Spider Love Song and Other Stories by Nancy Au

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spider Love Song and Other Stories by Nancy Au Mixby Dickon (bio) spider love song and other stories Nancy Au Acre Books https://acre-books.com/books/spider-love-song-and-other-stories/ 180 Pages; Print, $17.00 Carolina De Robertis, the author of Cantoras (2019), writes the following about Nancy Au's Spider Love Song and Other Stories: "These stories sparkle with life and secrets, joy and power, pain and hilarity, and sharp insights into the human heart." This deserving praise in Robertis's blurb is in no small part due to its rich appeals to sensory imagery. Whether that imagery describes a sight, a sound, or an aroma, Au's short stories entice the reader by inviting them into the atmosphere of the story with breathtaking language and unexpected comparisons that defy the common clichés. The concrete imagery in descriptions manages to accomplish this with dazzling success. These observations about Au's work are ultimately manifested in the collection's titular story "Spider Love Song." This story features a young girl named Sophie Chu, who lives with her grandmother while coping with the disappearance of her parents. Sophie and her grandmother receive a visit from a fishing woman nicknamed Owl who claims to have known Sophie's parents in their college days. The plot of the story is simple yet awe-inspiring, much like the language used in its telling. Offering a larger-than-life quality to the tale is a recurring image of elephants which describes the animal as follows: "An elephant towered over everything, everyone, yet could curl its firehose trunk around a branch, pluck a green leaf whole. What power! What bigness! What sensitivity!" Juxtaposing power and sensitivity together is an uncommon but not unusual comparison to make. As previously mentioned, the image of the elephant offers its bigness to the simple plot line, but this is not the only function of the image in the story. Throughout the story, the narrator describes Sophie Chu with elephant-like qualities, lent to her by what always seems to be a costume worn by the character. The reader is able to get a sense that the protagonist draws inspiration from the combination of strength and sensitivity which personifies the image of the elephant. [End Page 79] The language and descriptions in this story do not simply define elements of style and aesthetic; the language and comparisons draw attention to the moods of the characters as well as the atmosphere of the stories. Readers are not just following along with the plot of the narrative. They are instead transported into the story, its sights, smells, textures, and much more through the multisensory toolbox of images that Au employs. As Carolina De Robertis implies in her blurb of the book, these sensory appeals are versatile in what they do and in the language with which they do it. Au's debut collection is noteworthy in that it tends to invoke images in which seemingly contrasting qualities are juxtaposed together to show that those qualities in fact exist in harmony with one another. These images lend themselves to a recurring theme in the collection, namely striking a balance between various aspects of life and identity. Au's protagonists frequently exist on points of liminality, towing the lines between the private and public self, and reconciling their wants and desires with the aims of the broader social structures. Juxtaposition allows the narrator to communicate these liminalities without stating them directly. The theme of juxtaposition and ironic imagery continues in the penultimate story in the collection, "Odonata at Rest." This story follows a grade-school aged protagonist during a day at a private school where her teachers are nuns contrasting against the science-based education provided by her mother at home. Her mother opens up the world to her daughter by teaching her how to use a microscope "and she learned that there were entire universes of biological life teeming inside petri dishes—life so tiny yet so fervent—that there were answers to billions of questions the world might never even know to ask, right under her microscope's lens." Contrasting this image with that of the elephants...