Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

Machado is just a very good writer. These are the first stories I have read by her. I’m not sure I was prepared for the dark tone of the stories, leavened as they are by humor and surrealism. Once I adjusted a little bit, I was hooked.

Her writing is very personal and idiosyncratic in a good way. It’s hard to classify her stories — the tone is realist, but she adds an extra, surreal dimension to everything she touches. If she reminds me of anyone, it’s the Ray Bradbury of The Illustrated Man — that same anchor laid in reality but venturing off into another reality built on impressions and personal meaning. She has cited Bradbury as an influence.

The book contains eight stories. Many explore the difficulties of relationships.. show more Machado has obviously lived an unconventional life. Her characters experience ecstatic highs of love and sex, but there are always clouds lingering somewhere. They also experience abusive relationships.

Other stories, including one of my favorites, The Resident, explore what it’s like to be different and the difficulties of navigating “normal” human interactions and social situations when you are inescapably different — your reactions, your feelings out of harmony with the expectations of others and with the kinds of regularities that make our lives together harmonious.

I was left thinking, after reading The Resident, and also the final story in the book, Difficult at Parties, that we maintain harmony at a price. When everything is harmonious, little happens. Discord is eventful. We need that to make life interesting, and to inject creativity into both our individual and our social lives. There’s a price to pay either way.

Machado also just has a talent, and I’m sure a hard-won skill, at making words do things they weren’t necessarily designed to do. A couple of examples show what I mean — from The Husband Stitch: “Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.” The fun of a sentence like that is, I think, not in sticking a meaning on it — a good sentence like that one stops you in your tracks, to think of all the things it could mean and not settle on any one.

In Especially Heinous, a story that takes off at a right angle from the popular television show Law and Order: SVU, she writes, “‘Mercy’: The gunman lets all of the hostages go, including himself.” The surprise at the end of the sentence jolts you way from what you expected and gives you something new to think about.

There were a number of sentences in the stories that I marked or even copied into notes on the book because they do exactly that — they pull you out of what you expect to hear and think, and give you that something new.

This is way more than entertainment. Machado won’t let you just go on the way you always did. show less

Her Body and Other Parties wrinkled my brain. Seriously, more than once the story was over and my brain was spinning out of control in an attempt to fully grasp what I'd just read. Ambiguity with a capital A! But at its core is the (seemingly) never-ending battle between women and fear - of men, of children, of choice, of their own bodies, of love. I absolutely adored how Machado blurred the genre lines so thoroughly that they were almost erased, almost.

My favorite stories are "The Husband Stitch" and "The Resident" - loved loved LOVED those two!

I cannot wait to read more by this author; hoping for a full-length novel in the near future.

3 stars

"As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world show more observed only by a single set of eyes." ("The Husband Stitch")

"In contrast, colonist sounds monstrous, as if you have kicked down the door hatch of your mind and inside you find a strange family eating supper." ("The Resident")

"What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?" ("The Resident") show less

The story collections just keep rolling out and this one is a stunner. Most of these stories, take a provocative look at women's lives and their bodies. There is intimacy, horror, humor and a dash of magical realism. She is being compared to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, and I see some of that here, but I think her "voice" is a true original. Here are just a couple excerpts that I found quite impressive, among many:

“On this street, though, I might as well have been on another planet...when the streets are dark and a liquid chill roils through the gaps and alleys. Silence and sound bumped up against each other but never intermingled; the jolly chaos of warm summer nights was as far away as it could be. It was hard to stop moving show more between doorways in this weather, but if you did you could hear life pricking the stillness: a rumble of voices from a local tavern, wind livening the buildings, sometimes even a muffled animal encounter in an alley: pleasure or fear, it was all the same noise.”

“I can tell you with perfect honesty that the night in the forest was a gift. Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness. Pray, that one day, you will spin around at the water's edge, lean over, and be able to count yourself among the lucky.” show less

This was a terrific collection of weird & fantasy short fiction all of which had memorable twists and turns. The most immediately striking was "The Husband Stitch" which builds on various urban myths and legends incl. the green ribbon of In a "Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories" and the missing mother in a Paris hotel room (which I remember Hemingway using in "The Torrents of Spring"). Another favourite was "The Resident" which was probably the most "normal" of the stories and seems like a bit of autobiographical fiction about a writer at an artists' retreat.

Oddly, what lingers in my memory now (it has been a couple of weeks since I read it) is the story "Especially Heinous" which at the time of reading was the most difficult part show more of the book to get through. It is a 13 season episode by episode (22-24 episodes per season or 272 in total) synopsis of a fictional Law & Order: SVU series but one that seems to take place in an alternate universe with doppelgängers and death-eaters and such. It is at times a real chore to drag yourself through it. And yet... it sticks in the mind. You wonder why it was written at all, why was it written the way it was and what did it all mean? I don't know what challenge Machado was setting for herself, but she succeeds in getting under your skin and she leaves you thinking. You can't ask for better writing than that.

This was part of Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company's inaugural Year of Reading 2018 which is a 12 book subscription series selected and curated by its staff. I have been immensely pleased by the variety of the selections. show less

Short story collections are difficult to review because they can be so uneven; not perhaps in quality so much as in the fact that some stories will resonate more with some readers than others. For me, the first two stories, "The Husband Stitch" and "Inventory" were 5 stars. Haunting, evocative stories that were akin to prose poems. These stories spoke to me directly by reproducing nameless feelings that were both familiar and discomforting.

All of the stories could be categorized in the realm of speculative fiction: whether fairy tale, gothic, dystopia or fantasy. Most contained candid sexuality, but these scenes were neither erotic nor gratuitous. Some readers might be put off by them, but for me they were as an integral part of each show more story as they are in each woman's life. Although not my favorite of the stories (perhaps only because of the audiobook medium), I feel like I will always be haunted by the girls-with-bells-for-eyes from the story "Especially Heinous."

I agree with other reviewers that the beginnings of each story could have been better distinguished on the audiobook version. Also helpful would have been a table of contents on the cover that would provide the length of each story so that a listener could plan to listen to each one without interruption. Perhaps the publisher will heed these comments in future editions. show less

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado has turned the oppressions that women face in our society into literal horrors. Each story in this collection is surprising, provocative, often darkly funny, and different from the one that came before. And at eight stories, this collection is the perfect length. I started off listening to the audiobook, but halfway through the third story, I bought a paper copy because I knew I would want to read these stories again and again. The strongest story is the opener, "The Husband Stitch," which uses urban legends to illustrate how men try to entirely possess women, allowing them nothing that is theirs alone. And the final story, "Difficult at Parties," moved me to tears. This book will show more definitely find a place in my favorite reads of the year, I'm sure. show less

Carmen Maria Machado's book of short stories is an extraordinary collection that references fairy tales with a dark and woman-centered slant that brings to mind both Angela Carter and Kelly Link. From the opening story The Husband Stitch, a dark take on a familiar fairy tale, to a weird and haunting summary of 272 episodes of Law & Order: SVU, to Inventory, a remembering of past sexual relationships against the background of a world ravaged by a pandemic, each story was so different than the one before, although they all shared a stark vision of a world not entirely friendly.