Customer Reviews

Singing Innocence and Experience

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This book is brilliant. It shines with the darkness and light of wonder and awe which I have spent the last fourteen years trying to put down on paper. Indeed, I have no trouble saying that these stories are one of the rare bits of fiction to wow me in the last decade. They hit me like Bradbury hits me, or Angela Carter, or Kathe Koja, Thomas Ligotti or Shirley Jackson. They revel in the power of myth, but in no unseemly way. They strain to contain the sheer force of their telling. In these pages, the reader will find a woman made of stars (or stars in the shape of a woman), a cynical unicorn and a reluctant virgin, an ophiomorphic plague, the place where lost ships go, a glimpse of Lot's nameless wife and an encounter with Adam's nameless and untouchable second wife, an accidental golem, a perfectly ordinary teenage boy perplexed at the coming loss of his nereid sister, drowned ghosts and terrible sacrifice, the singing head of Orpheus, and a hundred marvels more. If you still have a heart and have not forsaken wonder for the mythless drought which so many seem to mistake for adulthood, these stories will leave you breathless, as will Sonya Taaffe's astounding way with words. And all this from an author who is surely at least ten years my junior. I'd give my left hand for such language and the mind in back of it all. And I say none of these things lightly. If my writing or my opinion means anything at all to you, please, please buy this collection and devour it and be amazed. Buy this book. If it contained only "Constellations, Conjunctions" and "Kouros," it would be worth twice the price. -- Caitlín R. Kiernan (greygirlbeast)

Sonya Taaffe, Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime, 2005)

I feel like something of a sycophant writing this review so soon after writing my review for Ms. Taaffe's other extant book, Postcards from the Province of Hyphens. I don't mean to be. I mean, it's not like I'm going to get scads of free dinners out of it or anything, since she lives hundreds of miles away. Postcards got, and Singing gets, rave reviews for one simple reason: they're brilliant.

Whereas Postcards was mainly poetry interspersed with a little prose, Singing goes the other way. Some pieces are repeated in the two books, but each of them is worth reading twice, even in relatively quick succession. But I've already sung the praises of Taaffe's short work in other places. What matters in the review are the longer stories. I mentioned in a recent review (of Charles Simic's memoirs) the truism that poets and short story writers are, with very rare exceptions, a different breed of animal altogether; those who can write excellent poetry are more often than not simply above-average storytellers. Good, but not as brilliant as they are poets. And the same usually holds true going the other way. Taaffe is one of those rare creatures who, it seems, is capable of doing both at the highest level of ability. Actually, if anything, she's slightly better at short stories. I rush to add, however, I had a lot more pages of short stories with which to judge.

Each of the stories here is a winner. The reader will no doubt find his own favorite (I honestly can't imagine anyone coming into this collection and not liking a single offering), but mine is the relatively early "Constellations, Conjunctions," whose simple beauty is so well offset by Taaffe's Corinthian prose (which, in the story, is still a relatively nascent being; you can tell she was younger when she wrote it than, say, "Clay Lies Still" or "Storm Gods of the Connecticut River Valley").

The stories here are perhaps best categorized as fantasy, though I think they're really unclassifiable; they deal in the unexplained, alternate worlds, all the sort of thing that fantasy stories deal in, but like the work of Lucius Shepard or Wendy Walker, Taaffe's fantasies feel far more like period pieces, though her chosen period, in most cases, is the present day; there's still that slight breath of mustiness between the words, the same one has when one opens a long-undisturbed book and holds it to one's nose, inhaling deeply.

The book gets four and a half rather than five stars for something completely not Taaffe's fault. There's an odd typo on the last two stories; it's so odd, in fact, it looks deliberate. If it is a coincidence, it's a right weird one. I won't spoil it for you; you'll ave to look for yourself.

I cannot sing Sonya Taaffe's praises loud (or, rest assured, tunelessly) enough. I can't wait for book number 3, whatever form it may take. **** ½

Sonya Taaffe is a writer of some of the most intense and image-drenched prose around. Line by long, exquisite, line her writing is desperate and involving. Indeed she made her first major impression on me as a poet - and I think she may be the best poet working in the SF genre right now. But she has also been publishing short stories all over the place, often on mythical or traditional fantastical themes but always individual and always centered on a central character's obsession. As I have intimated, the prose is really striking, lush, very poetical. In his introduction Tim Pratt suggests among others Theodore Sturgeon as an influence, and that seems apposite: not just in her thematic concerns but in the desperate feel to some of the prose. If there is a fault it is that read back to back the voice begins to sound a bit too similar story to story, the emotional register seems pitched always the same. (And here a look at Sturgeon is instructive - he being a writer who could and did vary his register greatly.) But this is a mild fault - taken each by itself the stories are moving jewels, and Taaffe seems a writer poised to grow into her powers. (Indeed, her latest stories, not included here, seem to me to be her best yet.)

