Magda Cârneci: FEM (FEM)

The latest addition to my website is Magda Cârneci‘s FEM (FEM). This is nominally a series of stories told Scheherazade-like by an unnamed woman to her unnamed and useless, about-to-be-dumped boyfriend. However, the stories are not Aladdin or Sindbad the Sailor but tell of her life, focussing as much on the images and impressions as on the actual events. The various key events in her life and, indeed, often the ordinary, are coloured by vivid images of her life. As she herself says From time to time, I am assaulted by strange images, powerful ones, charged with bizarre, excessive energy, visions that seem to climb out of unknown depths within me, or they come from above, from an interior heaven of the mind. While we follow her life and her life with useless boyfriend (TV, Internet, alcohol, other women), we also see these many images as well as discourses on the female body which seems (her own and that of other women) to somewhat obsess her. It is a thoroughly original and highly imaginative book.

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