Reviews

• Don’t recommend to read

  First story is quite good, but rest of them are obscure to understand because they are full of metaphor about women sex.

• Tedious

  Some of the stories are good, but not excellent. Any leftover redeeming quality is further pared down by the author's storytelling - having a story is one thing, and telling it is an art in itself, and that requires talent. Machado's technique is grating, vapid, and quite often boring. Maybe I've read too many good books, hence why this felt like a significant downgrade. I cannot recommend this book at all, and that says a lot since I'm generally a people-pleaser.

• Great writing as it provokes you to think and create an alternate voice in your head which is constantly interpreting what the author is talking and what they mean to say.

• this collection of short stories were really entertaining! i like all of them, but my favorite was the first!

• Llegó en perfecto estado; todas las historias cortas son muy distintas de lo "normal", algunas son difíciles de digerir, pero vale la pena leer y experimentarlas todas.

• “You never live with a woman, you live inside her, I overheard my father say to my brother once.” Her Body and Other Parties is Carmen Maria Machado’s brilliant first book, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Awards. It’s a collection of dark beautiful sometimes supernatural stories about women. And if that alone that doesn’t get you, I don’t know what will. Machado’s prose is stunning and erotic, her themes sharp and femme, the style wildly different from one story to the next. In the hetero stories, I was felled by how limiting and cruel the world is to women. Machado nails it line after line: “Scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make.” “She’s like dough, how the give of it beneath kneading hands disguises its sturdiness, its potential.” “He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt.” I don’t usually read speculative fiction and so the potential of each story to veer off into scifi territory was a little startling. I got used to it, and more, I started looking forward to it. The first story in the book, “The Husband Stitch,” is a bang on introduction to Machado’s mash up brand of psychological and supernatural fiction. “Inventory” starts off as an inventory of lovers and veers into a story of a mysterious epidemic, the two themes of love and plague intertwined, and now that I think of it, isn’t one just a subset of the other? I found the story “Mothers” to be especially disturbing for its themes of bad motherhood and abuse - the latter describing a violent lesbian relationship. “Especially Heinous” takes 272 titles of Law and Order episodes in the SVU series and makes up plot summaries for each. I found this story the least compelling of the collection, its themes of violence and re-invention lost in the long and rambling structure. “Real Women Have Bodies” was one of my favourites - the story of a shop selling prom dresses amid another strange epidemic playing out a metaphor for the silencing of women. The writing at the beginning of this story was especially delicious. I would read catalogue after catalogue if Machado were writing the copy: “She looks like she’s battling a giant prom monster - all petticoat undersides and rhinestone tentacles.” The story “Eight Bites” is about one of the most destruction social conditions of femalehood - those prescribing body image and weight. “The Resident” is a foreboding story intertwining the group dynamics of an art residency and a children’s camp. And “Difficult at Parties” is about trauma, PTSD, and social anxiety with a underlayer of voyeurism. Machado is an assured storyteller, confident and knowing and piercing. I especially loved the sexiness and physicality of the stories. It was visceral and refreshing and unabashed: “I run slick.” But it’s her writing that takes the cake - it’s some of the best I’ve ever read and I would happily read anything else she takes on, no matter the genre or topic: “The smoke crawled out of her mouth one limb at a time; an animal.” Read Her Body and Other Parties. It’s a wild ride about the human female condition.

• A coletânea de contos HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES, da americana Carmen Maria Machado é uma literatura selvagem, do tipo que passa a epiderme e vai parar na hipoderme. É o tipo de escrita poderosa em sua capacidade de figurar o presente numa prosa potente e criativa, como por exemplo: “In the realm of sense and resason it seemed logical for something to make sense for no reason (natural order) or not make sense for some reason (the deliberate design of deception) but it seemed perverse to have things make no sense for no reason.” É esse tipo de desorientação que os contos dela parecem buscar, saindo do lugar comum, e mergulhando em vísceras, e, nesse sentido, a forma do conto parece perfeita com seu efeito rápido. Suas personagens não estranhas – num sentido Freudiano – elas são como nós, mas não exatamente como nós. Reconhecemos algo de nós mesmos nelas, mas também algo que não é desse mundo. Elas são uma mulher capaz de ouvir os pensamentos de atores e atrizes de filmes pornográficos, uma mulher que descobre um fantasma costurado num vestido, ou outra que começa a listar seus parceiros sexuais, e, lentamente, o conto se dissolve numa trama apocalíptica sobre uma epidemia. O conto mais longo se chama “Especially Heinous”, e é escrito como uma série de sinopses de episódios fictícios da série Law & Order: SVU. Em meio aos exageros propositais aparecem questionamentos sobre a posição da mulher dentro da cultura, das narrativas. A posição da mulher, aliás, como ser atuante, como objeto, como força da natureza é o centro dos contos. É nesses questionamentos que a autora encontra seus grandes momentos, e faz sua literatura transcender as páginas.

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