Singing Innocence and Experience is an excellent introduction to Taaffe's work. It collects 16 stories and 7 poems, dating back to 2001. The poems are characteristic of her work, with the same long lines and sharp images as the prose, and with thank goodness complete and logical sentences: not just syntactical elements thrown against the wall is with some poets.

My favorites among the stories include "Constellations, Conjunctions", a very early piece. It's a sweet and mysterious story about a young man, an astronomer, who falls for a young woman with the significant name of Stella, and with a curious quality to her skin. "Featherweight" is another pure love story (as indeed are many of these stories love stories, and emotionally true love stories, of one sort or another), about a man looking for a heart for a mysterious creature - woman? Machine? Alien? No prizes for guessing where he finds it, but the story gets to its conclusion in a lovely fashion. Back to back stories deal with people obsessed with the sea. "Till Human Voices Wake Us" is about a teenaged boy staying for the summer with his older sister who loves a merman; and "A Ceiling of Amber, a Pavement of Pearl" concerns a woman commissioned to write a song for a man trying to find again the city under the sea he saw while drowning.

For the most part these stories are set in what seems to be our world, our time, though the slant viewpoint, and the gorgeous prose, give the settings a fantastical gloss. But occasionally Taaffe takes us elsewhere, as with "Time May Be", set in strange Aruis, and telling of a mysterious woman, Josza, perhaps not human, who takes in a lost young man. Images of the tarot mix with slow revelations of Josza's past and of the geography of Aruis.

Each story is a heady brew. The poems are similarly striking. As I said, perhaps the stories cluster around too similar emotional poles - and perhaps at times they go on a bit too long. But they remain fascinating, and the collection is at once fine work and a promise of even better work to come.

I first read the work of Sonya Taaffe in the pages of Caitlin R. Kiernan's Sirenia Digest. It was a reprint of "Constellations, Conjunctions" and after reading it, I immediately ordered Singing Innocence and Experience. This book is gorgeously written in a very lyrical style. Many of the stories read as a sort of prose poetry, while the poems included are equally affective. I strongly recommend this book to all. And for more and previously unpublished works by Sonya Taaffe, check out Sirenia Digest here: www.caitlinrkiernan.com/sirenia.html.

Sixteen short stories and a handful of poems, Singing Innocence and Experience is a collection of mythologies, retold or freshly imagined but in all cases humanized. The stories vary widely, from Orpheus's head found washed up on the seashore to a unicorn in the shape of the man, and all are written with lyrical prose and a strong sense of magic. All of the stories are a joy to read, but in a collection they sometimes suffer: when grouped together, there is not enough time to appreciate each story individually. Nonetheless, enthusiastically recommended.

Taaffe can place a golem on a sun-drenched Boston street, and still have his story read as a myth: she takes a myth, breaks it down, reinvents it, and then mythologizes it again in her lyrical writing. Clearly she knows her myths well, and she is able to render them to key themes and concepts which are a strong backbone that supports the story. By reinventing (or even creating) her myths, she renders them new again--in magical premises which capture the imagination, via characters who are nuanced and deeply empathetic. Her writing is a poetic voice rich with sensory detail, and it both brings her stories to life and renders them once again the thing of myth and legend. And so her stories are art: original, consuming, haunting, beautiful, empathetic, mythic, and truly meaningful.

Unfortunately, in a collection they suffer. Because the myths are reimagined and sometimes appear in incongruous settings, and because Taaffe's language is so lyrical and rich, it often takes half of the story to figure out its premise--and the second half to figure out what it means. Stories like this beg silence after their reading, to contemplate them and knit together their pieces. In a collection, with another story calling from just the next page, it's easy to skip that contemplation--and so the stories feel short, as if they end as soon as they make sense. But take your time in the reading, and this collection is a delight. I enjoyed every story, and was hugely impressed by Taaffe's talent. I recommend this collection with all enthusiasm. It's a work of art.