Beautiful Soon Enough: Stories
Margo Berdeshevsky, . . Univ. of Alabama, $15.95 (173pp) ISBN 978-1-57366-149-2
In 23 brief, dreamy stories set in locales from Paris to Cuba, poet, actress and photographer Berdeshevsky remains transfixed by beauty and desire. “Window,” the first piece, sets the tone: a woman stands at the window wearing a garter belt and motions to her lover standing outside in the snow. Elsewhere, seductions occur in places like church, where a narrator waits to meet her neighbor; on the streets of San Francisco; within a community of Russian émigrés in Paris; or by the waiter in a Parisian cafe bathroom—scenes all depicted with a certain aloof obliqueness. Evocations rather than development are Berdeshevsky's forte, as in “Cage,” where a caged white female monkey in a Manhattan pet store becomes a metaphor for the protagonist, who is sexually assaulted in the store. In many of the pieces, accompanied by photographs of statues and nudes by the author, the protagonists wait “for a beautiful thing to happen.” These moody moments can be evanescent, but as stories they're not quite satisfying.
Reviewed on: 09/28/2009
Genre: Fiction