CECILIA, sapphic obsessive love and bodily fixation in gorgeous prose

CECILIA
K-MING CHANG
Coffee House Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A surreal novella about the intensity and eroticism of girlhood friendships, the ecstasy of desire and disgust, and matriarchal mythmaking.

Seven, who works as a cleaner at a chiropractor’s office, reencounters Cecilia, a woman who has obsessed her since their school days. As the two of them board the same bus—each dubiously claiming not to be following the other—their chance meeting spurs a series of intensely vivid and corporeal memories. In the defamiliarization that follows, the narrator begins to experience queerness itself as an alienation from normative time.

Smart, subversive, and gripping, Cecilia is a winding, misty road trip through bodily transformation, inextricable histories of desire and violence, diaspora, and obsessive love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This short read is much more affecting than most its length are. That is a funcrion of K-Ming Chang's bravura performance with English as a weapon:

When I reached up to touch my face, I felt no protrusions, no new bones inflecting my surface, and yet, when Cecilia and I looked at each other, we saw them: beaks mountaining out of our mouths, rooted to the shadows of our jawbones. Beaks shining like the perfect darkness preserved inside a belly.

You are on notice: Pay attention to the words chosen, pay attention to the images described, or this very slightly surreal...in its literal meaning, the meaning of the parts it's made of, "overreal, above real, on top of real"...narrative of two girls discovering love, passion, intense vibrant hypercolored Experience, will simply squash you, split the space where you are and move through it.

An intense experience will be had; your choice of framing for the act of being engaged with this story will determine its positive or negative perception for you. I am resolutely positive about the experience because anyone who can, and will, and does explore the sensation of Obsession to burnout is my idol.

That will trigger very strong and not always positive memories for some readers. Be aware of this fact particularly if you have been, or are being, stalked.

Readers who prefer direct action will not resonate to the Proustian aide-memoire of this novella. The story, as in plot, is spare to the point of threadbare: Old friends with a past connection of unrequited lust, requited love, and sensual obsession, meet at one's place of work, chat, then get on a bus to go home...not together. Just that isn't gonna drag the hoi polloi into this tent, there to be entertained. The story is of the rung-bell resonance of girls loving each other before womanhood imbues loving, intense intimacy with a bodily expression's inevitability. The immensely divisive choice of piss as a focus of fascination, desire, disgust, and connection is definitely going to upset some people. It is, I think, an example of how little female desire is examined in our literary landscape that this choice has occasioned such a response across the spectrum of readers. Women, even sapphically inclined ones, are still called on to present a particular strain of pure, clean, unsullied neutered bodiless Love and not filthy, sweaty, bodily based Lust...that's reserved for intimacy, things done and thought in private. Shame, in other words. In porn, these acts are Done To women as a form of punishment or humiliation. K-Ming Chang's Seven is not humiliated or punished. She's so obsessed that this is an urgently desired act of further possession and imtimacy. There's more than a whiff of body horror to the way bodily processes and even body parts are casually discussed, possessed, and even deployed throughout the read.

The author's choice of making her girls of Chinese descent, living in the US diaspora, is...to my surprise...not foregrounded. I expected it to be more of a focus because so much is made of the author's own ethnicity. It was something I didn't really notice until I'd read the story and was thinking about responses to the author's realier works (eg, Bestiary, Bone House, Gods of Want), where ethnicity is apparently made more of within those stories. Haven't read 'em, can't speak with an informed eye, but this story doesn't make a meal of it as I suspected it might.

I definitely don't think this read is for everyone, but the right reader will be unfazed by childbirth evocations and livers of others as property to be treasured. The right reader will immerse their awareness in the meaty world of loving someone so much that consuming them is desirable, not in the Hannibal Lecter sense I hasten to say. The right reader will give their readerly ears to the very idiosyncratic music of K-Ming Chang's creation.

It's me. I'm the right reader.