Origami Striptease
by Peggy Munson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Peggy MunsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-30
ISBN: 0976341190
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Suspect Thoughts Press
Book Reviews of Origami Striptease
Book Review: Origami Stiptease Review
Summary: 5 Stars
I've read Origami Striptease over two times now. I seriously never do that with books, which I suppose is indicative of its completely addictive nature, regarding both its content and its language. The narrative is woven together with palpable honesty, magical middle-of-nowhere landscapes, and a pulse iambic as one's own heartbeat, almost creating a whole new genre of poetic memoir-like fiction. Combining themes so often isolated in literature, including gender bending queerness, disability-induced isolation, complicatedly abusive relationships, and provocatively hot eroticism, the novel also stands to be a great teacher and activist, overlapping and adhering multiple realms much needing of such cohesion.
The narrator's voice is utterly luring, enticing the reader via the tip of her tongue to join her in her bizarre odyssey through desolate borderlands, icy interiors, and mind spaces crazier than acid trips. One of my favorite aspects of the novel is how matter-of-factly the story is told, even through some of the more surreal scenes involving poisonous pens, origami moose, and penny carnival cake walks. There's a dry cynicism but there's also an unjaded reality of longing, desire, and revelation. In fact Origami Striptease is a love story, only that its broken hearts have literal damage and that its chases for love run beyond time and location, bringing magical realism geniuses such as Jeanette Winterson and Michel Gondry to mind. I also love how rhythmic the language is, and how symbiotically it works with the content. Take, for instance:
"That's when the legs came back, the boomerangs of legs. The legs came flying through the window like a slew of vampire bats. They battered us, and slapped our ears, and cut our hands apart. Jack ducked and dodged around the room. I sat mute as toast. And that's when Jack had grabbed his words and ran. I watched him run until the evening folded up into a paper bow. Until the distance was accordianed. Until the world folded up into an origami fan, and put out all the gentle heat of hands with plastic hands."
It's as if Munson is half-speaking and half-whispering the novel out loud, in a meter reminiscent of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart. I especially appreciate the voice of one of her characters, Jack, who consistently speaks Koan-like truths with a cadenced simplicity and candidness:
"'Girls are a language I can only taste,' said Jack. 'I'm blind like that. You're extrasensory. . . . We only make religions out of things we cannot know.'"
After reading Origami Striptease, I was not at all surprised to find that Munson is an accomplished erotic writer and poet, as well as a disability activist. The novel really is a merging of all three, and I hope that she continues to combine these indisputably honed forces in the future.
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