Book: Man or Mango? A Lament
Author: Lucy Ellmann
Published: 1998 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Beekeeping, poetry, perverts who grow giant vegetables, and
staged murder weekends at boring Irish hotels all have something in common:
deeply discontented people depend on them for one sort of bracing or another.
A lady who is slipping mostly willingly into hermitude uses
an Irish weekend to get away from getting away.
An expat American poet uses the same hotel to try and finish his epic
poem about ice hockey on his new patroness’s dime. These two were in love
awhile ago, turns out, and they broke each other’s hearts, and, well, after
years of obsessive lists and weird habits that burst out in
stream-of-consciousness tandem chapters that sometimes are told first person,
sometimes third and observations about everyday life that they desperately try
to turn into art, they find each other again.
Perverts who grow giant vegetables just want to show off the
giant vegetables, it turns out, or keep bees and harass the pretty hotel staff.
And then a lot of them drown in a stormy tidal wave that
ended the hotel’s staged murder weekend early.
This was a hard reading experience to describe because just
when I was starting to clap in the rhythm of a chapter, it would be over and a
new one would start with a whole different tempo, and sometimes by the time I
had caught up with that one it ended and changed again. But even while it was
mildly frustrating, it also felt like a true record of how messy and absurd
human emotion can go if it locks onto something against its will and tries hard
to pull away or at least distract itself. It’s lyrical rather than clear.
It seems like it would reward more with repeated readings,
but alas, this one is also a library baby. I have to give those all back.
No comments:
Post a Comment