Desire

by Lindsay Ahl

Overview

“A dense, dreamlike novel. You wake with a sense that your own world has changed because of this foray through the wilds of Africa, New Mexico, and family life.”—Susann Cokal, author of Mirabilis

In 1975 the price of ivory was on the rise, Bob Dylan released a seminal album, and nine-year old Elena Monroe witnessed a brutal murder in the Kenyan river valley. Sixteen years later, Elena must journey from Albuquerque to Africa before her increasingly unreliable and volatile memories unravel her ties to her mother and cause her to lose the man she loves.

Lindsay Ahl lived in New York, Europe, and Africa before returning to New Mexico. Desire is her debut novel—a portion of which first appeared in BOMB magazine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566891547
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	05/01/2004
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lindsay Ahl has lived in New York, Connecticut, Boston, Hong Kong, Sweden, France, and the Republic of Mali. She has worked as a freelance writer, editor, photographer, film producer, and actress. Her fiction has appeared in Global City Review and Murmur and a portion of Desire, Lindsay Ahl's debut novel, appeared in BOMB Magazine. She lives in New Mexico.

Editorial Reviews

In direct, visceral prose, debut novelist Ahl investigates the power of memory and the mystery of lovers and parents. Using Kenya, New York City, New Mexico and her narrator's complex inner landscapes as backdrops, Ahl combines rich sensory and geographical descriptions with a tale of psychological and emotional displacement. Petroglyph researcher Elena Monroe has difficulty concentrating when she's with her lover, Michael. During sex, she is deluged with memories of Africa and the elephant slaughters she witnessed as a child, and notes that since falling in love with Michael she's held back, "trying to not feel, trying to forget that I want him, want life, want to live." When her mother, an ambitious but emotionally distant photojournalist also named Elena, visits unexpectedly, Elena the younger is further plunged into a deep and sometimes preciously documented state of confusion. She'd told Michael her mother died, and she seems invested in the fiction herself ("I've always told everyone: my mother died in Africa in 1975" but "I was only telling it the way it was for me, not for the world"). At the same time, she's received a letter from her mother's ex-boyfriend Forester telling her that the land where her memories lie will soon be sold to the Kenyan government. Estranged from Michael and increasingly vulnerable to the onslaught of the past, Elena returns to Forester's home in hopes of clarifying her history. Some of Ahl's resolutions and plotting may feel a bit pat, her prose at times a little too self-consciously swooning, but she is clearly intimate with all the terrain here from the dusty clog of Africa to the tangle of love and memory. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In 1975, nine-year-old Elena Monroe watched as her mother and her mother's estranged husband were shot by poachers on a Kenyan wildlife reserve. Now an adult living in Albuquerque, NM, she is still traumatized and teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown, which creates a barrier between her and her lover, Michael. Her mother survived the brutal attack-Elena even sees her from time to time-but Elena has always perceived her mother's death as fact. Hoping to face her demons at last, she returns to Africa to retrieve her mother's body symbolically (the mother left a false gravestone to deceive the poachers). While managing to be at once hard-edged and ethereal, with a hazy, dreamlike tone, this first novel is sometimes overly self-conscious in its attempts to blur fact and imagination. Still, enough succeeds here to make this a worthwhile choice for larger public libraries.-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Quirky but appealing debut about a young woman who returns to her childhood home in Africa to set some family ghosts to rest. Anthropologist Elena Monroe is having some trouble finding herself. She grew up in Africa, where her stepfather researched polio and smallpox vaccines while her mother photographed elephants for conservation groups. Now she lives in New Mexico and tells everyone her mother died in 1975. But her boyfriend Michael, who lost his parents as a teenager and thinks they have that in common, one day meets Elena's mother leaning on her car in Albuquerque. Why did Elena lie to him? Good question, especially after Elena packs up and leaves for Kenya the next day to visit her mother's grave. In 1975, when Elena was only nine, East Africa was in the throes of an ivory craze, as skyrocketing prices combined with conservation laws to fuel a thriving black market in elephant tusks. Elena's mother set out to document the poaching cartels that rampaged through the bush in search of big profits from illegal safaris, and she soon found herself in the middle of a mob war of sorts, in which the legal boundaries separating the mobsters from the militias from the cabinet ministers were all but erased. We know that the young Elena saw someone killed during an elephant shoot; we also know that someone is buried beneath her mother's tombstone. It will take some doing to disentangle the rest of the facts from this intentionally snarled narrative, but that doesn't dampen the fire here. Maybe after Elena sorts it all out she can come home and get on with her life-if she's lucky. Ahl writes with an intensity that never quite goes over the line into melodrama, although it comes close at times,and her evocation of Kenya is impressionistic and moving without being manipulative or touristy.

Kirkus Reviews