Reviewed By Susan Price
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| A Quiet Afternoon In The Museum of Torture - Czerkawska |
I don’t know how the blog, Do Authors Dream of Electric Books, is working
for other people, but, as one of its members, I find it’s certainly widening my own reading.
With so many writers joining us, natural curiosity leads to me
downloading at least a sample of their books, and often the books are so cheap
- cheaper than a magazine – that I think, why mess about? I’ll just buy it.
And then I read the books thinking, this is so good, why haven’t I read these author before? Why have they been abandoned by publishers and pushed into self-publishing?
And then I read the books thinking, this is so good, why haven’t I read these author before? Why have they been abandoned by publishers and pushed into self-publishing?
This is exactly what I thought when I downloaded these three short stories by Catherine Czerkawska.
They are exquisite – like ‘The Butterfly Bowl’ of the second
story. It’s a plain little Chinese bowl,
handed down from Debbie’s great-great-grandfather. It’s nothing special to look at but, when
filled with water, the bowl seems suddenly filled with butterflies. Showier articles from Great-Great-Grandad’s
collection had been lost or sold, but this modest little bowl had been
treasured for its secret.
Debbie, a lecturer, falls heavily for a playwright, and
finds herself in that awkward bind of loving the man but thinking his work
mediocre. She hides her true judgement,
and praises and reassures him; but the more she reassures, the more reassurance
he craves, exhausting her. One day, to
cheer him, she fills the plain little bowl with water. ‘Nice gimmick,’ he says; but is much more enthusiastic
when he has the bowl valued…
I won’t tell you any more.
The author says that the stories are about love – and they
are, but not in the usual way. ‘The
Butterfly Bowl’ deepens and widens the more you think about it. It’s about love, about cost and value, about
the deceptiveness of appearance, about memory and family. It’s about the need to keep the central,
hidden core of yourself free, about the way love threatens that freedom, about
talent and creativity. All held in the image
of a little white bowl. I've read long novels that didn't hold as much as that little bowl. Hell, I've written long novels that don't hold as much.
The title story is about torture, but not the kind of
torture to which the museum is dedicated.
The central characters are a couple with a newborn baby: and suddenly
their world is full of terror and threat. ‘I didn’t know it would hurt this
much,’ says the mother, and she isn’t talking about the birth.
Three stories about love – but not the happy-ever-after,
romantic idea of love. These stories are
for adults: they're about love in the real world – plain, perhaps, as a white china bowl: painful
as thumb-screws.
Love hurts.
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