Scattered Light: What's Cheryl's novel Shiva's Arms about, anyway?

Sunday, April 25, 2010

What's Cheryl's novel Shiva's Arms about, anyway?

From a seemingly simple clash of cultures between in-laws, Shiva’s Arms evolves into an exploration of freedom and the ties that bind, love and duty. Written in a lyrical style studded with startling imagery, the author uses South Indian myths and customs to explore questions of belonging--national, cultural, linguistic--as well as class and ideology. Life is breathed into very different characters, giving them each the space in which to tell their story.

Alice marries Ramesh, a man from a tradition she can’t fathom. Ram aspires to the modern way of life. Alice, eager to belong, embraces the culture her husband is trying to leave behind. At the beginning, even her wardrobe is like a costume--“She jangled an armload of gold-painted bangles…Her eyes were lined with kohl… Every time she took a step, an ankle- bracelet of little bells tinkled.” Alice is an "insider" who wants out; an "outsider" to the West, Ram wants in.

But Alice is the outsider in her mother-in-law’s mind. The old woman will protect family traditions at any cost, whether in India or on US soil. Alice’s authority in her own home is constantly challenged. Amma re-decorates at will, imposes Hindu rituals on the household, and since a child belongs to the whole family, indoctrinates her grandson, Sam, with Indian traditions. As the namesake of the god of creation and destruction, Amma Shiva both embraces and repels, emotionally destabilizing the fragile Alice, who seeks refuge in clinical depression.

Also in Alice’s world is Ram’s sister Nela, a brilliant, beautiful woman rendered un-marriageable by a romantic indiscretion. When she makes her bid for freedom, Amma disowns her, and forbids the extended family to ever speak her name again. Alice keeps up with her anyway, by telephone and mail. “She writes to me often, with news of the boy and my brother, always with plans for a trap for my mother,” Nela explains to Nigel, her longtime lover, as they sift through the latest photos of Sam.

The boy has grown up believing his aunt is dead. When he discovers the truth, he storms out to go to Nela, and shifts the power between Alice and the old woman. Amma’s health fails, and stripped to her essence, she must depend on Alice. With the help of the dishonored daughter, Alice does her duty with tenacity and ingenuity. She restores Amma to health, and in the process, heals herself.

“Samsara,” is a word that builds resonance throughout this book. This domestic sea, part of the endless cycle of birth and death, means different things to each of the characters: to Ram and Nela it is a trap, to Alice and Amma, community. But the struggle between the religious and the secular, the traditional and the modern is best exemplified by Amma Shiva, who sets the tone for a household in which relationships mean everything. That is what ultimately draws Alice in. In Shiva’s Arms, the theme of religion shows how one family uses it to care for one another in an unpredictable world.

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What They Say

Deliciously smart fiction August 7, 2014

By Britton Swingler

Cheryl Snell has woven a compelling story; a page-turner that is emotionally rich without being predictable.

Throughout the book, I found myself trying to imagine being Nela, the main character, and wondered what decisions I would have made given her circumstances. Ultimately, the difficulty I had in imagining myself in her capable shoes gave me great respect for the decisions she made/directions she chose...and I am still thinking about them days afterwards. Though Nela is highly intelligent (a scientist) and independent - the kind of person who could quite easily spend life alone - she is not impervious to love's inexplicable ways, which gives her a delightful charm. Strong women everywhere will applaud and root for her.

When the end came, I was sorry I couldn't travel on with these rich characters. The ending is applaud-worthy and will leave you longing to know more about these rich characters and the motivations that drive their actions.

Janet Snell, Painter of the Great Silence

Some paintings are quiet vortexes. I don’t mean depictions of spiraling maelstroms. Rather, some paintings are an implicit swirling and blending of the emotional into the metaphysical. That vortical energy opens a different space or zone of experience for the onlooker. Painters who can do this are sort of like magicians, aren’t they?

Life is such a hectic, loud, nervous affair. Ten-thousand thoughts at once always colliding, hollering in our heads, eventually prompting some vague action. We’ll then do this or that as modes of defense against the hectoring of time.

