Refractions

  The Female Gaze Artist Nancy Lu Rosenheim’s  Big Girls  Figurative Paintings For Sale by Collector Ave (Luisa), 69x54x8 inches,  Handmade egg-oil tempera on panel, white gold leaf, carved bass wood Query Collector Gail Vida Hamburg at  founder@rainworksomnimedia.com Big Girls Artist’s Statement The female gaze, aptly defined as an extended reciprocal conversation between the artist, her art, and the viewer, is crystallized in the unbroken exchange between artist  Nancylu Rosenheim , her early work,  Big Girls —a series of larger than life figurative paintings of women—and its female collector. In 1991, writer and multimedia producer,  Gail Vida Hamburg  stumbled on several paintings from Rosenheim’s  Big Girls  in a gallery in Granada, Spain that captured her imagination. “The paintings were full of  machisma —the subjects were larger than life, serene, defiant women demanding acceptance on their own terms. I was mo...

  "Stay In Your Own Lane” Storytelling Will Be The Death of Literature Reposted by Gail Vida Hamburg The controversy over Jeanine Cummins’   American Dirt— about who has the right to tell a story, the “White Gaze” of writers, and about the self-referential, exclusionary arbiters of mainstream publishing who dictate what is written and promote what America reads—has divided the writers I know into partisans.  In one camp, those who defend their right to create any story and character that captures their imagination. In the other, those who view the writing of stories by those who haven’t directly lived the experience of the characters and the fiction they create as cultural appropriation and cultural misappropriation. As a writer of two novels populated by multicultural characters—immigrants, exiles, itinerants, Americans rooted here or living peripatetically as foreigners abroad — I stand in the middle, not without opinion or jud...

  Zadie Smith’s   White Teeth   & J.M Coetzee’s   Elizabeth Costello Reviewed by Gail Vida Hamburg Author of   The Edge of the World   (Mirare Press) White Teeth   and   Elizabeth Costello   are serious books, both of them hyper-intellectual literature of ideas. However, White Teeth is more accessible to the general reader, while Coetzee’s book is for a rarefied audience. White Teeth   is most of all, about consequences and responsibility. Smith opens the book with a quote from E.M Forster’s   Where Angels Fear to Tread : “Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today, and when you say of a thing that “nothing hangs on it” it sounds like blasphemy.” In   White Teeth , Smith uses three families to spin her large ideas into an interesting saga. The privileged, fully actualized Chalfens represent old England, while the Iqbals, a failed immigrant family, haunted and crippled by its past, embody th...

  Rohinton Mistry’s   Family Matters Reviewed by Gail Vida Hamburg Author of   The Edge of the World   (Mirare Press) The double entendre in the title of Rohinton Mistry’s novel is no mere Hallmark sentiment. The Indian not yet inspired by Western notions of personal freedom, still lives his life in the context of family—its rules authored by the caste and enforced by the clan and family. What profession he pursues and who he marries, fall within the jurisdiction of “family matters.” Personal space – “spatial matters” if you will -- is also a compelling issue on a subcontinent populated by one billion people. Rohinton Mistry’s quintessentially Indian novel is a discursive tale about family and spatial politics, and disintegration of the self and the home. Nariman Vakeel is an aging widower suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. He lives in a large, crumbling Bombay apartment -- the Chateau Felicity -- with his unmarried adult stepchildren, Coomy and Jal. Coomy is a hect...

  Contempt   by Alberto Moravio Reviewed by Gail Vida Hamburg Author of   The Edge of the World   (Mirare Press) Contempt   is a disturbing work by Italian author, Alberto Moravia that casts a penetrating gaze at two people flailing about in the sticky molasses of a decaying marriage. With deep psychological insight, Moravia tells the story of Moltari, a failed public intellectual turned screenwriter and his beautiful wife, Emilia. Moltari is one of the most appallingly selfish and self-destructive protagonists to be encountered in literature. He installs his trophy wife in a rented hovel that she furnishes and cares for, with all the attention due to a love nest. “Her love of home,” Moltari [the narrator] explains “was an unconscious means of expression for the frustrated aspirations of generations of disinherited people who were chronically incapable of setting up an abode of their own. The actual power of that dream was for her, more a reason for living than ...

  Amy Hempel’s   Reasons To Live Reviewed by Gail Vida Hamburg Author of   The Edge of the World   (Mirare Press) To draw parallels between Amy Hempel’s   Reasons To Live   , a cycle of “cut to the bone” stories set in contemporary Los Angeles, and India’s opulent Mughal miniature paintings, is not as crazy a notion as one might think. Mughal miniature art bloomed and flourished under the reign of Emperor Akbar [1556-1605], and are awesome images of artistic structure and excellence. Often smaller than the palm of one’s hand, the pictures are filled with many figures and stories, all of them happening simultaneously and bound only by shape and color. According to Bharati Mukerjee [ Jasmine, Holder of the World   ] who is an avid collector of the art form, Mughal miniatures are crowded with “narrative, sub-narratives, sometimes meta-narratives, so taut with passion and at the same time so crisp with irony.” In an essay on Mughal Art’s narrative esthetic...

  Yann Martel’s   Life of Pi Reviewed by Gail Vida Hamburg Author of   The Edge of the World   (Mirare Press) Life of Pi   begins earnestly with a fetchingly loquacious Author’s Note. In the italicized prelude, Yann Martel explains the perfunctory response to his previous novel in his native Canada: “Reviewers were puzzled, or damned it with faint praise. Then readers ignored it.” Martel explains his flight to India to finish his work in progress, a tale set in Portugal in 1939. “Unfortunately,” he writes “the novel sputtered, coughed and died … an element is missing, that spark that brings to life a real story. The discovery is something soul-destroying.” The disillusioned writer mentions his wanderings through South India, on no particular mission apparently, other than to lose himself. In Pondicherry--a former French colonial outpost south of Madras--he meets an elderly man, Francis Adirubasamy, who tells him ominously, ‘I have a story that will make you beli...

  Elias Canetti’s   Auto-da-Fe Annotation by Gail Vida Hamburg Author of   The Edge of the World   (Mirare Press) “You believe in alarming people to the point of panic. Is it the writer’s function to bring more fear into the world?” Herman Broch once asked Elias Canetti. Presumably, Broch was responding to Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe, a cautionary tale about the dangers of detached intellectualism. Canetti originally planned his tragi-comic tale set in Vienna and Paris in the 1930s, as part of a series of novels about mad men and visionaries. It became instead, an absurdist romp about one man’s descent into insanity by mass provocation. The main character in the novel is Peter Kien, the world’s foremost authority on China, and evidently everything else. “No branch of human literature was unfamiliar to him … the few papers he had published were known word for word by his peers … a sentence once set down by him was decisive and binding … in controversial questions he was the ...

  "... Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude do not have a second opportunity on earth."      -- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Annotation by Gail Vida Hamburg Author of   The Edge of the World   (Mirare Press) Whereas in the West, one thinks of “solitude” as a desired state, a reward for putting oneself through the daily machinations of industry and commerce; solitude as I understand it in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s epic novel,   One Hundred Years of Solitude , speaks of a different, sadder condition—not the European notion of existentialism, but a profound loneliness, a sentence of exile. Jose Arcadio Buendia and his men, and their families were wanderers who had crossed the mountains to find the sea. When two years had gone by and they had still not located it, they stopped at the bank of a river. Because they could go no further, nor return to the past, they settled on the ground beneath their feet. They called it...