Even the unwitting taking of a single pebble will cause an endless amount of trouble. Unknowingly, the pebble is a "touchstone," a portal to vivid dreams, the ancient world, the collective subconscious.
(I can almost hear the reader saying, "Don't pluck the apple! Don't take the stone!")
The beauty of Strange Tango is that you're never sure if the action is in the artist's head or if it is her reality...given the language of the oeuvre, it's as seamless as a South Sea pearl. The story is deceptively simple: but when when you figure in the symbolism of anthromorphological objects—whether the classic "kiss" found in magical realism or the psychoanalytical meanings of figures and actions strung together in her technicolor dreams, or even the carefully-chosen gifts the artist bestows upon her beloved—you have an entirely different level of subtextual interpretation.
I wrote the first version of Strange Tango when I was still in my 20's. I put it away for more than a decade and went on and did other things with my life...the life experience and maturity that would inform my work toughened what was then an extremely sensitive and fragile psyche. Also, at the time I began writing Strange Tango in the 1980’s, interactive multimedia hadn't yet made its popularized appearance in our global order. My mental processes and imagination have always been in a matrix pattern, which allows me to pick and choose from an eclectic assortment of influences without consideration for a linear order—this is one reason why I plumbed so many disparate areas and endeavors like my favorite Renaissance figure, Leonardo da Vinci...what appeared to be job-hopping was simply collecting a portfolio of experiences that was meaningful to me...and today, ironically, it's relatively rare that anyone stays in one job/career for life. It took the pre-eminence of interactive multimedia to make my thought processes ubiquitous so, yes, I had to wait until the world changed and my timing was right before I revisited Strange Tango, and revealed its existence and my early aptitude for being a writer. After re-working and trimming about 5% of the original, my first literary effort has amazingly stood the test of time and relevance.
When I began writing the manuscript, before the advent of multimedia, I realized that matrices and layering could figure into the construction of my 103-page novella, almost like a chess game or like solving a metaphysical mystery.
(I sat in the turret penthouse of my 3-story Victorian, within walking distance to the ocean, and for hours on end roamed the earth and interconnected my education and knowledge to come to a synthesis of my experience of the world...while repeatedly playing in the background Robert Palmer's "She Makes My Day"...I feel so lucky loving her, tell me what else is magic for..)
Flash forward 19 years...you now have the time-and-space-leaping conundrum of "Lost" and video games that allow you to start at a point of origin and to follow an action or narrative to a non-predetermined end.
I understand some readers feel a sense of disquietude at the end of the reading, so to immerse you in the cosmology of Strange Tango, here are seven such levels of interpretation.
Level 1: The artist and the muse are from different cultures, backgrounds (she's an artist, possibly multiracial Asian/Mediterranean; he's a businessman), and generations, though not quite a May-December match. They are simultaneously soul mates and polar opposites (e.g., she never wears watches and he owns a collection of watches). Karmic attraction and a love of beauty draw them together, but pragmatism pulls them apart. (Question: can we all really get along?)
Level 2: Follow the transfiguration and migration of ordinary objects. The unopened envelope is the portal to the unknown...like Pandora's box. The kiss...well, it's a chaste kiss, but it's enough to rupture one's certitude and moral paradigm...like the first step into oblivion. The pebble...yes, it's a play on words: the stone is no ordinary stone but a stone, touchstone, lodestone that brings vivid, frightening dreams, that recur throughout the book.
Level 3: Magical realism and metaphysical mystery. The portrait of the narrative voice probably owes more to Latin American writers than any other influence. Of course, the voice is very contemporary and female, but writers such as Garcia Marquez and Borges freely adopted dreams, the occult, fate, seers, mystics, and horoscopes into their works. It's like this...you're happily living your life in the real world, and then fate intrudes because of a single, solitary action or object, and you're cast into another dimension. Now what?
Level 4: Freud, Jung, psychology and the interpretation of dreams, astrology. Yes, colors set the mood and tone, especially white, blues, and reds...the elements as well, especially the symbolism and depictions of water, air (she's always jetting off somewhere...), fire, and earth. The disembodied dreams can also be interpreted in classic fashion. Finally, why is it that, today, many major newspapers and web portals have an astrology section? Here's why: in the modern era, psychology and astrology are linked through their dependence on archetypes...Jung has called astrology “a summation of all the psychological knowledge of Antiquity.”