Normality gets to have too much say; science gets to claim every-freaking-thing. But a long time ago, the conventional tree science of monkeyism turned into something stranger. Human consciousness and later Shakespeare. Something new and weird bubbled off the surface of being — the pure energy of metaphysical silence potential in floating heads. That dark energy creates eccentric space. The residue of dreams flits there, as pieces of alternate being. The gravity of imagination there warps mirrors of the obvious. Contours of discrete things — especially ourselves — become equivocal, liquid, mad with metaphysics.

Some artists are able to paint that zone of Great Silence, wherein time gets trapped and stunned into colorful shapes of enigma. Something in us, I hypothesize, requires enigma.

illumine

Desire

Black Sleep

Connections

Now Wait Just a Minute

Violence

Dark Flower

I detect certain motifs recurring or threads running through Snell’s work: the familial, the traumatic, the feminist. Yet her paintings also uncover and convey more universal themes. The same fabric realizes tableaux of ancient psychological moods brushed as modern visions. I get wondrously lost, for peculiar duration, in the Great Silence of these paintings.

by Tim Buck

Deep moments, haunting expressions, June 5, 2012, by Tim Buck

The poems by Cheryl Snell in PRISONER'S DILEMMA are like psychological novels compressed into exquisite lines. This is free verse on a high level -- what is being said flows with a calm, artistic cadence. What is being said probes depths with a subtlety and with the ring of lived experience.

The art by Janet Snell is some of the finest contemporary work I've come across. I'm partial to black-and-white, and these works are deftly realized, surreal, and evocative. They are haunting.

How wonderful the complementary nature of this volume! Poem and painting suggestive of each other -- a complex of emotion and vision, of deep observation and expression.

The Blend of Visual and Written Art

THAT FEEL is one of the finest collaborative books published by the sisters Snell. Cheryl Snell is a fine poet and her sister Janet Snell is a fine expressionist artist. In their previous books there was often the question of whether Janet was illustrating Cheryl's poetry or if perhaps each artist made her art and then combined it in the most suitable manner.

Now it is obvious that the art that spreads across both sides of an open book is unified and equally involved in the nidus of expression. The poems and art of THAT FEEL seem to be more visceral than those that came before them - these are poems from the gut, art about alienation and longing and rapturous moments that fade too quickly (or were they even there?). For example in the combined expression of the following, the painting accompanying the poem is that of two faces distorted by reflection in glass or mirror or memory:

REFLECTIONS IN CRACKED GLASS

Each brush stroke had been its own allegory and could not reconcile the break. I felt for connection in blind corridors, whispering Who's there? from within the room's glass eye. Maybe I was dreaming. The facts were hard to parse and sometimes lied. I did, too,confused by what my reflection showed. The glass distorted it and the fissure widened from a thin red line. It splintered our embrace and

again I was alone.

The book may be brief but it is a powerful one. The only criticism about this latest opus is the somewhat disjointed feeling of the varying fonts or typefaces the artists used. Those wide variations of print diminish the tone of the poetry/art like unwanted audience distracters. But that is a minor complaint in a book that further substantiates the excellent collaborative efforts of the sisters Snell. --Grady Harp

