Customer Reviews

She and I: A Fugue

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

In fairness, I haven't read the whole book, but jumpin' Jebus on a pogo stick, what a bunch of pretentious BS. It pretty much looks like just the minor personal memories of some nobody with no obvious point of interest to anyone who does not know Michael R Brown personally. Except that this is all made worse - or perhaps mildly entertaining (depending on how desperate you are for cheap entertainment) - by the pretensions of the language trying to puff up this nothingness into some Deep Meaning, starting with this super cheesy title. She and I: A Fugue.

Just a couple of quick examples will make the point.
"But the feeling of the souls is as alive as it ever was.
Women were big presences.
They raised me."

I'm glad the author had some nice women to raise him, but really. What's the insight here?

One more little turn of Profound Phrasing: "Lisa and Allison - my first personal friends: the first whose selves I remember."

Shut up already, damn.

I received this book in mail - I started to read it - I stopped at 112 pages - I wanted to poke my eyes out.

This is how this author writes. Not only is it annoying, he writes in tedious detail about his life, his father leaving, his grammar school, being sent to military school, experience bullying and sexual abuse. Pages on pages of online chats and going to get sushi. I was afraid the book was going to be the end of my sanity.

Good book, apparently true to the author's somewhat overwrought feelings as expressed in his own words. Recommended for a quick read.

Michael R. Brown is an example of a self-educated eccentric who does not tolerate challenges to his own little world. Nearly every observation he conveys smacks of inconsideration for his entire environs. Hopefully, this is self published. If not, it may not be wise to ever buy anything so published. This is Ayn Rand at her most simplistic and misleading.

**SPOILER**

This book is well worth reading because it is the book of the future, describing one man's experience meeting someone over the internet with one possible outcome. I really enjoyed the book, especially once Mira came into the picture and it got difficult to put down. The contractions must be similiar to what I use when I think because they made the story flow.

One issue I have with the book was the narrator's odd lifestyle. He describes himself as polyamorous and had an open relationship with his partner Gabrielle. They both were fine with each other meeting other people, and would discuss the people they met with each other. I got this impression through the whole thing that they were almost like in a relationship of convenience and were quick to let one another go at one point (they did break up once but got back together almost in a casual way when both of their side-romances didn't work out). I would be interested to know if they are still together to this day.

Another thing of note: The narrator expressed a need to be 'kept in the loop'. This is important in an online relationship. I know because I met my husband online. It was a tragic story when one party had all kinds of expectations for a situation that another party saw as a bit of fun. This situation might come up a lot, as more and more people are without face-to-face contact and meet people online. There will be much reading things into cold words on a screen.

Michael R Brown wanders without any solid anchor of philosophy, common sense or reflection on human experience. This sounds like a psychoanylisis of a detached subject groping to understand things he hides from himself in the first place. The subject confuses when he should have his values straight. The sensual content of the book is overwhelming, but rarely directly referred to. His poetry and narrative style remind me of someone trying to pick up a total stranger in a upper eschelon pick up bar. Mr. Brown seems like a very well trained person, but appears to restrict that training to a fundamental viewpoint that is out and out anti-intellectual. There is no appreciation of real beauty here. Compulsion and obsession with an unrefined and uncriticized self predominate.
I am tempted to wonder what moved this author to publish this. It would only interest someone if the author were there present, for it does not convey any sense beyond an appreciation of something like some extension of a one night stand. One is reminded of Mozart's Don Giovsnni, only without the powerful and entertaining arias.
This is to biography what De Sade is to gentle lovemaking. My only recommedation for this book is as an example of debauched egotism that might get even DeSade to appreciate the finer points of love.

A fugue is a musical pieced played with different voices, sometimes flowing together and sometimes showing significant dissonance or different threads or phases. Michael Brown's off-beat memoir begins when he is a boy sent to a military school, is the victim of sexual abuse by a classmate bully and finds a way to make those memories strengthen his life rather than destroy it - by facing it squarely rather than burying the horrific memories. His life then turns around as he becomes totally enamored of a writer with a passion for trains and then a long phase in which the works of Ayn Rand and her followers shape his living philosophy. Later he professes a break from Rand's philosophy, yet his journey from that moment seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to Rand's own controversial role in successful and failed relationship with the opposite sex. Michael narrates his discovery of women, including a passionate and free relationship with a wife who dies of cancer and then a relationship borne out of an evolving, free spirit type of internet communication. The dialogues occurring on the internet occur between Michael and a woman many years younger than he, Mira. But they also include his girlfriend Gabrielle, who is as enamored of Mira as Michael is.

Mira is a dancer suffering from depression until her relationship with Michael bears fruit in changing her inner flexibility and endurance for complex dance movements. The characters spend a lot of time apologizing in advance and being sure they aren't crossing boundaries or hurting each other. They claim this sensitivity increases the depth of their bond, but the effect on the reader is to create more questions than agreement with this lengthy, repetitive process before they actually meet in person. Other crises occur with families and friends, natural events that occur in everyone's lives and other events demonstrating how an Objectivist would break from Rand's original ideas or just show their all-too-human foibles and then attempt to deal with same.

Brown writes in a poetic prose style with broken lines, rhyme, metaphors and similes that are supposed to elicit epiphanies in one's own life. Sometimes it works well and other times it's like viewing abstract art that evokes different thoughts and feelings in every unique individual viewing it. Complexity, compassion, beauty, tension and eroticism fill these pages, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively open for the reader's interpretation.

She and I: A Fugue will please a limited audience who can appreciate this artistic presentation that is definitely poetry and probably sparks more philosophical questions than it answers. Its romance again will touch those who are culturally open to appreciate a different form of communication that stretches all boundaries. You'll love it, hate it, resonate with it or be totally confused by it all - it's an enigma fore sure! Try it - you may find something new evolving within yourself as surely as its author lived and relished.

Interesting account, Michael R. Brown!

Reviewed by Viviane Crystal on June 22, 2009

This is a memoir, especially focused on the arc of the author's love life. Or, as he writes:

"Follows apparently disparate lines of experience into a final sounding of nature, time, and the Female Principle."

That sounds rather dry, but the story is juicy and full of emotional events, as he pursues love where it takes him. I take the subtitle, "A Fugue," as referring to the name of the theme-and-variations musical piece. He feels recurring patterns in his story.

I don't want to offer much in the way of story spoilage, but perhaps it is safe to say that it offers explorations of grief, internet relationships, and even polyamory. Some of the key players are what the author calls "the Rand-touched" - people deeply influenced by Ayn Rand.

He has one stylistic quirk that took some getting used to for me. It looks like this:

"No girl'd ever made me feel that."

Thus does a "had" get reduced to an apostrophe and a "d". We do, often, talk like that. But we don't usually transcribe it like that. Perhaps it does make you feel that you are listening to speech, not reading the written word.

The writing is spare, teasing you to imagine the scenes as they glimmer past. To me it felt, at times, like a fairly fast road trip:

"We flashed along, by trees - one stand leafless, bare branches swept
against clouds - then copseful of pines - needley, solid, rich-green."

"Our hands found one another across divider and clasped."

I kept thinking of Emily Dickinson. I guess it's the love of evocative language, plus the inner yearning for bliss. Like Dickinson, he does not aim to titillate; rather he means to inspire, and inspire he does.

There are not enough books on the market that the many facets of men, but with She and I author Michael R. Brown gives us an intimate look at what it means to love and lose and keep yourself intact along the way.

Written in thoughtful prose that will keep the pages turning, the author gives of himself and his experiences in a way that few would be able to pull off. Definitely a book that is worthy of discussion.