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BOOK REVIEW of In Bed with the Exotic Enemy:
Stories & Novella by Daniela Gioseffi

BOOK REVIEW of In Bed with the Exotic Enemy: Stories & Novella by Daniela Gioseffi by Dr. Fred Misurella, professor of American Literature, East Stroudsburg University, Pennsylvania. Born and bred in NJ, Fred Misurella is a graduate of Montclair University. He has served as a Fullbright Scholar in Paris. He is author of the novella, Short Time [Via Folios/ Bordighera, Inc. @ Purdue University. His commentary has appeared in The Village Voice and many other publications]:

[Daniela Gioseffi. IN BED WITH THE EXOTIC ENEMY. Avisson Press, Inc. © 1997, 204 pages; cloth, $10 postpaid E-mail: daniela@garden.net]

In a voice that combines the all-encompassing embrace of a Whitman with the metaphysical wit of John Donne, Daniela Gioseffi offers a collection of 16 stories and a novella that, page after page, maps the
gulf of loneliness and frustration between individuals whose souls aspire
to flight while their bodies remain firmly planted on earth. In a story
called "The Exotic Enemy" Gioseffi's character says,

"Yes, I'm sixty-six... and I know now that erotic ideas are like flashy lights turning on in
heads that echo from mouths and shine up secret places, and people can be
greedy in their groins and ugliness can come even from the beauty of
nubile bliss. Sex can be ripped from the blood as if the body were not a
house of green moss, a vase of kindness, a space for greed set alight from
the dark by the glow of hand on hand."

Time passes, the flesh decays while hopes take flight, even as the
human spirit continues to desire. The exotic enemy of the title is someone
wanted, yet someone unattainable, primarily because of physical, social
barriers that create barren spaces between us.

In the first story, "Bleeding Mimosa," a young journalist
participates in the 1965 march on Selma, only to be reviled, jailed, and
raped by a local law officer with no capacity for social or sexual love.
In "A Yawn in the Life of Venus," a young woman rises from her bed,
stretches in the morning light, and takes coffee while reflecting the
various ideals and frustrations of the men and women in her life who think
about her with love and desire but can neither possess nor fully encompass
her. Each has different ideas, memories, and images of her, so their
reflections, gathered in the narrative, form a modern, cubistic portrait
of a traditional mythic, as well as erotic, image.

"Rosa in Television Land" also presents a clash between tradition
and modernity. A seventy-two year old woman who works in a chocolate
factory to support herself and her ailing sister earns more money in one
day performing for a television commercial than she does in a month at the
factory. But her earnings come at a price. She recites her lines ("Uma
always use Ultragrip ona my dentures to enjoy my family pic-a-nicks!")
before a table full of meats and foods such as her family only dreamed of
when they sailed to America from Apulia. Then she watches, puzzled and
horrified to see the table of sumptuous food dumped into garbage bags
uneaten.

These divisions--between desire and satisfaction, tradition and
modernity--recur frequently throughout this book and may, I think, form
the connecting leitmotif of Daniela Gioseffi's writing. Her wide range of
interests--poetry, short stories, the novel, anthologies, and music, as
well as active participation in ecological and social causes--animates
almost all these stories, but never at the expense of narrative art.
Complexities and mysteries of human character and behavior form the crux
of every dramatic situation in the book, and social issues such as racial
hatred, sexist behavior, moral intolerance, and bias concerning physical
appearance serve as background and context for, as Milan Kundera sees it,
a fiction writer's one true subject: the investigation of human character
and the possibilities of human existence.

In this book Daniela Gioseffi conducts her investigations with
insight, wit, and, above all, compassion, always in clear, energetic
prose. The final story in the collection, a novella entitled "The Psychic
Touch," demonstrates these qualities with special clarity. I recommend it
for its strange pairing of characters, its absolute believability, and for
the pathos and humor that make it one of the great pieces in the novella
genre. A prostitute and a three-armed man fall in love, largely out of
convenience, but as they live together and improve their lives, the love,
physical at first (his third hand, after all, provides added technical
dexterity!), evolves into a deeply felt affection and commitment. He takes
up work as a bartender, his three limbs making him famous as a quick,
showy mixer of cocktails, and she attends classes in literature and
writing. But one night when she goes to the bar to see him, they glance at
each other as he performs and for the first time see themselves and their
love in a public, commercial context that illuminates and degrades their
affair. Embarrassed by a shared sense of freakishness, they revert to
self-loathing and an old despair that dooms their love. Moving swiftly
toward a wrenching denouement, Gioseffi raises the level of these two
characters' lives to a high plain of passion and thought, where the
conflicts of soul and body, fate and personality intersect with cool,
poetic beauty. Then the final lines, a yin and yang of opposites: "Where
the darkness copulates with the light, the world is born again in the dawn
of every morning ... as one body pours light into the darkness of another,
pours hard full lit meanings into the dark wet hollows of dreams."

For more than thirty years this Italian-American, pioneer writer has given
uncompromising voice to the individual spirit seeing, yearning, and
deserving, yet unsatisfied. Her poetry, non-fiction, and fiction have
engaged readers with humor, sensuality, and thought. Few, if any, American
writers of the twentieth century combine her sense of wonder in such a
unique, poetic, and dramatic fashion with a realism grounded in complex
daily experience. In Bed With the Exotic Enemy gathers an important part
of Daniela Gioseffi's lifelong work. It deserves the attention of all
readers: Italian-Americans, feminists, social activists, and, most of all,
artful, literary thinkers. It is a first rate collection, and I recommend
it to VIA's audience. After all, you and I form the elusive exotic enemy
of the title.

Copyright © 1997 by Fred Misurella, Professor of American Literature & Creative Writing: East Stroudsburg University, Pennsylvania.

Back to: IN BED WITH THE EXOTIC ENEMY: "The Bleeding Mimosa:" a story from the book

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