Cheryl Snell's Shiva's Arms (novel review)
by Matthew Biberman

Any one who frequents the fiction section of a good independent bookstore knows that there is something of a cottage industry of writers currently churning out fiction invested in capturing the lived experience of ex‐pat Indians who have moved to America. One of the more distinctive elements of this sub‐genre is its investment in detailing life in India as well as in America, most often in ways that include, often in great detail, the back stories of the
characters before their decision to move away from their home land.
A recent addition to this stack of books is Cheryl Snell’s first novel, Shiva’s Arms. I know and admire Cheryl first and foremost as a poet, a fact that inevitably colored my reading of this book. Indeed I would encourage anyone who begins Shiva’s Arms to keep this fact in mind because I believe it influences the writing of this novel all the way down to its essence. Cheryl’s poetic eye is not just visible in the felicitous phrase, though the book is filled with such moments. A conversation in an Indian cab takes place in a dialect that sounds “like gravel in their mouths.” When a character unravels, we see that her eyes are “blue puddles in her slack face.” Food gets sopped up “in a baseball mitt” of bread. But to read Shiva’s Arms for its precise, poetic imagery is to skate along an iced over lake without any thought to the depths below.
The true challenge of Shiva’s Arms is to recognize that it is a very ambitious—indeed, innovative piece of writing. It is an experiment in what I would call a transversal novel. Shiva’s Arms takes shape somewhere between the sonnet craze that swept Shakespeare’s England four centuries ago and the cinematic techniques often identified as producing the Rashomon effect in twentieth century avant garde film.
First we must think about that now largely obsolete form—the sonnet sequence. Generally understood to have been popularized by Petrarch with his love poems to Laura, the sonnet sequence flourished in the late sixteenth century in London. Shakespeare’s effort is a very late example, and perhaps for that reason, breaks new ground. For the first time, the poet is repeatedly identified with the speaker of the poems (think of all those puns on Will) and the beloved is not simply idealized (famously, her eyes are nothing like the sun) but also unfaithful. Nor is the narrative clear. When you read Shakespeare’s poems it is as if you are reading a novel in snap shots, but with this twist: as you read it dawns on you that somehow the poems are no longer in chronological order
While keeping that experience in mind, let us flash forward to the art house movie. Famously, Kurosawa made a film‐‐Rashomon (1950) that retells a crime from four different perspectives, a device that highlights the complex and dynamic nature of reality. What the Rashomon effect
highlights is the truth that though reality is intersubjective (that is, reality is a collective formation), this “collective hallucination” (to use Freud’s term) is inevitably being made by individuals who are experiencing what is happening in ways that are always at once congruent and divergent.
What Cheryl has done in Shiva’s Arms is to present the story of an extended family in a novel that combines both of these techniques. The result can be described as a novel where each chapter operates as a kind of intense short poem, that is‐‐ as a sonnet. The chapters do not,however, anchor the reader to one character. Rather, the reader is passed from character to character. We begin tied to the American Alice, but then pass on to her husband Ram, and then their child Sam. This primary pattern is however interrupted with detours into Ram’s mother Amma, and ‐‐ with increasing frequency as the book builds to its conclusion ‐‐ the shunned sister Nela. With each shift, a different perspective is showcased. In strategy, the result is reminiscent of some of our most celebrated modernist novels, books such as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway come immediately to mind. But in those works, the effect encourages the reader to separate out the characters so that the readers gains a satisfying sense that people are unique, yet isolated, grounded but limited to their bodies.
The effect that Snell produces in Shiva’s Arms is striking because it works in reverse. People in families get caught up in each other so that the configurations shift and change. Suddenly the notion that we are limited to our physical bodies falls away. We meld in our struggles, mix and combine in ways that defeat the macro laws of physics both in terms of space and even time. In this, Snell’s work is reminiscent of Djuna Barnes cult masterpiece Nightwood, though the overall mood is far more evocative of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.
For me the high points of Shiva’s Arms come when Snell renders the rapid blooming of a state of existential dread. The effect is positively unsettling in its intensity, most especially early in the novel after Alice’s marriage precipitates a psychological crisis. The concluding confrontation between Amma and Alice is even more impressive, coming as it does so effectively after the dramatic resolution of the dinner immediately preceding it. Fights in Shiva Arms do not end with characters walling themselves off. Everything drives toward mixture, a fact highlighted by Ram when he observes that “we are all just chemistry labs.” This theme is made overt via the role food plays in this novel complete with Recipes, a crowning touch.
According to western cliché, cooking and food illustrate how each of us enjoys a unique and colorful heritage of goodness. True to its radical nature, Shiva’s Arms upends that idea and puts in place the notion that each of us is but an ingredient, a blend that makes up the bigger whole.
Shiva’s Arms is a satisfying novel that demands much from its reader. Its strengths are many but if I had to pick one on which to end I will stress that this is a book that provocatively challenges many of the most cherished presumptions propping up many well known examples of Indian – American fiction, or indeed of multicultural literature generally speaking. Despite paying lip service to the idea that western notions of subjectivity are not universal, most writers working in the genre of the English novel continue to present nonwestern forms of consciousness via free standing western characters. In stark contrast, Shiva’s Arms invites you to imagine characters that are interconnected parts of a larger whole. Such a radical insight can only come from a novelist of great talent and skillful execution. With luck, future novels from Cheryl Snell will deepen this exploration. As a reader I certainly look forward to the adventure.

