Marilyn Krysl

The comical elegance of Marilyn Krysl’s new book, featuring a spare but expensive table setting and a place card for its title guest, perfectly mirrors the elegant prose inside. Krysl serves up substantial portions of reality, made not just palatable, but savory by the humor and originality she mixes in. Her compassionate, idiosyncratic depictions of those who suffer famine and war teases each individual character out from the masses we too often imagine as an inhuman blur. She sears their show more suffering into our memory. But just as we don’t think we can swallow another bite of such truth, she refreshes our palate with a zesty rendering of mother-daughter love, or a treatise on the beauty of belly fat, or the imperious, altruistic narrative voice of the Egyptian goddess Hathor and her pal Akka, the 12th Century Indian feminist. The two put George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden in time out together and make them take deep breaths. If you like your truth buttered in wisdom, and, like me, need to laugh in order to stay sane, read Dinner with Osama. show less

Much of what's here is poetic and interesting, but often at the expense of control. At various points, meaning became so ambiguous that I'm not sure that the author herself knew exactly what she was going for, and while the book as a whole was a unique read, it left me feeling as if Krysl would have benefited from an editor or reader who, early on, demanded some more control and clarity within her storytelling.