GLR May June

Bloomsbury (the catalog for a 1999-2000 Tate exhibit), was an acclaimed art critic, writer, and artist. At one of the Bell’s innumerable house parties, E. M. (“Mor- gan” to his friends) Forster, just a couple of novels into his writ- ing career, makes an appearance. “Morgan goes about his writing with such an unfussy, self-effacing grace that he is one of the few people for whom Lytton feels no real jealousy, only admiration.” Virginia Woolf, a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement , “is bitingly jealous of Morgan and usu- ally avoids discussing his novels.” It bears mentioning that the artists and critics of Bloomsbury started to make their mark be- fore Woolf’s first novel , The Voyage Out , was published in 1915. Between 1911 and ’12, Vanessa had made four portraits of Virginia, who felt overshadowed by the artists’ success and was annoyed that art talk took precedence over literary talk. Interspersed among the diary entries are imagined postcards that Lytton Strachey sent to his friend Leonard Woolf, who in real life, and in Parmar’s creation, was employed by the Ceylon Civil Service. Many of the postcards urge Woolf to come back to England and to marry Virginia Stephen. An occasional 21st-century anachronism does creep in, and Vanessa has the rather annoying habit of ending some of her diary entries with a cliff-hanging paragraph beginning with the word “And.” One such entry is about “Maynard Keynes, Lyt- ton’s young economist friend from Cambridge—with whom I understand him to be occasionally involved? But then, I may be wrong. I often am.” Parmar provides a helpful “What be- came of them” section that can lead readers to the original works by the authors, to their biographies and memoirs, and to the art museums that hold their works.

B R I

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Framed Butterflies by Raad Rahman Bard College Press. 247 pages, $7.99 This novel is about two young Bangladeshi women, Nisaa and Maryam, who come from families with close ties, have grown up with each other, and begin an illicit rela- tionship. The affair is discovered by their parents, who are shocked and disgusted. Nisaa, the narrator of the story, is sent away to India to continue her education far from her family’s gaze. Maryam is forced to marry a man she cannot love and later bears his children. The story follows the narra- tor’s life as she drifts from place to place, not knowing what she wants or who she wants it with. She rejects her American boyfriend and then lets him back into her life only to dump him again after seeing Maryam once more. This confusion is mir- rored in the book’s structure, which takes us backwards in time to the moment the pair discovered their mutual passion and from there meanders through to its conclusion, mixing thematic strands and taking detours that threaten to derail both Nisaa’s life and the plot of the novel. Maryam is more con-

sistent but also more delusional. Outwardly, she’s the conventional good Muslim wife and mother, but secretly she’s having an af- fair with the maid and still desires Nisaa. In short, she’s trapped by her inability to change and by the rigidity of society. It is Nisaa who’s the ticking time bomb to the Bangladeshi status quo: she’s a chameleon and a survivor with ties to the West—a for- eigner, a lesbian, an independent woman— whose main limitation is her state of confusion as she negotiates her various roles in life. K EN P OWELL Once the lead singer of an electro-pop band called Provocateur and now a crooner with an Elvis-like baritone, Matthew Connor is a performer of considerable range and panache. A native of Birmingham, Ala- bama, Connor spent his youth in the South but, as a self-described “queer kid,” always felt like an outsider. So he bade Dixie adieu, moved to Boston, and released his debut album Farewell Motel . The video for “How is July Already Over” (a nominee for Farewell Motel Album by Matthew Connor

Music Video of the Year at the Boston Music Awards and available on YouTube) features Connor in a white tuxedo, in- volved in a pas de deux with actor Hunter Canning. In an interview, Connor told me that he enjoys the autonomy of being a solo artist: “ I’m very much a control freak, so being able to write, produce, record, per- form, and oversee every element of how I present myself from start to finish is a huge thing for me.” His powers of self-fashion- ing could be the most compelling thing about Connor, who felt that Farewell Motel needed to be sung in an old-fashioned style. “Smoke Signals” is the paradigmatic track, since Connor’s vocals don’t so much re- sound but waft, like a smoke ring, evoking the great k.d. lang and her cigarette-in- spired Drag of 1997. “After the Show” picks up the pace with a more contempo- rary tempo, and it’s one that should carry Connor into new musical vistas. He assured me that there is nothing “retro” about his forthcoming music. “Farewell Motel” may feel old-timey, but taut and elegant, it’s channeling somebody or some thing.

C OLIN C ARMAN

May–June 2015

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