Book: Real to Reel
Written by Lidia Yuknavitch (FC2)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz

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It is a ripe moment, with all of the sundry pitfalls laying agape in our world, for a wry voice - one unafraid of pitting vulnerability against smart critique - to emerge; and the writer possessing such may just be Lidia Yuknavitch. Co-editor of Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions, editor of two girls review and author of two previous collections, Yuknavitch is as technically skilled and timely as any writer wielding a pen today. The stories in her unforgettable book Real to Reel are a scalding representation of the extraordinarily wide breadth that falls beneath the tent of contemporary fiction.

There is a frenetic pace to "Scripted," the book's opened story. Focused closely on modernity and touching accepted archetypes, it models three story-telling elements with a swift and critical tongue. "Male Lead" spoofs on celebrity with its surreally dimwitted take on Keanu Reeves during an "Inside The Actor's Studio" interview. "Blue Movie" frames a lover's estranged disappointment into a series of vivid still shots, describing blue veins, dark rooms - the very chambers that comprise mourning. Caution: a cool glass of water might be necessary to read "Shooting," a scattered, sexually charged detail of deeply planted need. Criticism of society and literature in this collection are by no means onerous constructs; Yuknavitch grabs at disparate cultural pieces in Real to Reel and wrestles gallantly with them. She is particularly fond of focusing her reader's attention through a lens, a frighteningly appropriate idea in light of our collective film culture obsession.

In "Chair" there is the small but poignant linguistic division drawn between "seen/scene," an example of word play that appears again in "Siberia: Still Life of a Moving Image." Easily overlooked, these may be read as the distilled essence of Lidia Yuknavitch's fiction: all that is perceived as reality is derived from the editing of very divergent celluloid moments. As our attentions divide equally between media phenomenon like the Academy Awards, March Madness and an Iraq war, it isn't hard to see that a voice possessing such wide aperture as Yuknavitch's time has come.

[Pick this up at www.powells.com.]

© 2003 - Erick Mertz