Secret Lives of Books

By Rosaleen Love

Secret lives, replete with possibilities. Elsewhere exists as a better place, in a better time, for a better life. The trick is how to get there from here. These stories give the answers. Share in the secret lives of books. Fly to Mars, the first stage, perhaps, in the onward journey to elsewhere. Hear the music of the heavenly spheres and be forever changed, providing the bad guys don’t hear it first. Discover Gaia may not be quite what we think she is. Discover the universe is a rather big place. Embrace Utopia for women too, if only ...

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Secret Lives of Books
Kiddofspeed
Qasida
The Kairos Effect
The slut and the universe

Rosaleen Love’s stories evoke a sensibility that is wholly, distinctively hers... The irony that pervades this sensibility functions as a sort of glue that imbues each story’s incidents and observations with meaning. - L. Timmel Duchamp

Rosaleen Love's previous collections Total Devotion Machine and Evolution Annie were published by the Women's Press alongside classic works by Joanna Russ, Suzy McKee Charnas and Octavia Butler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twelfth Planet Press
• Release date: Oct 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781922101075

Book preview

Introduction

Rosaleen Love’s stories evoke a sensibility that is wholly, distinctively hers. I first encountered this sensibility in her Women’s Press collection, The Total Devotion Machine, and have been delighted to find it in every story of hers I’ve read since. This sensibility, I suspect, derives from an approach to life and the world that is sharply observant, retains its sense of humor in the face of disaster, and thinks simultaneously on the grand scale—in geological or even cosmic time—and on the small and human and sometimes even the microscopic. Mysteriously, this sensibility manifests itself through fairly plain words (and never very many of them). The irony that pervades this sensibility functions as a sort of glue that imbues each story’s incidents and observations with meaning.

As often happens in her stories, the immanent and transcendent meet in 'The Kairos Moment', when a doctoral student seeks a music of the spheres by orchestrating the efforts of garage-band musicians whose instruments include humble beer bottles, a tin whistle, a fiddle, and the didgeridoo. In 'The slut and the universe', three generations of women living together in the future—Marysa, Erica, and Elisabetta—who take different views of what feminism is and should be sustain a visit from Gaia, whose cosmic perspective introduces more than one kind of irony into the argument. 'Kiddofspeed' offers another ironic perspective, a recognition of the flow of fact and fiction in the medium of the internet, in which unreliable narration is not only the rule but one of the main vectors of interest driving proliferation.

'Qasida', a witty tale with a deceptively homely beginning, uncoils and then uncoils some more and then even more after that, cannily encompassing Bronnie and Del’s backyard, Curiosity, the Mars Rover, and the formidable Livia Wynn (who knows fifty-four words for dust and prefers cooks who sit over their pots and quote poetry). Finally, 'The Secret Lives of Books', a ghost story, is most unsettling when funny. Ritchie’s books pushed his family out of the house and now, after his death, he’s entered a new stage of his relationship with them that only emboldens them. Personal libraries tend to go out of control, right? Ritchie’s discovers the internet and issues a manifesto, with Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing in the vanguard.

Enough said. Now just turn the page and let Rosaleen Love’s words do their amazing, amusing magic.

L. Timmel Duchamp

The Secret Lives of Books

We do not devour books. They devour us. They vampirise us, they nourish themselves from our being and our energy, they cut us off from the world, transport us to their world, gobbling up our space and our time, shortening our nights and days, contracting our house or apartment, ruining us in enriching them, making us theirs when we believe they are ours

William Marx, Vie du Lettré

With the first death begins the dissolution of the body. Cell by cell. The second death is the disassembling of the mind. Word by word. Except this time it wasn’t going to happen. Ritchie lay on the bed in the hospice, quietly breathing his last breath. He had made his escape plans. Once all this was over, and it was taking far too long, he was going to be off and away.

Ritchie held fast to his remaining scraps of consciousness. His body lay heavy. He no longer felt the gentle pulse of the morphine pump. Pain was no longer his companion. If he opened his weary eyes, he glimpsed Luisa, once his wife, and their children, Luke and Ellie. Good of them to stick around considering the life he’d led them. True, they had moved out when his books took over but they came back to visit. Ritchie stayed with his books and his family moved on to a place with more room to move.

There were some surprises among his visitors: his mother, his father, his grandmother, long dead each and every one. His family, alive or dead, whatever, he was glad of their care, their company, their compassion.

The time for action was upon him. Ritchie slid deeper into his mind. Time to make the jump. Not for him the white tunnel towards the bright light into the beyond. His body gave its last shudder. He lay still, unbreathing. It was over.

The spirit that was Ritchie broke free. He took off as fast as he could, belting away from the light towards the dark at the edge of it all. No tunnel for him. He zoomed into darkness until what lay beneath fell away, and down he plummeted into the void. Until he found himself falling though the ceiling of the room he so recently left.

Ritchie hovered on high. Nurses smoothed his body straight, the body that had been his for fifty-seven years and one day. His final birthday had been terrible, with Ritchie near oblivion, his visiting family distraught. Now he no longer saw the point of any of it, that body, those people keeping watch. He loved them all once, as they loved him, whatever love once was. How swiftly it retreated from his post-death consciousness.

Separate. Separated. No longer together. The spirit that was Ritchie said farewell and swirled away out the door to freedom.

Down the street he zoomed, no need of car or tram, up the road, turned the corner, slid under the door, and… ‘What was I thinking?’ Luisa asked herself, when later, much later, she wised up to what had happened. At the time, she’d had no idea. ‘That spirit didn’t sidle under any door like a wisp of smoke. No, it went straight through, as the quintessential ether permeates and infiltrates all things, no creeping and crawling for it. It went home, by the most

Reviews for Secret Lives of Books

[fred_mouse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A slender collection of short stories, each one packing quite a punch. Love's writing style is quite pared back, understated, and the subtlety of the stories is a delight. Each story interrogates a different aspect of culture and/or politics, investigating the domestic and small, as well as the world-spanning and world-changing. Well worth a read.