The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Extremities by Kathe Koja
Irving Malin

Kathe Koja. Extremities. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998. 202 pp. $22.00.

Although I praised Koja’s last novel, Kink, in a previous issue for its perverse, spellbinding explorations of a love triangle, I must admit that I was not completely prepared for the manic beauty of these stories. They remind me of a marriage of Poe and Burroughs, a relentless pursuit of extremities of behavior—behavior which is captured in the surging currents of Koja’s sentences.
In “Arrangement for Invisible Voices”—notice the mixture of ear and eye—the protagonist cannot escape from pig sounds as they engulf his consciousness. The sounds destroy whatever reason he once possessed. Now he can no longer be a husband—or even a person. I quote a passage which represents the wonderful style: “It was coming from the pigs. Spitted bodies, bellies dull and glowing from the fire beneath, feet tied like victims, their eyes were alive, alive, and though their small hairy mouths moved not at all the song continued to grow, to burn as they burned. Yet it was not, and he knew this, not their own prosaic torment that they mourned, oh no something large, large, some huge death celebrated in accusatory song.” Note the flood of words, the oddity of adjectives, the conjunction of pain and celebration. Surely these sentences are carefully constructed to examine the supposed division of man and beast.
In “The Neglected Garden”—another love story, another Gothic arrangement—the protagonist sees his beloved as a shadowy garden. (Koja continually undermines accepted myth; she offers a black paradise.) I can’t resist quoting Koja’s amazing dislocations, displacements, destructions of structure. The woman’s eyes are “the eyes of someone surprised by great pain.” She is transformed into flowers: “Then on each spot where the solution had struck the foliage began not to wither but to blacken, not the color of death but an eerily sumptuous shade, and in one instant every flower in her mouth turned black, a fierce and luminous black and her eyes were black too, her lips, her hands black . . . that black black tongue come crawling across the grass, and she behind it with a smile.”
Koja gives me the “power of blackness.” But she does more: she violates me, seducing me into some world that holds my obsessive fears of love and death. She offers “the secret that leads us finally to where at last and always we were always meant to be.” [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Extremities by Kathe Koja Irving Malin Kathe Koja. Extremities. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998. 202 pp. $22.00. Although I praised Koja’s last novel, Kink, in a previous issue for its perverse, spellbinding explorations of a love triangle, I must admit that I was not completely prepared for the manic beauty of these stories. They remind me of a marriage of Poe and Burroughs, a relentless pursuit of extremities of behavior—behavior which is captured in the surging currents of Koja’s sentences. In “Arrangement for Invisible Voices”—notice the mixture of ear and eye—the protagonist cannot escape from pig sounds as they engulf his consciousness. The sounds destroy whatever reason he once possessed. Now he can no longer be a husband—or even a person. I quote a passage which represents the wonderful style: “It was coming from the pigs. Spitted bodies, bellies dull and glowing from the fire beneath, feet tied like victims, their eyes were alive, alive, and though their small hairy mouths moved not at all the song continued to grow, to burn as they burned. Yet it was not, and he knew this, not their own prosaic torment that they mourned, oh no something large, large, some huge death celebrated in accusatory song.” Note the flood of words, the oddity of adjectives, the conjunction of pain and celebration. Surely these sentences are carefully constructed to examine the supposed division of man and beast. In “The Neglected Garden”—another love story, another Gothic arrangement—the protagonist sees his beloved as a shadowy garden. (Koja continually undermines accepted myth; she offers a black paradise.) I can’t resist quoting Koja’s amazing dislocations, displacements, destructions of structure. The woman’s eyes are “the eyes of someone surprised by great pain.” She is transformed into flowers: “Then on each spot where the solution had struck the foliage began not to wither but to blacken, not the color of death but an eerily sumptuous shade, and in one instant every flower in her mouth turned black, a fierce and luminous black and her eyes were black too, her lips, her hands black . . . that black black tongue come crawling across the grass, and she behind it with a smile.” Koja gives me the “power of blackness.” But she does more: she violates me, seducing me into some world that holds my obsessive fears of love and death. She offers “the secret that leads us finally to where at last and always we were always meant to be.” [Irving Malin]

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