Transcendent: Dustin Kurtz reviews Kathy Page’s Paradise & Elsewhere in Music and Literature

Paradise & Elsewhere by Kathy PageA long and very thoughtful review from  Dustin Kurtz which digs deeply into the stories in Paradise & Elsewhere and the impulses behind them. The first part is quoted, and a link to the rest follows:

‘Early in Paradise & Elsewhere, her latest short-story collection, Kathy Page places readers in an Edenic oasis of plenitude, communal and iridescent, populated by immortal women—a bubble about to be ruptured by a stumbling heat-stricken outsider. The women of this paradise discuss the intruder:

“Then again, how different was the traveller? . . . We had recognized her as human from the start. Differentness was not the point, some said. It led both ways. Rather, the issue was that she had come from elsewhere and so we did not know her story or intentions.”

Here Page has written a useful gloss of that story, itself called “Of Paradise,” and, indeed, the entire book. In these stories Page gives readers a literature of elsewhere, but one in which difference—or, as above, “differentness”—is not a truth laid bare. Oddity, the fantastic, the cruelty that accompanies them, is not the point. Instead it serves only to highlight a longing, across stories and characters, for a kind of transcendent understanding or (and they amount to the same thing) an escape.

The Canadian author Kathy Page has been compared by critics to Angela Carter, and it’s easy to understand why…http://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2014/10/5/kathy-pages-paradise-elsewhere