Giraffes in Hiding – The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack: A Review by Ethel Rohan

Carol Novak’s Giraffes in Hiding – The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack is a quirky and remarkable collection of forty-one poetic fictions, fusions, and prose poems. This exceptional collection makes for a challenging and absorbing read. To read this book is to set out on a journey that stretches the mind and imagination in surprising and wondrous ways. The language and imagery here are both unexpected and often exquisite, as are the elements of magic and the absurd. Giraffes in Hiding – The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack is unlike any other collection I have read and is welcome nourishment for me as a reader and writer.

The first and excellent story, “Minnows,” introduces the themes of family, loss, sorrow, rage, sibling rivalry, power and powerlessness that are threaded throughout this collection. This story, like every work that follows in the book, is a delightful cornucopia of original language and gorgeous imagery. Our young narrator, Hattie’s twin, reveals:

“Hattie’s wonder book came with six white giraffes. Before she’d finished coloring them yellow and brown, I poured water on two of them. They were ruined forever yes for always and she cried for always, cried like a minnow so quiet you can’t hear those minnows with whetted hooks in their mouths, like plants when you cut their roots, voices of broken lutes, lobsters in hot pots. But I could hear her; put my fingers in my ears for always when she was around.”

“Minnows” turns darker and further reveals this family’s tensions and struggles, not least of which is an insatiable tumor growing in the twins’ mother’s stomach. The story continues on a chilling note that reads both brutal and refreshingly honest:

“The minnows were gone, maybe into the belly of the sky. I combed the ocean for my minnows while Hattie’s giraffes multiplied like spider plants, all yellow and brown on the dry yellow savanna, propelled by their gauche necks, awkward in their bodies, bodies rooted to the feet of the humming planet. Where can a giraffe hide? I asked Daddy; wouldn’t he know? There’s nowhere to hide, I said to Hattie. Don’t be ridiculous, she responded: Why would giraffes want to hide?

I asked for lions for my birthday, prayed hard for lions bigger than Hattie’s giraffes. When the big lions arrived, I colored them the color of oceans. I sent them to the savanna.

The lions are on their way.”

Then “Minnows” shifts and becomes something other than a traditional, plot-driven story, setting the biting tone and impressive standard for the rest of the collection. It soon became clear I should forego any expectations this collection would deliver traditional language, characters or plot. Already captivated, I surrendered to the work and let go of such personal biases and preferences. As “Minnows” progresses, our narrator is grown and marries Rock:

“When we wed, Rock insisted on a Temple of Bluefish cer- emony, he said yes, bluefish you must say yes yes you must or I’ll drown and I said yes till death do us in. If I hadn’t he’d have gone on and on, boring me to madness I would’ve had to close my ears for good. When you know about Minnows as I do you know they are everywhere in the open; thus temples are unimportant I said to self, hiding my sorrows in shoe pockets in my closet. Whereas bluefish, well, we know where they are; check your microwaves, chandeliers and mirrors, so loud and cunning those fish, taking over oceans. I could live without attending the community of the Temple of the Minnows know- ing I was living with them always in spite of Rock and the cameras.”

Then we appear to have a movie review within the story written by our narrator. Here’s an excerpt:

“So Minnie beseeched him: Put them back, please do! She repeated her entreaty for the frantic minnows, slippery slivers of iridescence leaping out of the bucket onto the sand into the sky, fearing extinction she said this reminds me of early death, please no please no! The heavens turned dense ash blue like hospice hair.”

True to everything that follows in this collection, “Minnows’” ending is perhaps not easily accessible or understandable in terms of what happens, but I gleaned enough in terms of “story” to be satisfied and most certainly admired the language, imagery and a female narrator’s voice that’s deliciously fierce:

“Then what? Into the sunrise they went? you queried, forgetting you had asked, no, told me; you always told me everything without your hearing aid imagined you’d related the whole ostentatious synopsis as well as the start of it all with the minnows in the bucket no, not a bucket, a net that stretched from Nantucket to Nova Scotia. Imagine! But I was tired and couldn’t be sure I actually recalled stampeding giraffes, falling heliotropes, bloodstone storms, an old child with no eyes, wrapped in waves; I couldn’t; and you had dropped like a minnow of a brittle star into my flat trap of a lap, my darling sour ancient fish.”

