1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quite simply, the best, August 4, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: The Best of Gowanus: New Writing from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean (Paperback)
The world's full of literary journals. Why read this one? If you want to know about the world, it's all on National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and CNN, isn't it? What possibly can a literary journal add?
Don't look for the answer in the Table of Contents. Look for it in the Author Bios. To take only a few of the 28 contributors: Razi Abedi is from Pakistan, Vasilis Afxentiou from Greece, Arlene Ang from Manila, Anjana Basu Calcutta, Richard Czujko South Africa, Viktor Car and Miroslav Kirin from Croatia, Raymond Ramcharitar from Trinidad. Several are from India, there's a handful are Yanks, plus assorted hangers-on from places in the world with no fixed address, apparently they just respond to "Occupant."
Some of their characters leave a track, some make a mark, some luxuriate in unearned reward, some crumple under the stubbornness of systems, some sing, some cry. Yet when the last shovel of dirt is spaded or the pyre done to embers, their little bundles of personality have vanished along with their fleeting, private histories, blips on a scale whose magnitude they or we may never know, their meaning incomplete because our comprehension is incomplete. This instant, too, is a short story.
More than mere characters are in these stories. We are, in that part of ourselves which is all humans. First we are a dream, then we are not, then we are again ("Sister Hanh" by Ly Lan), only this time vaporous angels, the angels of the keys, angels in the sense of "Mon ange te précédera"-My angel will precede you-the ignored part of our own relevance going ahead of us into the so-called future (A Feast of Crows" by KC Chase), preceding, going ahead of us, furthering us ahead of our pace ("The Long Journey" by Vasanthi Victor; "Jesus Christ Lord of Hosts Discovers Southern California" by Holly Day), while events of the hour play themselves out as if seemingly important in our monkey-brain salad-bar humanity heads ("Parking Ticket" by Norma Kitson). The carnival barker calls on ("Singing in the Wind" by Keith Smith).
In these stories.
In some tales is the taste of cultures gone rancid ("The Ngong Hills" by Rasik Shah and "London Through the Magic Eye" by Raymond Ramchartiar), scallop-shaped memories in white light ("The Lost Village"-Lang Lo in Vietnam-by Le Van Thao), the wire through which happiness flows ("The Burden of Grace" by Vasilis Afxentiou), the sense of life's undoing preordained ("Curses and Poetry" by Anjana Basu and "Diary of a Street Kid" by Fanuel Jongwe), this or that character blocked by not knowing their true worth ("Dalit Literature" by Rezi Abedi and "Spectacles" by Anjana Basu), others a tarantella of quick cuts as the burning finger of the past reaches their heels ("Snapshots of Elsewhere" by Raymond Ramchartiar). The shape of a woman created out of the galaxies ("A Betting Man" by Vallath Nandakumar). The gelatin temple of turning deeds into a brand name (Winnie Mandela portrayed in David Herman's "The Lady and the Tiger"; "The Transformation of Sleepy Hollow" by Richard Czujko).
Everything is real, their reality, even the phantasmagoric. Like the paintings of California Realist James Doolin, the "realism" in these stories is skewed in a way that what is seems always lunging forward at an angle, anything but static. A good story tells us of time; what it brings us to know within is untouched by time. These accounts are real, yes, close to the surface of here and now, but also deeper for their absence of self-interjection, the contrived just-so light and just-so exoticism of the TV Special. Nothing artificial, nothing fake, nothing held back. What you feel is not the author's work, it is your own feelings responding to the facts they set forth.
About half are fiction-or rather, reality with the clothes of character on-the rest non-fiction. Some are cryptic enough to be short-shorts. Most have a certain fabulistic air about them; all you have to do is change the humans to animals and you have Apulius' Golden Ass or Mr. Toad and friends. The usual baggage of reviewer lingo hovers uneasily near these pages. The stories are lives, not stories; circumstances, not contexts. In the lives on these pages, Levi-Strauss, F.R. Leavis, postmodernism, and semiotics are self-indulgent caricatures. When we know where fear comes from, we transect it. That's when the stairway appears before us.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The "Best of Gowanus" is GREAT !!, September 10, 2001
This review is from: The Best of Gowanus: New Writing from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean (Paperback)
This "Gowanus" anthology is an outstanding volume of third world writing. Reading many of the essays, short stories, and poetry was more than a joy, because you get the flavor of other places, a sense of the people, and new perspectives about what's happening in "real time" around the world. To be sure, a lot of these writers are unsung, but clearly enormously talented. This volume deserves nationwide exposure, and many of the writers here could make a lot of noise, if they are "discovered." I recommend this one! It's an exciting, turn-the-pages read.
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