Seven Dreams of Elmira: A Tale of Martinique By Patrick Chamoiseau Translated by Mark Polizzotti Photographs by Jean-Luc Laguarigue Zoland Books Inc., 1999

Seven Dreams of Elmira is a little reverie, concisely bound and illustrated, a prose-poem study of the myth, history, and folktale of St. Martinique, of poverty, and of idealized desire.  Elmira is a Creole Anna Livia Plurabelle, the archetypal vision of an immaculate matriarch.

“Elmira of the seven splendors and every grace.  She’s the one I wanted to talk about,” says Patrick Chamoiseau’s narrator.  The thirty rum and ritual soaked pages that follow taunt the reader with glimpses of this ephemeral island Madonna.

The remainder of the little book is comprised of photographs by Jean-Luc Laguarigue, portraits that seem to retell the same tales of Elmira, as seen by the island’s denizens and by the weathered walls and impassive machinery, the negative space that defines “the Queen of our rum.”

Reviewed by Marc Flanagan

April 2000

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The Splintered Day By V. K. Mina Serpent's Tail, 1999

The Splintered Day is a collection of eight stories that together give the impression of a novel.  More accurately, it is the same story told eight times, each telling more desperate than the last to impress the reader by any means necessary.  The narrator, whether she is called Neelam or Lili or “I” or “You” or finally–in a last ditch attempt to get our attention–“N”, is an upper middle class twenty-something sexually ambivalent Indian girl living in New York City.

The tales of her banal misadventures quickly become an unintentional parody of multiculturalism.  The reader tires of politely retrieving the countless names and references Mina drops from her politically correct but unbearably heavy hands.  It’s a catalog of countless bars and clubs, a cross-section of the Physician’s Desk Reference to Recreational Drugs, and an index of her personal library, coated with a generous dose of shameless Gen X ennui, and peppered with as many sexually liberated dirty words as she can think of.  When all else fails, she falls back on esoteric references to India and irrelevant use of Hindi words that are sure to convince the reader that, no, this isn’t a lot of nonsense, and yes, he must be missing something.

Reviewed by Marc Flanagan

April 2000

Zipidee.com