Degrees Of Nakedness: Stories (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
Lisa Moore speaks my language, and in Degrees of Nakedness, her first short story collection from 2005, she speaks this language straight into the soul of me. I must confess that I don't always understand what Moore is talking about – she feints and flips and makes strange leaps – but on every page there is a turn of phrase or moment of truth that makes a reader want to pump her fist and stab the page and yammer to anyone nearby, “Yes. Like that.”These are stories about love and sex, with recurring themes about cheating and parenting stepchildren, fires and German tourists, people coughing “like cotton ripping”. I may not have acted out the exact following scene, but it completely captures the strange impulsiveness that I was prone to as an eighteen-year-old:I just talked and shouted and did cartwheels and the cancan with my parka open. I did chorus kicks all the way down the empty highway. I shrieked the lyrics from old musicals; I got plenty of nothin' and nothin's plenty for me. The hills climbed up on either side of us. Rain fell off the massive sky like the faces of buildings in an earthquake.Many of the stories are constructed like impressionist collages; a movie reel spliced and taped back together seemingly at random; creating in large what this passage suggests writ small: Sounds, smells, images, every sensation slipping over the next, chaotic, ticklish. I can feel the metallic yelp of the mailbox lid at the tips of my teeth and I have to run my tongue over them. The smell of ink, like the smell of blood. A fingernail broken to the quick, rubbed against a cotton bed sheet. Then the smell of paint thinner.And if that seems too out there, any reader might appreciate the imagery of the following: There's a photograph of the house my parents built together when it was just a skeleton. Blond two-by-fours like a ribcage around a lungful of sky.I'll read anything by Lisa Moore – and despair that I'm nearly at the end of her current body of writing – but like with any other works of art, I trust these stories will reveal more to me upon revisiting.
This book was recommended to me by reader and writer extraordinnaire Grace O'Connell, who calls Lisa Moore one of the greatest living Canadian writers. Ms. O'Connell knows a thing or two about short fiction (having taught classes and having her own stories nominated for awards) and she was spot on with this collection. This series of short, visceral, and impactful stories will stay with me for a long time. Most of them take place in and around Newfoundland and feature broken, memorable characters. Moore's attention to detail sets her apart from other writers, something I learned while reading (and falling in love with) her fabulous novel FEBRUARY (underrated and under-appreciated in my opinion.)Sometimes you need a break from tried and true formula and narrative and DEGREES OF NAKEDNESS was a refreshing dip into literary fiction that reminded me of why I love words so much, especially when in the hands of a premiere wordsmith.
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