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City of Mazes and Other Tales of Obsession
While the twenty-nine stories in City of Mazes bring to mind Robbe-Grillet, Duras, and Kafka, they are clearly the product of a powerful and distinct new voice. Obsessive and dreamlike, Cynthia Hendershot's tales are narrated by the disembodied or never-completely-bodied, those so intensely wrapped within their own Gothic darkness as to seem at once sensuously injured and curiously detached. In spite of their sufferings, their intense longing, the subjects of these fictions remain committed to someone who is careless. Lovers become vicarious participants in a passion that is extraordinarily powerful, even though it is enacted offstage, as if we are all condemned to eavesdrop eternally on our own disappointed desires. With their imagery of cruelty and self-victimization, of blood and violence, sex and love, Hendershot's stories are often shocking and we wander with fragile narrators, trapped within a nightmare world where ritual and symbol slowly evolve into an alternate view of sanity.
80 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 25, 2022
(3.25 stars)
Being a collection of microficfion, prose-poems and poetry expressing an intensely obsessive yet fairly familiar sense of eroticism, this book was slightly ahead of its time in form, if not in content; its sensibility is like a distillation of the noir aesthetic, thankfully jettisoning all the shoot-outs and thuggery to focus on more intimate forms of violence adorned in black lace, masks, ropes and stiletto heels. Though basic heterosexuality prevails for the most part, a few instances of transvestism appear here and there (2004 could, in "sexual time," just as well be 1950 at this point); the most memorable example occurs in "Photograph" which uses art as a facade for fatal power-play and sardonic gender-reversal. Photographs feature in many other stories and, along with various statues, multitudes of mirrors and reflections in pools of blood, act as libidinously charged motifs which manifest the mutual emptiness of the desired object and the desiring subject, both being equally defined by the insatiability of desire itself. Certainly, at least in this book, the desiring process is the ultimately impersonal production of images which complicates the possibility of emotional connection; that Hendershot's writing still often attains a minimal degree of poignancy remains one of her small triumphs.
The whole collection can be read for free here:
https://archive.org/details/cityofmaz...
Being a collection of microficfion, prose-poems and poetry expressing an intensely obsessive yet fairly familiar sense of eroticism, this book was slightly ahead of its time in form, if not in content; its sensibility is like a distillation of the noir aesthetic, thankfully jettisoning all the shoot-outs and thuggery to focus on more intimate forms of violence adorned in black lace, masks, ropes and stiletto heels. Though basic heterosexuality prevails for the most part, a few instances of transvestism appear here and there (2004 could, in "sexual time," just as well be 1950 at this point); the most memorable example occurs in "Photograph" which uses art as a facade for fatal power-play and sardonic gender-reversal. Photographs feature in many other stories and, along with various statues, multitudes of mirrors and reflections in pools of blood, act as libidinously charged motifs which manifest the mutual emptiness of the desired object and the desiring subject, both being equally defined by the insatiability of desire itself. Certainly, at least in this book, the desiring process is the ultimately impersonal production of images which complicates the possibility of emotional connection; that Hendershot's writing still often attains a minimal degree of poignancy remains one of her small triumphs.
The whole collection can be read for free here:
https://archive.org/details/cityofmaz...
September 24, 2018
Nightmarish tales of sex and violence. Cigarette smoking and self harm recur.
She has her own style, and it's a welcomed break from the norm. Certain aspects of her story-telling get repetitious though.
The first day I found fingers in the envelope. Four smooth glass fingers arrived safely, but your letter was broken. It shattered on the way. I cut my hand on slivers of your words.
- "Seven Days"
When you've gone silence drips down my thighs like blood.
- "Silence"
Four straight lines of white powder, a black wine glass on the nightstand, a note from you. I cry out for your body in the humid three a.m. bed.
- "Blackness"
I wait for you in a cafe filled with lovers who hold hands while drinking endless cups of coffee. Bloodshot eyes and cigarette smoke enshroud my table like a veil.
- "Desire"
When the windows open
in your eyes, I look
inside. I see through
the purple glass, the steel curtains.
- "Twenty Shores"
She has her own style, and it's a welcomed break from the norm. Certain aspects of her story-telling get repetitious though.
The first day I found fingers in the envelope. Four smooth glass fingers arrived safely, but your letter was broken. It shattered on the way. I cut my hand on slivers of your words.
- "Seven Days"
When you've gone silence drips down my thighs like blood.
- "Silence"
Four straight lines of white powder, a black wine glass on the nightstand, a note from you. I cry out for your body in the humid three a.m. bed.
- "Blackness"
I wait for you in a cafe filled with lovers who hold hands while drinking endless cups of coffee. Bloodshot eyes and cigarette smoke enshroud my table like a veil.
- "Desire"
When the windows open
in your eyes, I look
inside. I see through
the purple glass, the steel curtains.
- "Twenty Shores"
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews