American - Journalist | -
Artists, in theory, should not be limited to their personal experience, culture, identity, and worldview. But they must also accept that the degree of difficulty in imagining beyond their own borders is steep, and the failure rate is high.
Sarah Weinman
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When a novel is based on an actual crime, it should do much more than loosely fictionalize it. The novel must stand alone as a work of art that justifies using the story for its own purposes.
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When I first read Helen Weinzweig's 'Basic Black with Pearls' several years ago, I emerged in the sort of daze that happens when a book seems to ferret out your most secret thoughts and hopes. Since then, I've described the book to others as an 'interior feminist espionage novel.'
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The interior nature of 'Basic Black' is central to its unfolding. Shirley Kaszenbowski, regarded from the outside, is the embodiment of the invisible woman. She is in her early forties, long married, with two children.
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'Basic Black with Pearls' contains overt references to Virginia Woolf and covert ones to feminist classics like Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper.' The scholar Ruth Panofsky, who writes extensively about Weinzweig, sees echoes of George Eliot.
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'Basic Black with Pearls', upon its publication in 1980, was greeted with a mix of praise and misunderstanding. Critics sensed its daring and applauded its formal inventiveness, but those qualities also kept people at bay.
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In the summer of 1997, a little more than half a lifetime ago, I got my first proper summer job. The job, with one of the many branches of Canada's federal government in Ottawa, covered the entire tuition for my sophomore year of college.
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Like so many other bored teens, I was a bored teen with a hobby. The only difference was mine was obsessing about crime.
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As an inveterate lover of mystery, cracking the code of a writer's true identity has the same effect, for me, as tasting forbidden fruit.
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Reading 'Ghost Waltz' and 'Nine and a Half Weeks' side by side, Day's vulnerabilities come shimmering into view. Both books examine the consequences of relationships marked by withholding - be it her lover's effortless domineering humiliation or her parents' shutting the door on discussing Herr Seiler's deep-seated Nazi ties.
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Having set its tonal template, Vertigo Crime laid low for a few months before starting in earnest at the beginning of 2010.
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'The Chill,' by Jason Starr and Mick Bertilorenzi, was both a wise and nervy choice to start the year: Starr's standalone novels, such as 'Hard Feelings' and 'The Follower,' sustain a mood not unlike the perpetual unscratchable itch on one's back, and go Highsmith-level deep into the sociopathic mind.
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