Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces
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In the short fiction of Angela Carter, the landmarks of reality disappear and give way to a landscape of riotous and uncensored sensibility. The city of Tokyo turns into a mirrored chamber reflecting the impossible longings of an exiled Englishwoman abandoned by her Japanese lover. An itinerant puppet show becomes a theatre of murderous lust. A walk through the forest ends in a nightmarish encounter with a gun-toting nymph and her hermaphrodite 'aunt'. Not simply a book of tales, Fireworks is a headlong plunge into an alternate universe, the unique creation of one of the most fertile, dark, irreverent, and baroquely beautiful imaginations in contemporary fiction.
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The stories in this collection aren't simply Gothic. They are full of darkness without any source of light. Full of dark, ominous sexuality and murderous impulses. The set is primarily a tapestry of Japanese lore and urban wanderings, vindictive geishas lurking in the lantern-lit backstreets of Tokyo. Tribal, animalistic, shamanic rituals from the heart of Africa, androgynous enchantresses hidden in moonlit caves, women seeking their lovers of the past in the East, tales of incest upon the villages of the German mountains, dark actions and betrayals within a terrorist group in the heart of London in the 70s.
If you choose to read ‘‘Fireworks'', do it with a clear and open mind. Don't focus on the sexual premise of the stories, look beyond it, within the darkness of the human soul and let the beauty of Carter's language carry you away. Not for the faint of heart...
