Month: October 2005

Title: An Invisible Sign of My Own

Author: Aimee Bender

Backstory: After buying 58 books at the San Francisco Library’s Annual Sale, I needed to make sure I read deeper in the bibliographies of authors I admired. I loved Aimee’s first collection of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and had picked up Invisible, a novel, nearly a year ago. Plus, with my book collection being added to Library Thing by the day, it’s easy now, via tags, to determine whether my last few reads were by a new author, old favorites like Aimee, a female/left handed/Iowian-who-writes-in-the-second-person or otherwise.

Notes: Superstituous math teacher falls for a colleague, worries about her father’s death (because he’s turning 51, a number with, eh, only prime factors?) and gets second graders to make numbers out of everyday objects. Which is how an ax (which looks like a 7) ends up hanging on the classroom wall.

Verdict: I know Aimee and find her one of the sweetest, nicest people around. Which makes her books all the more delicious because they reveal a pervert, or at least a very dark imagination lying in wait. In her first book, a librarian had sex with every male patron who came by her desk and another woman’s crush on a hunchback evaporates when she discovers the hump is fake. This is freaky stuff, set firmly in our workaday world, which reminds me of the little Jorge Louis Borges I have read. I’d be alright calling Aimee Bender “The Borges of North Hollywood” and await correction from someone who has read more of the Argentine master than me.

…Sign has many of the characteristics I admire about Aimee’s work–a tilted take on the mundane, characters aware of but struggling with their eccentricities and a savantlike fascination with unconventional methods of organizing existence. In this case, our protagonist Mona Gray counts everything and believes that numbers and their divine orderings are perfectly reasonable rules to live by. She’s also gifted at just about everything she tries but likes to quiting more than succeeding.

It all sounds like jollly good fun and, for the most part, it is. I wish though, Mona’s obsessions had been minded for either more comic or emotional ore. Thing about reading about an obsession is in can’t be written like one or it becomes repetitive. So maybe Mona needed a friend, a hurricane, a turnip addiction, something to kick the character around a little. As is, she plays fine as a long short story but as a whole novel, gets a bit long in the tooth.

Worth reading? Still, yes. Start with …Skirt, skip around a little in this one, then dive headlong into Aimee Bender’s new short story collection Willful Creatures. I didn’t like this book as much has her first, but she’s never dull.

Followup:

Aimee Bender’s Official Site

Interview at Powells.