****7.5 stars***
Dedication: "This one is for Scott Browning and for Robert Rodi, with my love and gratitude."
Epigraphs:
Each dream is a child of Night, affiliated closely with Sleep and Death, and with Forgetting (Lethe) all that the daily world remembers. Dreams have no father, no call upwards.
--James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
"I did this," says my Memory, "I cannot have done this," says my Pride and remain inexorable. In the end--Memory yields.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
It was an easy birth, once it had been accepted, and I was younger.
--Martha, in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Well, obviously, I haven't been keeping up with a reading journal since The Big Move, but since Haven Kimmel is one of my all-time favorite authors AND since our principal told us all to go home today because of the horrible ice storm (her husband called her from a 9-car pileup this morning to report that while HE was okay, their truck was not), it seems like a good time to post again.
And even though I constantly beg people to read Haven Kimmel, perhaps Iodine isn't for everybody. Interesting and surprising and well-written, it's just...well, perhaps not the exact book for fans of Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch. If you go into Kimmel's 4th novel expecting something different, expecting something darker, you may be pleasantly surprised.
A great excerpt from Iodine:
"I'm not a dog person, people say, I hear it all the time. Oh? Oh, you're not a dog person? Are you a zombie, an automaton, a marionette? Is it about your carpet? Your beige carpet? Or is the nuisance, the caretaking, the ritual? Is it about how you'd prefer not to be bothered, or how you find a certain level of sterility necessary in order to support your loveless marriage and your absurd career and your rapid decline and death? The death you will go to without the irritant of dog hair on that black suit, split up the back by the undertaker? Is it because you don't understand that dogs are Other, they are messengers and wild animals--they could survive just fine without us--and they are carnivores, they are dangerous, they could kill us (and do), and yet virtually all of them choose to live in harmony with us for reasons we will never understand? There is no species of mammal on earth with greater diversity: a papillon is a dog, and a Neapolitan mastiff is a dog, and a greyhound is a dog, and a mutt scavenging at the edge of a garbage heap in Calcutta is a dog..."
