Cydney Chadwick:
Enemy Clothing
Cydney Chadwick, Enemy Clothing. Five Fingers Press, PO Box 15426, San Francisco, CA 94115. 114pp A5. ISBN 0 9618 409 9 4.
A book of short fictions. From the tiny 'Mirror': "In every reflection I see you imitating my laugh, my walk, my kiss. You mean to erase me completely", to the intricate and fatal knot tied among 'The Readers' of an (unnamed) book of short fictions, Chadwick alternately reveals and defies the processes of shaping and attrition which act on any personality when it's shoved into (or denied) social context. The shaping of the fictions (mordant economy) and of the collection as a whole is consummate: a story about a woman who licks hallucinogenic frogs to enter into the life of an alter ego; a story ('Object') about a woman who becomes obsessed with an unattainable vase in a shop window; a story about a woman who wrote a story called 'Object' who herself becomes obsessed by a five-foot tall sculpture of a frog in a shop window; two 'Holiday' stories showing maximal and minimal upshots of the same starting premises (anatomising causality as ruthlessly as Kafka did); Chadwick takes the floor out from under her reader so efficiently and so often (there are 46.5 stories here) that this reader concludes he has been standing on one awful concatenation of floors all these years. A vital, obsessive/compulsive-ly funny collection, in a crazily small edition (can you even find it in Britain?) & recommended unreservedly. (For completists I also recommend Chadwick's two tiny pamphlets: The Gift Horse's Mouth [a story of paranoia wheeling out beyond all logic] from Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines, Morris, Minnesota 56267, and Dracontic Nodes [19 prose-poems], from Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Drive, Norman, OK 7302-46321: "When nothing matters but what's on paper. When the hurdles of scrutiny and desire are past. Wounds sleep. Turn back on Dullness. Talk from a place--another season. // Cut the loop.")
This review first appeared in issue 5 of Object Permanence magazine.
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