The Daily Sabbatical

Angela Carter is one of the lesser known literary wonders.  She’s a sort of British, feminist Thomas Pynchon with a handy dab of Robert Coover mixed in.  I’ve read a few of her short stories, but not until Nights at the Circus has her genius been so apparent to me.  I’m now committed to reading everything she’s written.

Carter’s “Nights” is a sort of hallucinogenic fairy-tale that takes us from London, through Petersburgh, and into the snowy depths of Siberia, all in the warm, oversized company of a winged aerialiste named Fevvers.  Fevvers, along with her protecting witch Liz, guides us through bizarre brothels and the three ringed wonder of Colonal Kearney’s travelling circus–with its prophetic pigs, autodidactic apes, and chaotic clowns–for love of fame, money, and in the end, love itself.  Our proxy is an American Journalist by the name of Walser, who falls for Fevver’s charms, gets blown up in Siberia, and becomes a Shaman constantly tripping on hallucinogenic urine before his love is requited.  Oh, the things we’ll do for the embrace of a winged woman!

Carter is, no doubt, the mother of those young writers who seem to be everywhere these days writing a female inflected sort of fairy-tale.  She has clear kin in Kathyrn Davis, Kelly Link, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Laura Groff, Karen Russell, and many other excellent writers, all of them worth reading, but perhaps none quite so fluent in the medium as the original.  Carter performs verbal acrobatics while telling her tale , and is unashamed of where she lands.  Her death at 52, in the early nineties was a great loss.  She was only gaining steam.  Her legacy is something to savor.