Review of "Making a Name"

I reviewed Rosanne Dingli's Making a Name and other stories over at Amazon. I'll let it stand.

We are so spoiled these days, by the garish and the obvious. Subtlety and nuance seem to have been relegated to the quieter corners of the world. In "Making a Name and other stories", Australian author Rosanne Dingli seems to be on a one-woman mission to bring those qualities back into the mainstream.

These nine short stories are rich in the finer aspects of human interaction. It is a book filled with gestures. Glances, tilted heads, quiet movements tell deeper stories than many writers manage to convey in far showier works. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate homicidal savagery and alien invasions as much as the next fan of genre fiction, but who wants a meal of only protein? Green vegetables are good for you, after all. But I also don't want to appear to damn with faint praise, or compare Ms Dingli's stories to brussels sprouts. No, these are finely tuned and exquisitely textured snapshots of the human condition in all its regrettable, messy glory. And there is even a hint of unease that sometimes emerges more fully at the end, a haunted echo of something barely touched upon in the body of the story itself. I am being careful not to leave spoilers here, not that these stories particularly hinge on shocking revelations; even the twists are subtle.

One story in particular continued to resonate for me long afterward. In "Woman Peeling An Apple", the complexity of human relationships is at its most intense; all the loneliness, desperation, tender envy and regret of sexual longing are present in this beautifully crafted account of painters, photographers, friendships, and family ties. Its European setting (France, Belgium) enhances its paradoxically gentle power, and it won't let go.

If I were to offer one slight criticism, and not a particularly serious one, the writing is perhaps *too* mannered sometimes. Everyone "makes love"... and maybe this is my own capitulation to the sensational, but I found myself wishing they would get a little raunchier, a little earthier, now and then. But like I said, that is but a minor quibble; the vast majority of this work is a delight--in its memorable phrases, in its clear love of and dexterity with the language itself.

This is the territory of Virginia Woolf, or possibly Milan Kundera. Now *that* is certainly not faint praise.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.