World Literature, Fiction Subjects, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

My Body to You

Name: My Body to You
Author: Elizabeth Searle
ISBN: 9781587298066

by Elizabeth Searle

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Overview

These finely wrought stories unfold in the Dakotas during the struggling pioneer days and bone-dry landscape of the thirties as well as the verdant years that followed, where the nighttime plains are bathed by softly radiant harvest moons shining down from dazzling northern skies. Young's absorbing narratives begin with the pleasant sense of "Once upon a time..." anticipation, but the firmly sketched details, warm humor, and vivid characterizations reveal an unanticipated and satisfying realism. The haunting title story is about a beautiful and tragic pioneer woman and her wedding dress; her gown takes on a life of its own and turns into an enduring symbol for the grace and compassion of homesteading women on the plains. In "Bank Night," a hired hand working during the midst of the Depression wins $250 at the movies, careening him into a single night of notoriety that becomes a legend in its time. "The Nights of Ragna Rundhaug" tells the tale of a woman who wants only to be left alone with her white dog Vittehund and her crocheting but instead is propelled into a life of midwifery "because there was no one else to do it." The babies have a predilection for arriving during blizzards and always at night, when she must be transported across the dark plains by frantic husbands who have fortified themselves with strong drink and headstrong horses. All the stories in The Wedding Dress are linked by the enigmatic Nordic characters who people them and by the skill with which Young draws them. Emotions run so deep that they are seldom able to surface; when they do the interaction is extraordinarily luminous, both for the characters themselves and for the fortunate reader. The Wedding Dress is for all readers, young and old.

Synopsis

In the thirteen stories of My Body to You, thirteen women or girls pilot their own bodies through a shifting universe of lovers old and young, parents devoted and destructive, sisters of different sexes, children and adults living in the mysterious world of autism. All these characters share keen powers of observations and a heightened sensuality. In a wild variety of settings, they struggle to control—or dare to abandon themselves to—their intensely private passions.

A woman in love with a gay man she calls Sister Kin attempts to escape the bonds of her own body. An eighteen-year-old virgin enters into a passionate affair with an older man who turns out to be a virgin of a different sort. A special education teacher in a school for aggressive teenagers finds herself attracted to another teacher, also female. An intelligent outcast girl bonds with her mindlessly seductive mother to form “one person.”

Searle reveals other characters through inventive and often comic feats of narrative daring. A girl grows into womanhood during a single family dinner that spans twenty years. A middle-aged wife, once dubbed “The First Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” watches her former selves parade before her family in a lively evening of home movies. Two women—one recently divorced, the other a group home resident in love with The Who—join forces as they figure out “What to Do in an Emergency.” An old woman experiences both physical breakdown and spiritual breakdown in a supermarket's vegetable department. A young woman is drawn into the emotional and sexual life of an autistic boy obsessed with the number 8.

Each of these stories is written in a language that strives to match the intensity of Searle's characters; each gives the reader an exceptionally intimate portrait of a unique female and the central, sensual mystery of her body.