Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees

March 30, 1998
"Cursed with a vivid imagination," the woman in the story "Aria Nova" (who has her "briefest and most extraordinary affair" waltzing in her Doc Martens with a stranger in the Montparnasse metro) mirrors her creator, Duncker (Hallucinating Foucault), a Welsh academic and novelist who lives in France. This collection of 13 tales is honed by precise, hard and luminous wordcraft. In "The Crew of M6," a Parisian film crew, in the south of France to interview a group of articulate lesbians, gets caught in the women's eerie web. The incantatory monologue "A Woman Alone" introduces a femme fatale who makes Billy Joel's "Modern Woman" sound like June Cleaver. Perhaps the most successful of these stories is the novella "The Arrival Matters," which follows a young girl's initiation into a dark world of powerful women and the musician/magician who obeys them. The title story is the anomaly of the collection: a gentle, vivid memory of two beloved lemon trees in a wartime snowstorm. For all her feminist engagement, Duncker's vision is precise and miniature. She sets severe limits on her fiction, most notably excluding strong, admirable men and any love even momentarily separable from power. This closed system accounts for both the vivid life contained between the covers and the sense of release that many readers will feel when they turn the last page.

March 15, 1998
Duncker's stories may be cryptic, surreal, or even impenetrably enigmatic, but they are always powerfully evocative. It's not clear, for example, how the rebellious wife who shatters the windows in her sunroom manages to leave her husband, who is complacently bathing upstairs, hideously pierced with shards of glass, yet the image is hauntingly disturbing. It's more understandable, but nearly as shocking, when the seemingly submissive wife in another story defies her controlling mate by covering her torso with the tattoo of a huge dagger. Lesbian lovers fare decidedly better than their heterosexual counterparts in these stories, though one of the most accessible and enjoyable describes the wickedly funny revenge of a discarded plaything. Duncker's prose is spare and clean, her intelligence keen, her imagination vivid. Inasmuch as these challenging stories will appeal mainly to readers who are thoroughly comfortable with ambiguity, however, their audience may be limited. ((Reviewed March 15, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)