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MetaxuCafe UpdatesSearching Member Sites
I’ve recently added a search function so that you can limit your Google search to just the blogs that are members of MetaxuCafe. I think that will be a good resource for everyone looking for literary topics online and you’ll find it right on the front page as well as other places on the site. Now if you want to read about, say Orhan Pamuk, but only want to search the litblogs you trust, you can narrow your search right here.
Collinsworth, Eden: It Might Have Been What He Said
by Debra Hamel on April 25, 2007
Arcade © 2006, 279 pages [amazon]
Eden Collinsworth’s It Might Have Been What He Said begins with an arresting first paragraph:
“Isabel could remember the precise moment she tried killing her husband. Strangely enough, she couldn’t recall why.”
The lines suggest what sort of a story might follow: layers of mystery and deceit to be unwrapped, and pieces of Isabel’s mental puzzle connecting to form a clearer image of the events that precipated the story’s violent climax. But that’s not what happens. The book tells the story of Isabel’s marriage to James, an account that encompasses forays into their respective childhoods. Isabel’s was something out of a gothic novel (so even the author tells us), with a distant father who communicated almost exclusively through New York Times clippings, an undemonstrative, mentally ill mother, and a by-the-book nanny. James is the scion of an aristocratic but money-poor Virginia family. James’ principal problem is that he’s fiscally irresponsible. Isabel’s principal problem is James. Their marriage should never have happened, should not have lasted for as long as it did, and when it fails no one should be surprised. As for the book’s first lines, their promise is never paid off: Isabel, as it happens, eventually regains her memory of the event without any trouble at all, and the attempted murder, when it’s finally detailed to us, proves to be anticlimactic. Since it amounts to nothing in the end, it becomes apparent that Isabel’s memory lapse is merely a device used to delay the narration of the dramatic scene.
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