Liberty's Excess

by Lidia Yuknavitch and Aamna Qureshi

In interconnected and mutually enfolding texts protagonists face off with some deformation of being: psychological, sexual, political, philosophical. Plots play out across the body, as if formed,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573660841
• ISBN13: 9781573660846
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: F2c
• Length: 177 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

I Meant to Say...

Exactly what Lidia Yuknavitch means to say, in Liberty's Excess, is unclear. What the reader gets is a clever amalgamation of commentaries and experiences that are "Seedy but aesthetically stunning"(147). Not necessarily aesthetically appealing or beautiful, but certainly stunning. As is becoming an almost necessary trend in writing literature these days, Yuknavitch taps into the basest elements of life in today's world, pressing arduously for shock value. And she delivers. What results is a beautifully written and skillfully structured collection of stories that gorge into the reader's heart or [a number of expletives can be inserted here]. Her stories make the reader ask, "where the heck are the parents?" and "would it make a difference anyway?" and "is there hope?". After just a couple of stories, the reader turns furiously to the last story, in hope of finding hope. The reader is left with writings that have been "lost to the script of the world; not a story at all. Storied over"(171). Yuknavitch convinces the reader that her stories are what the real world is all about. Throughout Liberty's Excess, the reader begs the author, "please, don't go that way... you know what's there... can't it be something else?" But it can't. Yuknavitch assures that her story's direction is inevitable and, concurrently, jarring. The convictions portrayed are made all the more haunting by the fact that her stories often read more like personal essays, before twisting off into more fictional, imaginative directions. Her ideas are "landmines made from potatoes"(95). Yuknavitch takes real life situations, relationships, and plotlines, which inevitably explode into climactic moments (as in the girl's conversation with her brother in prison, in the story Cusp) that force the reader to question human worth. There is "no difference between flesh and the molecules of dark surrounding"(170); humanity, it seems, is left "laughing in [its] own [excrement], drool, and smile dripping [its] face into dark"(171). Being human, Yuknavitch, seems to say, is no shield or consolation against the world we live in. Instead, it contributes to the filth.And yet, by the book's ending, there is a glimmer of hope. Yuknavitch gives the following message to herself and to her readers: "You are particularly skilled at telling stories, I think." Maybe it is all a story, a bad dream, a work of art. "Art clings like a parasite," she proclaims. "I do not want my I. I release it. I give it back to the world"(177). And to the world and the reader: make of this what you wish.

rare and surprising

Yuknavitch offers a rare exposure to life through a vast array of interconnected characters. The grade school outcast, teacher, American consumer, beggar, junkie, prostitute, wife, husband, painter, drug dealer, janitor, and sister all share the common thread that they are immersed in their roles in life whether they want to be or not, and whether they understand their lives or not. In these stories you can feel what it's like to experience someone else' reality. In the nonjudgmental portrayal of characters it is as if she puts the reader into the living, breathing body of a character to feel its beating heart and desires. The sensual text is paced with the movements of the characters-their breathing, hearts beating, and synapses firing in their brains. She takes the banality of every day life and makes it seem absurd, or dangerous, and mocks the way people embrace the ordinary, trivial things, leaving the reader to question what is really trivial and what is really absurd. The stories are divided into four groups that can barely contain them; such is the diversity of both content and style. If you read the stories in order, at the end you will find yourself in a very different place from where you started. The story I enjoyed most was "Cusp" which is a coming of age story of a girl who watches the construction of a prison from her secluded attic bedroom window. The erection of the prisonparallels her sexual growth, and just as she reaches sexual ...., the prisoners begin to arrive, when she is ready to begin exploring both her sexuality and the prison. This gutsy author lays it all out on the table for the readers to see things from new perspectives.

Sexcessful Fictions

"She knew the world was filled with wonderfully abnormal stories."--Lidia Yukanavitch, "Beauty" After immersion in Liberty's Excess, the reader, like one of Yuknavitch's protagonists, is completely full of these abnormal stories yet still yearns for more of her original and disturbing look at American taboos and dysfunction. Switching from first to third person point of view throughout this collection, she paints portraits of characters spread across canvasses so wide-ranged that the reader can't get unstuck from this Salvador Dali-like work of art. At one end, vague statues of liberty and capitalism get ripped apart and made specific through descriptions of a changing neighborhood and an ethnically unaccepting drive-through. On the other end, nudes gather manipulating each other and intertwine so gender is unrecognizable. In the middle is the Americana of having dessert, present-day coupling, factory work, coming-of-age stories, intimate sex, wars, crime, ex-husbands, and Hollywood. Although American culture deforms these protagonists, Yuknavitch writes them without their knowledge of these excuses. The reader semi-consciously follows these characters sometimes questioning erotic actions and other times completely understanding them. At the sentence level, it is amazing how many descriptive words fit perfectly into a concisely Yuknavitch-written sentence. By experimenting with various prose styles that sometimes swerve into prose poetry, form becomes a character to deal with in itself, all the more making the reader struggle with and focus on Yuknavitch's untold American stories.

LE brings America back to the frontier of the body

I see Manifest Destiny, Capitalism and Liberty lose their cover stories violently and without flinching in Liberty's excess. Pursuing the dream ricochets off the page and you are left with only desire. Old myths we've lived by tower and collapse; old rituals foam out the mouth and burn the skin, leaving scars of exhausted creeds and identities. This fiction is a luscious mouth you've been dying to kiss. And there is no languid post-sex smoke after reading these fictions: just bite marks, bruised and succulent. Just a body with a knife and words refusing to surrender. The body doesn't lie. It just gives good fiction. From the fast-food drive-thru to the Marquis de Sade, from the Texaco to Sigmund Freud, from mothers to terrorists to professors to junkies to intellectuals to vagrants to the self--these fictions writhe under the filmy membrane called America. Liberty's excess is a call out, breaking through the thin layer of tissue to let the body/landscape breathe.

Move Over David Foster Wallace

These fictions are wicked, funny, intelligent, moving, unashamed, and original. The stories weave in and out of capitalism and the bodies of those written over by the movements of culture. Wives, junkies, prostitutes, gay men, male movies stars stuck in the roles we won't let them leave, terrorists, athletes, models, icons, mutants and average joes all populate the underworld of LIBERTY'S EXCESS. Get this book. In this new author we've got a live one on our hands.