Member Review
Review by
Andrew S, Reviewer
This is a rich and crystalline read of warmth and pain, sunshine and dust. CJ Hauser awakes all those feelings you know, but don’t have words, let alone stories, for.
She is restlessly smart and can’t resist turning each granular moment into a poetic introspective anecdote. These are often fragments. to make a memoir, she shuffles them together. You smile and cry. You suspect, as she says of her grandmother’s stories, “Goddamn, (…) none but half of those are true.”
The collection starts at a brisk pace with brief absurdist parables, telling of love and memory. Then the parables end, and details congeal into longer accounts. Often culture shimmers as it touches her, becoming a mirror that reflects a person faced with dilemmas, of love, commitment, and fulfilment. Her fictions wander off in many directions, anecdotes leading to larger landscapes from where you can look off towards the far horizon.
She brings all her scraps together, shuffled into untidy piles. And that’s what life is, something you can joke about but never sort into a definitive order, never make into serious piles. My favourite was the woman who wears clashing colours because they will appear to be the colours that are “really in right now” to her husband, who is colour-blind.
Hauser reminded me of people I text who I know must be allowed to send the last message, or those messages will go back and forth to infinity. Often, this edging beyond, adding another and another last word, has a magical and moving effect, at least if, as here, it is executed with precision literary acumen. Hauser is pushy. She always threatens to push things too far, like a chocolatier surprising you with layers of deliciousness, one after another. You yearn for more and feel a bit sickly at the same time.
As you read, you remember your own happysad elegentclumsy times, if you succeeded or fell flat. And you become aware that you don’t know now any more than you did then—about life and love.
She is restlessly smart and can’t resist turning each granular moment into a poetic introspective anecdote. These are often fragments. to make a memoir, she shuffles them together. You smile and cry. You suspect, as she says of her grandmother’s stories, “Goddamn, (…) none but half of those are true.”
The collection starts at a brisk pace with brief absurdist parables, telling of love and memory. Then the parables end, and details congeal into longer accounts. Often culture shimmers as it touches her, becoming a mirror that reflects a person faced with dilemmas, of love, commitment, and fulfilment. Her fictions wander off in many directions, anecdotes leading to larger landscapes from where you can look off towards the far horizon.
She brings all her scraps together, shuffled into untidy piles. And that’s what life is, something you can joke about but never sort into a definitive order, never make into serious piles. My favourite was the woman who wears clashing colours because they will appear to be the colours that are “really in right now” to her husband, who is colour-blind.
Hauser reminded me of people I text who I know must be allowed to send the last message, or those messages will go back and forth to infinity. Often, this edging beyond, adding another and another last word, has a magical and moving effect, at least if, as here, it is executed with precision literary acumen. Hauser is pushy. She always threatens to push things too far, like a chocolatier surprising you with layers of deliciousness, one after another. You yearn for more and feel a bit sickly at the same time.
As you read, you remember your own happysad elegentclumsy times, if you succeeded or fell flat. And you become aware that you don’t know now any more than you did then—about life and love.
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