Fantasy – Kim-Anh Schreiber
Fantasy by Kim-Anh Schreiber / ISBN 9781940090115 / 134-page paperback from the small press Sidebrow Books
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Part exegesis on Nobuhiko Obayashi’s film HOUSE and part meditation on the ineffable specters that inhabit homes and ancestral histories, FANTASY is a daughter’s story of her Vietnamese mother and their twin journeys towards belonging with one another and in the world. Where exilic, inherited memory encounters its limits, FANTASY reaches towards cult cinematic atmospheres, irreverent flowers, pop culture, and photographs with no images, making for a reading experience like no other.
“The semi-autobiographical fantastic FANTASY of Kim-Anh Schreiber is rooted 1/4 in Vietnamese/Germanic realism and ancestral context, 1/2 in Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 HOUSE, 1/4 in matriarchal estrangement, and 0% bikini-clad pool party. Schreiber uses the fabric of cinema and horror to quasi-measure the length and width of her pre-adolescent and adolescent consciousness. It’s a GORGEOUS dress that the ghost in her psyche demands that it wears before falling into ash. Here, in these immolatable, scriptive dialogues with all of her consanguineous, anecdotal, exegetical selves (‘who become shoes without feet that walk back and forth’ in a house that eats like hungry ghosts), her psyche is cut, recut, uncut, though not forgotten, un-linearly and nonchalantly and numerously, by her relationship to film and her relationship with her Vietnamese mother, surrogated mother in grandmother(s) and auntie(s). Through the art of disfigurement/defacement, her intimate rapport to pain and her sacral joint, and her friendship with abandonment, she is able to elevate her daughterly North Star duties to subliminal heights. As Kim-Anh Schreiber seeks closure with the uncloseable, we see an acutely talented scholar and inventive memoirist on her way to becoming more than Sandra Bullock’s neighbor.”—Vi Khi Nao
“‘Every seam I encountered in the fabric of my reality was like a disfigurement that someone had smoothed over and left silent,’ writes Kim-Anh Schreiber in this remarkable investigation of female anger and resilience, intergenerational trauma, and what might be called the development of literacy in the subject of pain. Schreiber, the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee and a German immigrant, combines recognizable modes—memoir, criticism, dramatic play script—into something as uncategorizable as the film she deploys throughout the book as muse and foil: Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 post-Hiroshima ‘horror-comedy’ HOUSE, in which generations of women are trapped together in a haunted house. Beginning with extended considerations of the instability of memory (‘an evocative curator’), of the ‘impossible problem of drawing a picture,’ and of the pull to use projection and doubling as bridges across gaps in experience and understanding, FANTASY finally resolves into a flickering, unstable but vivid portrait of a mother and daughter both separated and bonded by history, violence, human fallibility, and love.”—Anna Moschovakis
