Bøger af Maude Hutchins

In A Diary of Love, Maude Hutchins introduces us to Noel. Noel is an orphan being raised by a flute-playing grandfather, a spinster aunt, a benign family doctor, an incredible cook, an improbable governess, and the neighbors, who are gamey. Between a country estate and a sanitarium in the desert, A Diary of Love highlights the capriciousness of Noel and her capability to love a vast array of characters. Hutchins' probing, darting, fantasy-building mind is ever on the move through space, time, history, dreams, and delighted memories.

In Love is a Pie, Maude Hutchins serves up what is surely one of the most extraordinary pastries ever baked in a literary oven. Its ingredients range from the small angel Astrolabe, to Toto the gorilla, from an impudently portrayed Julius Caesar to the newest wife of the founder of the Mormon church. There is the curious history of why mannequins do not speak. In a group of five stories--"The Lost Papers of an Extra Man"--one learns what goes on in a bachelor's mind and heart, and at the dinner parties where he tends to lose both. In every piece within Love is a Pie there is the inimitable Hutchins style, her fresh and original way of looking at familiar matters, her piquant wit.

Georgiana is a girl. The printer who printed her thought she was quite a girl, and we readily agree. But don't interpret "quite" to mean "bad." A girl with as much brain and flair as Georgiana doesn't have to be bad to make her appealing. You read a few pages of Georgiana at random--her childhood or her days in school or her first loves--and you realize at once that she is a real person. So indeed that she breaks all the roles of novel-writing. In fact she walks clean out of the back cover. Nobody is going to finish her. Perhaps good sculptors cannot be trusted with typewriters. They see too much and they feel too much. You will, too.

Victorine is thirteen, and she can't get the unwanted surprise of her newly sexual body, in all its polymorphous and perverse insistence, out of her mind: it is a trap lying in wait for her at every turn (and nowhere, for some reason, more than in church). Meanwhile, Victorine's older brother Costello is struggling to hold his own against the overbearing, mean-spirited, utterly ghastly Hector L'Hommedieu, a paterfamilias who collects and discards mistresses with scheming abandon even as Allison, his wife, drifts through life in a narcotic daze. And Maude Hutchins's Victorine? It's a sly, shocking, one-of-a-kind novel that explores sex and society with wayward and unabashedly weird inspiration, a drive-by snapshot of the great abject American family in its suburban haunts by a literary maverick whose work looks forward to-and sometimes outstrips-David Lynch's Blue Velvet and the contemporary paintings of Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin.