Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

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In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. Machado’s tales uncover new meanings in well-known stories and depict experiences that are usually silenced, thereby highlighting the othering potential of story-telling and stressing the interdependencies between worlds and stories. Read, enjoy, comment, and make links but don’t post or publish this material elsewhere without my permission. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been.

Our corpus is circumscribed by Clarice Lispector’s short story The Body and its homonymous film version, by José Antônio Garcia. I left the garden, the plot where my dog was buried, the pine table where I’d anxiously made so many lists—trees that began with m: maple, mimosa, mahogany, mulberry, magnolia, mountain ash, mangrove, myrtle; states that I had lived in: Iowa, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York—leaving unreadable jumbles of letters imprinted in the soft wood. The beach bunnies and art dealers would never see the town like this, I thought, when the streets are dark and a liquid chill roils through the gaps and alleys.

He is not old enough to know the story of the naughty girls who wanted the toy drum, and were wicked toward their mother until she went away and was replaced with a new mother – one with glass eyes and thumping wooden tail. He told me about how he walked through Chicago, actually through it, and how they had stopped bothering to dispose of the bodies after a while.

Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. I feel like this one was one of the weaker ones, just because I didn't feel pushed to mull it over as much as the others.After a few paragraphs, we stumble back in time to January at Cape Cod before the surgery has been agreed to. The connection between the freaks that structure her reading (Eve/lyn, Fevvers, Dora and Nora) and the process of “self-freaking” becomes obvious in the reading chapters. Silence and monstrosity are linked by a lack or void of information and Transgressive texts are filled with confronting voids which overwhelm and undermine the grotesque content. My hand flies up in front of me – an involuntary motion, for balance or some other futility – and beyond it his image is gone.

Despite her objections, her husband becomes obsessed with trying to touch and loosen the ribbon and tries at any chance he can get. At first, I thought it was her desire for a life less disciplined, one where she indulges her appetites and doesn’t worry about normal but that didn’t seem like a great fit. But the cup was tipped and the puddle was cold, and I recognized the symptoms from the television and newspapers, and then the leaflets, and then the radio broadcasts, and then the hushed voices around the bonfire.

Cape Cod in winter is presented as a place going through its own, rather sterile and cold transformation. My boyfriend’s mother found my underwear behind the bed weeks later, and handed them to him, laundered, without a word.