Prisoner's Dilemma:...The diction here, precise and yet off-hand, coupled with the unexpected coupling of ideas (beauty – rivers – the girl who knows all the boys desire her) places Snell on intimate relations with the main currents of twentieth century American poetry, a landscape marked by masters such as John Ashberry, Mark Strand, Louise Bogan and Louise Gluck, to name but a few poets associated with the style Alan Williamson (himself a fine poet) dubbed the new American surrealism. And yet Snell—or rather the Snells—for the book I am reviewing, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, is a collection that alternates between Cheryl’s short lyric poems and Janet’s pencil drawings -- stands apart.

The difference is hard to explain, so lets be blunt: in the best of Cheryl’s work, the style regains its vigor, enlivened by the poet’s deep sense of what it means to be caught up in life. A digression on Freud may help here because we are on the subject of digressions. Freud could never stop being fascinated by the notion that it is life that is the interruption. Not death. The immortal is the natural state. But somehow we find ourselves shunted and routed out of the immortal and into the detour of the mortal for a brief go round before flowing back into the immortal, back into death, and the beyond of death. Cheryl Snell’s poetry, and Janet’s art, together illuminate this insight: that the detour into life is a circular whirlpool. --Matthew Biberman

It could be the case that those human heads are floating in a paradoxical space: yes, obviously human (and all that that signals to us) but also pure moments of form. Cephalic shapes to circumscribe color-vacuums, lending force to the other “objects.”Another impression jumps into my own head, beyond what I said above about...well, whatever it was I said. For me, I feel like I'm looking at a negative-image of consciousness. The subconscious? Maybe. And what's weird and cool is that those heads, drained of color and feature detail, seem to express more human soulfulness and depth than even a portrait by Rembrandt!...Tim Buck

There is something of Keats's “negative capability” revealed in this poignant story: it is a mystery to me how a female author can so perfectly inhabit the hurting corners of a middle-aged man's soul. And her striking turns of phrase bring delight to the reader, even as he squirms and winces in sympathy with Roger...Tim Buck

The imagery is often stark and reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, the emotion bottled which, unstoppered, pervades an air of vaguely fragrant stoicism. Where the subtext is menacing, it frets away at a blithe surface like a sliver of glass stuck in the weave. But, often, it's uncompromising, violent, in-your-face, leaving the reader with no more than the merest scintilla of hope...Rosy Cole

...This is a collection of poems to be lingered over, like reminders of first views or experiences we usually keep to ourselves for fear that speaking of them will make them lost to us. Snell has captured these moments and we can only hope she will continue to write such tender thoughts as well as in MULTIVERSE. ---Grady Harp

Marilyn Kallet, on Multiverse:
"Cheryl Snell's poems are rich, integrative, witty, and beautifully composed."

This is not poetry merely to beguile the imagination; it is experience by vital proxy, full of pulse and texture and radiance. Memento Mori is a tour de force. (R.Cole)

"... Both Snells' (author and painter) works soar in this lovely book. It was interesting to watch the movement of fear between the poems...A nervous and wonderful collection of art fused with poetry."--Andrew Demcak, on Multiverse

Dorothy Shin, Akron Beacon Journal--
"Her work is dark,mysterious, seemingly drawn from the subconscious...Foreboding, regret, entrapment, longing and enigma vie for prominence while gestural, expressive brushwork gives the forms a supernormal tension and energy..."

Bob Grumman, Taproot--"Macabre, comic, mysterious, and subtly erotic, these fascinating drawings constantly flirt with disgust -- a perfect example of graphic black humor. "

"A series of charcoal drawings that go darkly anywhere via an expressionism that reminds me of Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon. Snell provides poems for her illustrations that generally extend rather than just rephrase them-- ."

... varied and beautifully imaged lyric narratives...Again, she stuns us with her imagery.---Comstock Review

Scattered Light

Sunday, April 25, 2010

What's Cheryl's novel Shiva's Arms about, anyway?

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