Customer Reviews

Silk

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

 

 

Grace Dane Mazur is a biophysicist, and has a scientist's
eye for detail. But she's also a poet, to judge by her
skillful use of words, and she has a painter's
appreciation for the language of natural light.

Many of the stories in this slim collection are connected.
They relate crucial, character-forming episodes in the life
of Cassandra. The stories are set in Paris, the American
Northwest, and South East Asia and are filled with the
sensual experiences of foreign life - the reverent silence
of catacombs, the roar of a monsoon and the exotic taste
of durian.

But best of all are the characters. They are complex,
human and falliable. It is a delight to watch them
change and grow from one story to the next. We first meet
Cassandra as a young girl, then as a graduate student in
Paris and again as a working scientist. Some of the stories
are told in the first person (Cassandra's point of view)
and some in the third person; this mix of viewpoints allows
the author to give us a fuller appreciation of Cassandra's
character.

Highly recommended, especially if you've been to Paris
or South East Asia, or ever eaten a durian.

Silk is a collection of eleven short stories. Several of the stories are about the sexual development of a woman we first meet at age ten, Cass. The stories about Cass are very bold and have the power to shock. She first gets a sense of the notion of sexuality when she watches her aunt, who is enough younger than her mother so she does not see her maternally, enjoying an erotic stimulation from bathing nude from the waist down in a fast flowing stream. I think Mazur shows incredible narrative skill and subtly with this theme as just as ten year old Cass is confused initially by what her aunt is doing, the reader of the story is also confused as to what is happening and what is going on in the mind of Cass. In a very shocking story, we see the long term incestuous relationship of the now young adult Cass and her older brother. This is a very daring story that Mazur powerfully develops and once we understand how it happens we are on the edge of accepting, even though we know we cannot.

Another reason I liked these stories is that the people in them are into interesting things and talk about them in a way that seems real. I was simply fascinated in one of the stories when an older woman who was an expert on French cave art speculated about what the music of the painters of the famous cave images might have been like. Her account of the recreation of this music was fascinating and made perfect sense.

The stories are also set in interesting places from the art quarters of Paris, to Cambridge, Ma, to Singapore. I really enjoyed it when one of the characters buys a durian at a Vietnamese market for her boyfriend. Durians smell so bad that airlines in Thailand, where they are common, will not let people on the plane carrying them. They are also so heavy, imagine a bowling ball with protruding spikes, that every year several people sitting under a durian tree (OK not a bright place to take a nap) are killed when a falling fruit hits their head. I have had several times Durian meringue pie and I really like it but it might not be for everyone.

The people in the stories also have interesting professions they are passionate about, not just jobs. Some of the characters work are curators in museums and some do research work on silkworms, something the author did herself for years. The title story, "Silk" centers on the life of a woman who has dedicated her working life to the study of silk worm eggs. I learned a lot about silk worms from this story and one other one also.

Silk is a wonderfully collection of short stories about interesting engaged by life people, sometimes hurt and pushed into partially destructive behavior by loneliness. It also about competition of women for men.

The prose in these stories is exquisite. There is a lot to be learned from these stories but that is an incidental pleasure. At places I gasped at the beauty of the stories.

I have picked out this book at my local library's summer booksale. I realy liked the title. I love silk and just wearing it brings back the memories of the wonderful time I have pent in Southeast Asia. I was curious to find out the author's reasons for choosing the title. It was delight to find out that this talented writer is both scientist and a poet, cosmopolitan in cast of characaters she introduces in her stories - as well as wonderful places around the world used for staging some of her stories. Her characters are complex and vulnerable. Some of the stories are connected, so in some ways the book feels like a sort of novella, too. After reading it I had a feeling that this book is strongly personal for Ms. Mazur and that it has its strength in the possibility of being semi-autobiography mixed with dash of fiction.