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Desire of a Liar With a Camera
Roses of Crimson Fire by Gabriela Anaya Valdepena & Richard Denner. ISBN: 978-0-9774000-2-7
by John A. Rippo
This is a book about desire; the unrequited kind. reading it, one may be reminded of the kinds of french romantic poetry of the 17th century that so heavily drenched its prose forms with the agonies of desire cooped up. Roses of Crimson Fire might be seen as an update of the art form and what that ancient French style might have evolved into in the California of the 21st century.
Roses is structured as an email exchange between five characters; four men and and a woman, with a few others popping up occasionally as a kind of Greek chorus. The emails are usually conversations concerning what’s been done earlier by the authors or others in the correspondence circle. The reader is dropped into a continuum of correspondence with little forewarning or preparation of who these people are, but its soon clear that the boys are flitting round the girl like the planets round the sun and she beams on them alternately in turn, though never quite hot enough for them. And there’s the charm of the story; each gets to experience the desire in the way best suited to the sufferer’s temperament. One is tormented, one attempts masterful self control (emphasis on the “attempts”) one idiot tries to deny it and only one—guess who she is?—is smart enough to enjoy it for what it is; desire for it’s own sake as a tonic to the ego, mind and antidote to the gray age known as the 21st century. Obviously, the desire remains unconsummated since the desire is the point of a kind of a transcendence—perhaps personal, likely cultural. But it’s Gabriela the Radiant Sun who needs the Planets even more than they need her. For her, the desire is not merely a food for the soul, it’s joie de vivre—proof that she’s alive, potent and...desirable.
The book is dynamically illustrated with photographs of the author, which underscore and add to the characterizations found in Roses. In all, this is an intriguing book and perhaps a workout for the reader’s sense of adventure and esthetics, too.
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