A New Review of Unexplained Fevers, MRIs, and a new favorite author – Siri Hustvedt

Thanks to Julie Brooks Barbour and Barn Owl Review for this excellent new review of Unexplained Fevers: http://www.barnowlreview.com/reviews/gaileyfevers.html.

I have to say, I am grateful for each and every review, because as a reviewer, I know how much time and energy goes into each one. And I’m grateful to journals that still publish reviews!

Had my two-hour brain and spine MRI on Saturday; the tube shook during parts of it, and then the floor of the tube heated up. I asked the tech about it, and she said “Sometimes the coils overheat when we do the whole spine.” Aha! Good to know. Well, that didn’t make my fear of MRIs any better. But now it is done, at least hopefully, for a whole year. I find out my results on Thursday, (more neural lesions or spine lesions would be bad news, anything else is basically good news) but I’ve already been able to look at my MRI on my computer, you can see the outlines of veins and muscles and bones. It’s quite fascinating.

I’ve been reading a book, The Blazing World: A Novel, that has quite taken my breath away, in the manner of a classic A.S. Byatt or Margaret Atwood, all about feminism, female artists in the art world, art world biases towards the young and male, art world hoaxes, phonies, and masks – a faux anthology with different POVs – an academic art critic, the artist’s children and boyfriends, a professor of aesthetics, and the artist’s own hyperbolic (?) journals – and it manages to do everything with a subtle undertone of irony, making direct observations that ring so true to me as a middle-aged female writer but refusing to take away any of the layers around sexism and agism – did the main character, an artist who finds fame after her death, merely take herself out of the game too soon in her mid-fifties, before resorting to her male masks? Did she refuse to step into the limelight because of her father, husband, children? Is she, in fact, the hysterical monster that so many art critics assumed her to be? It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered as complex, unlikable, and intelligent a female character as Harriet Burden in any book at all, but I especially love that the character is so closely aligned the prototype of just my kind of female writer  – ambitious, misunderstood, prone to sympathizing with Frankenstein. I fell in love even more with the author when I picked up her memoir, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, about the author’s sudden and disturbing onset of neurological symptoms in middle age. Yes, I would like to have tea with Siri Hustvedt very much. Except her name makes my dyslexia nervous.

After visiting with my oldest brother last week, I was thinking about the things we think make us unique, the things that color our vision. My brother and I are both dyslexic and partially color-blind, for instance, and I wonder about what sorts of colors we’re not seeing. (He jokes that he’s “gray/gray” color blind, a great joke!) For years I wore blue and purple together, thinking they matched, and I’ve never been able to write down a phone number correctly, or a credit card number. My bones and joints are hyperflexible, my collarbone popping in and out of joint at the slightest provocation these days. How, now, with my knowledge about my newly dysfunctional brain – a motor skill dropped here, maybe the ability to read music there – do I proceed? Will I remain myself if I lose my memories, my abilities? This should, after all, be inspiring me to write more – but instead, I remain quiet, waiting, listening. Perhaps I am shoring things up, keeping them to myself, watching them to see if they are changing.