Award-Winning Tribute to the Female Body
Why was this book nominated for a billion awards? Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties has won several accolades, including the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, which sounds like a significant recognition at first glance. Oh, and it also won the Lambada Literary Award. Alright, enough with the jokes—it’s actually the Lambda Award, which honors the best LGBTQ-themed books.
And here, I’d like to quickly advise the conservative and religious readers of this blog to skip this piece for the sake of their mental well-being!
Her Body and Other Parties (and Carmen Maria Machado) might just be onto something. They certainly know how to title a book.
Surreal Stories
The title, the blurb, and other elements like the Lambda Award promise a dense mix of surrealism, erotica, and sex. Predominantly lesbian sex. Surrealism is present in all but one of the stories, while overt erotica is mostly found in the first one, and the amount of lesbian sex decreases as you progress through the book, eventually fading away completely.
Everyday Female Desires and Strange Mysteries
What you do find in the stories of “Her Body and Other Parties” are the unvarnished depictions of everyday female desires, but even more so, various trauma situations (abuse, body image issues, depression), which are always accompanied by some sort of bizarre mystery that keeps you hooked on the stories: What will happen if the ribbon around the woman’s neck is removed? Will the girl survive the apocalypse? Whose child is that, anyway? And so on. The most interesting thing is that these bizarre situations often serve as a mere framework for the story, but the reasons or meanings behind them are almost never revealed. So, after finishing a story, it continues to linger in your mind. Very clever.
Mostly. There are also some stories that are just strange in a head-scratching way. Except for the pseudo-Special Victims Unit one (Especially Heinous), starring the ghost-seeing Stabler and the unstable Benson. This creation, being a collage of story fragments and casually thrown-in half-sentences, is nearly impossible to interpret within the confines of the known universe.
Beauty and Female Sensitivity
Carmen Maria Machado’s writing is, however, undeniably beautiful and consistently high-quality. I’d even add that it’s written with a female sensitivity, which usually doesn’t imply a positive trait, often leading to excessive sentimentality. But that’s not the case here. And there you have it—an explanation for all the awards and nominations.
The two exceptions that break the overall smoothness of Her Body and Other Parties interestingly disrupt the two most powerful stories: The Resident, which exudes a Stephen King-like ominousness from start to finish—possibly a reflection of the author’s childhood trauma, as she deliberately places her monogram in the text—is ruined by an overdone, out-of-place ending.
And The Husband Stitch contains some forced authorial instructions on how it should be read: “If you are reading this story out loud, make the sound of the bed under the tension of train travel and lovemaking by straining a metal folding chair against its hinges…”
Certainly, dear Carmen! Certainly!
Rating: 7.6/10
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado
248 pages, Paperback
Published in 2017 by Graywolf Press