|
|
|
|
The Victoria College. Full-time salaried position with benefits available...
DISTRICT "Champions for Community Wellness" has the following positions...
Against Gravity weaves together the lives of six characters struggling to cast the weight of the world from their shoulders. Hence the title, and the epigraph from Rilke, “Life is heavier than the weight of all things.”
The setting is Houston, all “lust and death and decay,” where Roya, a single mother, a refugee from Iran, interacts with other refugees from life.
One is her own daughter Tala, whose father died before she was born. Another is the creepy Madison, dying of AIDS, a former philosophy student obsessed with Heidegger, Roya, and his dead father.
In this character-driven novel, everyone has lost a father and death is never far away. Some fathers died in war, some abandoned their families, one died in a car wreck. Ric, the counselor who helps Roya, makes up for his own abandonment by becoming a good father, only to lose his son to schizophrenia.
D. H. Lawrence’s poem “The Ship of Death” plays a part in this literary novel: “Have you built your ship of death, O have you? –O build your ship of death, for you will need it.” The work that builds that ship, “the fragile ship of courage,” is living, and that is the work Farnoosh Moshiri sets for her characters in Against Gravity.
A playwright in her native Iran, Moshiri fled that country in 1983, living in Afghanistan and India before moving to Houston, where she teaches literature and creative writing on the University of Houston campuses. Her latest works, Against Gravity, The Bathhouse, and At the Wall of the Almighty, have been published here in the United States.
Farnoosh Moshiri is the final speaker of the season in the American Book Review program. Tomorrow from noon to 1:30 she will discuss her work in Alcorn Auditorium on the University of Houston-Victoria campus. From 2:30 to 3:30 a reception for her will be held in the Bronte Room of the Victoria Public Library. The public is invited to both events.
Tonight at 7 p.m. Austin author Mike Cox will present his new book, The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, at the annual meeting of the Friends of Victoria Public Library, held in the Bronte Room. The public is invited to attend.
Reese Vaughn reviews books for the Advocate. Write to her at P.O. Box 118, Seadrift, Texas 77983 or e-mail lrv@infionline.net.