Review: Life in its Full Splendor
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 9, 2011
From the plane or on a map the small Pacific islands look like `mere specks', but zoom your focus and you find life in its full splendor, even things larger than life. Nothing is diminutive on the ground: the all pervading green (`Polynesia is green. It is everywhere'--Cannibal Nights, Colonial Afternoons), the `warm forgiving sun,' the accumulated passion and the riotous imagination (Paul Gauguin), the uncontrolled rage (Assasin Orders Peking Duck), everything reflects the vivacity of life.While these splintered islands, trapped in the vast ocean, showcase life in all its hues, there are moments when life is dwarfed by other phenomena, like the monolithic statues dotting the Easter Island, which seem to have an overarching presence over the island's people, and their fate.Like a master photographer author Kiana Davenport captures the vignettes of life in these disparate settings, crops and balances the images and finally presents us a rainbow of stories each different yet complementary to each other.All the stories are suffused with fervent passion: passion for vengeance, passion for love, lust, passion to keep the family from breaking, to find a lost father and for an unbridled life. In `Assassin Orders Pecking Duck' a father reacts to the loss of his teen age daughter to terrorist violence, in the only way his pitiless Navy Seal past has prepared him for: to smoke out the perpetrators from their hiding and to inflict on them matching pain and death. The story `Cannibal Nights, Colonial Afternoons' recounts the suffering and grief, the lust, zest, and the working of the artistic mind of a genius, who has cut himself loose from society. In `George Bush and Papa at Paradise', a bright but sensitive girl foregoes the chance of pursuing higher studies in New Zealand, so that she may restore her wayward father's lost affection for her mother.The characters are busy in their own quests: some of them move inwards while others explore out to the distant parts of the world. While the flawed genius of the eponymous story, unhappy with the external world, comes to the core of nature in Marquesas Islands, the women and men in Easter Island, scared of the life of bondage that the big bad world offers them, hold precariously on to their land by hiding in the deep crevices of earth (`Mysteries of Rapa Nui'). And there are outward journeys too: by Samuel in `Assassin Orders Pecking Duck', who fans out to distant lands in hot pursuit of the terrorists. The daughter of a French soldier in `The French Foreign Legionnaire's Btard' goes out to interior France in quest for her biological father, but her quest leaves her more shattered.The stories have a haunting quality about them and they strike a chord with you. The primordial men and women in their idyllic settings grow on you as you read more and more. You may check out from this milieu whenever you choose, but you can never shut them out from your mind. They will cry out in the dark of the night like the cannibals in the Paul Gauguin story.