It will come as no surprise to those familiar with my own writing that I was especially enthralled by the family dynamics in this collection, in particular that of the mother/daughter relationship. Here’s this brutal and beautiful paragraph from “Girls at Play” where we’re again brought the heart-wrenching image of the narrator with her fingers in her ears and the “you” is the narrator’s sibling:

“Perhaps you knew as you always have, you so suddenly seeming wounded well seemingly so in your angel pink bathing suit with tender moon blue hearts – you who looked at me as if I were yes I was a wave of approaching fire so hot and there was our mother not wanting to know I saw her wondering who emerged from my womb? as she saw the flame in my eyes and her voice was rising too they all were I guess you were had been screaming for centuries they had and will go on and on and so I put my fingers in my ears. It was like that, is.”

The sense of abuses, doom and destruction is ever-present in this work, but here form doesn’t follow content and in juxtaposition to theme the descriptions are so alive and creative. Look at this great paragraph from “Cluck Cluck” where the narrator, a writer, discusses with a fellow writer her novel’s protagonist:

“She was pulling more than 50 years after her. Distillization, even on a modest scale, seemed daunting. Heaps of shit to re-count and re-invent. Yes it’s overwhelming, I said to you, but one must try, I understand, I am told. Your wan, bulimic girlfriend with the belly button ring was in the kitchen fixing something like Vegan tofutti with soy cheese; her skin was blinking like strobe lights. Must’ve been glitter. My skin is dry with fur-rows like clay from the Paleolithic Age. I was trying a new skin cream from Aveda at the time, I think. Now it’s “facial sculpting” cream by some company owned by a dermatologist in New York. Your girlfriend Zappa drinks bottled water, 12 Evians per day. She’ll never run dry until the mother of all tsunamis comes along to get all of us who are still alive. The Greenland icebergs are sagging, falling flat into the ocean up there, like dead breasts. Time to leave coastal areas.”

There’s also the constant return to sorrow, loss, seeking, betrayal, and missed connections in the collection. All of the stories spoke to me to some degree in this regard and such pain and suffering are especially evident in the story “Destination” where our narrator’s yearning to “arrive” at a certain place and state is achingly rendered:

“He frightened me when he clasped me to him in the night, when he lowered the volume of his voice to speak of the mirage of walls and roofs. Not so long ago, he seemed to be my des- tination. He was mine and I was his or so it seemed. After an orgy of mirrors, we sucked and picked at one another’s bones. Then he strayed into that other woman’s residence and stayed too long, I took the turn back to where I’d been going, but couldn’t find it. Pain was my map; I could hardly see clearly.

So I found you hiding in a hedge with thorns, not crying but chanting, no, singing, singing a lament to your mother; you crooned, wanting to crawl back into her, so I came and stroked your head. I remember your hair as soft as dandelion puffs and you trembled but kept still for a spell entranced you let me be your home. And then like flotsam, you floated away, you with your eyes dense with storms. I carried on, tore off my red dress, taunted you. Who can stay still? Who can remain in homes with so many rules? you pleaded. I left that town a long time ago, I answered. At least I thought I did. You looked like a rabbit in a wolf’s yellow eye. All homes have rules, you said. You said I am a nomad. I have no choice. You do, I replied, drawing you into me for the last time, feeling like the rabbit in your jaws. But was I the wolf? Now I have forgotten your name.”

There’s so much of the unexpected and visceral in this book, particularly in terms of language and imagery, that’s it’s staggering in ways great and even perhaps overwhelming. I found it impossible to read much of this collection in any one sitting and enjoyed the work over the course of weeks—savoring, digesting, and grasping at meaning. At times fable and mythical, these works are rarely realistic but always fantastic. There’s sensuality, wildness and even rage in both form and content here that’s palpable. The book design is gorgeous and comes complete with fourteen beautiful and haunting illustrations by various artists, hence the book’s expense at $32.00. It’s an investment I hope many will make. Whilst reading this unique book, I felt I was deep-sea diving, surrounded by exotic and breathtaking words-as-creatures, but mindful too of the murkiness, sinister and danger that also lurk both under and above water.

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Giraffes in Hiding – The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack (September 2010) is available from Spuyten Duyvil Press or from Amazon, ISBN 978-1933132839. Novack is also the publisher and editor of Mad Hatters’ Review. Fictions and poems may be found in numerous journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Caketrain, Drunken Boat, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction International, First Intensity, Gargoyle, Journal of Experimental Literature, LIT, and Notre Dame Review, and in many anthologies, including “The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets,” “Diagram III,” and “The &Now Awards: the Best Innovative Writing.” Writings in translations may or will be found in French, Italian, Polish and Romanian journals.