Staff Picks: Morgues, Mysteries, and Monster Meat
Kiki Smith, Spinners (detail), 2014.
Stricken suddenly with a midspring virus on Wednesday, I had all my usual grouchiness about sick days delayed during the four blissful hours I found myself in bed with , by Barbara Comyns. I’m not the first er to discover my love for Comyns—Sadie Stein has written the foreword—but I nevertheless felt like I was charting new territory. When I picked it up, I wasn’t familiar with the Grimms’ tale of the same name, though the epigraph gives any reader a grisly hint. Never before have I read anything like Comyns’s fabulously readable, diary-like prose, which makes the most of simple meals and little pleasures. For example: the magnolia sapling that was a little more expensive than our heroine could manage; the sponge that maintained its shape when so many others sag in the middle; the Italian teacup, still intact. The book has an uncanny kinship to Helen Oyeyemi’s bewitching . In fact, Oyeyemi’s blurb on the book’s jacket is a cunning little key to her own work as well as Comyns’s. I wish I had a whole week to make sense of the relationship of both novels to race
