![]() ![]() The father is “a clown, an acrobat and a crook.” The child narrator, who often breaks up the narrative with statements in all caps, writes about how her fragile family is held together by their cultural traditions. The mother’s act is to hang by her long, “steel” hair. Veteranyi’s novel begins when the unnamed narrator is very young. Kling writes that the family suffered discrimination: though they were not of Romani origin, “their wandering life made them outcasts indistinguishable from Gypsies and subjected them to even greater instability.” They started touring with their circus act their home began and ended at their trailer door. ![]() According to an afterword by Vincent Kling, the novel’s translator, they escaped “lethal poverty and a reign of terror” and were granted asylum in Switzerland. Born in Romania in 1962, Veteranyi left with her family in 1967 after the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu came to power. Surely she wanted to write more she had so many fans.) So I was particularly intrigued when a bookseller at Malvern Books in Austin, Texas, insisted I read Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta, by Aglaja Veteranyi (1962–2002), a novel likewise narrated by a daughter of circus performers-with the crucial distinction that Veteranyi’s tale is autobiographical. That Dunn never wrote another novel was one of my early literary sorrows. I foraged the fresh leaves from a street near my parents’ house. Stuffed peppers and grape leaves is a classic Romanian dish. She suggested that-no matter how much damage we might sustain-familial love, safety, and acceptance was possible. But what I remember most about the book is that from Al’s first mythologizing words, Dunn showed that she understood trauma and celebrated difference. Al and Lil had deliberately bred their children so as to enhance their carnival act. The main character, Olympia, was “an albino hunchback dwarf,” her brother Arturo the Aqua Boy had flippers for hands and feet, and her daughter Miranda did well as a fetish stripper, thanks to her arousing little tail. Today, Geek Love’s portrayal of people with physical disabilities might provoke unease. This worked as a seduction technique-a testament either to the popularity of Geek Love or the ease of college hookups. ‘Spread your lips, sweet Lil,’ they’d cluck, ‘and show us your choppers!’” “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. I’d memorized the opening lines, in which Al Binewski extols his wife’s grace in biting off chicken heads, and used to get drunk and murmur them to boys at parties: Geek Love, Katherine Dunn’s 1989 novel about a family of circus performers, was one of my favorite books in college. ![]()
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