Level 5: Feminist interpretation. An articulate exposition of marriage, childbearing, and a litany of girls' names which, if you look closely, have their own stories to tell as they are the heroines of numerous literary classics from around the world, including Emma (Jane Austen), Beatrice (Dante), Thais (Massenet opera), Scheherazade (Persian), Gigi (French)... (As a child, I rarely watched television, I just went to the library a lot and got a head start on reading world literature...Sherlock Holmes was an early hero...)
Level 6: Literary: epistolary novella, prose-poem. Strange Tango is non-linear, compact, dense, and encoded. Therefore, words, not plot, carry the action. The work is extremely descriptive, whether in describing an object or action in reality, or taking the reader insider the intimate recesses of a one's thoughts. Is the artist a woman or, in fact, a spirit?
Level 7: Congratulations! You have advanced through 6 levels to:
Desperately Seeking "J". The artist, never named, appears embarked upon a quest. Does she yearn to discover the secret to Julio Iglesias (love), Japan (art), or Jesus (spirituality)?
One of my first readers, Nicole Saffold Maskiell, not only reached level 7, but also line edited the manuscript and wrote a reader’s review, similar to what you’d find up on Amazon.com. Nicole writes, “I can't express how moved I was by the end of this piece. It brought me to tears. I found myself reading sections over and over…” Nicole's comments are especially meaningful as she is a dear friend who is an up-and-coming novelist and a Ph.D. candidate in History at Cornell University. She is also a Harvard University cum laude graduate in History and Literature who founded the Cambridge Writers Group.
Alan Hoffman’s analysis was also very perceptive. Alan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Cornell who was a student activist in college before earning degrees at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He writes,
"Even if your relationship to your muse is celibate, the very notion of a muse carries with it some form of sexual tension, and it neither detracts from your work nor your authenticity to share that tension with potential readers. In fact, it is in how you deal with your muse, how you draw your boundaries, that others might find some degree of identification. So something that emphasizes the muse's power over you...and your ability to deal with that power...is what is so intriguing about Strange Tango.
I'm glad to see you've returned to Strange Tango; at some point, it will need to be published. Much as unsolicited advice is often wide of the mark and hence of dubious value, I hope you will at least permit me the observation that a possible difficulty in publishing the work in earlier decades was the use of the first person, now widely embraced in blogging, but then a difficult innovation for many to swallow.
I offer this observation as someone who's seen you at times misunderstood precisely because you were so far advanced beyond the perceptions and understandings of those who may therefore have been threatened by your vision and capabilities. In Strange Tango, you get to explore the kind of (revisitation) that represents what I would call the dynamic resolution of Naipul's "post-colonial" character, someone who does not merely sit outside of cultural norms but who has fully transcended them and become a truly global human being. What then makes Strange Tango so much of a tango is the interaction of this global human being with the elements of culture, myth, art, and achievement that tradionally have defined what people are."
My blurb:
"Strange Tango is a travelogue through the physical and spiritual world, fresh and contemporary in a way that appeals to the personal journey and no boundaries mentality of the Millennial / MySpace generation. Unfolding through a series of evocative and interrelated vignettes, and set in no specific time or place, the book’s style and form seem almost a throwback to the timeless world literature of layered psychology, metaphysics, and wordplay of which Woolf, Calvino, and Borges are among the best-known practitioners."
Here's the re-write:
STRANGE TANGO
An envelope...a kiss...a single pebble touched at an ancient ruin...three symbolic objects seamlessly interwoven in a literary debut that is part epistolary novella, part spiritual travelogue.
Strange Tango reads as an internal, dramatic soliloquy building toward catharsis. Though thoroughly accessible, its vignettes mine an internal landscape, organically developing in a way that is non-linear, compact, dense, and encoded—dream-like and poetic—vivid, touching, and illuminating.
On a literary level, the plot is multi-layered: "Strange Tango may be subtitled, "Desperately Seeking 'J'". The artist, never named, appears embarked upon a quest. Does she yearn to discover the secret to Julio Iglesias (love), Japan (art), or Jesus (spirituality)?"
On a commercial level, the plot is a simple one: "Searching for and finding your karmic soul mate...but, it's complicated."
