption.
Year published: 2000. Pages: 242.
