The Blue, Red Lyrae by Mehreen Ahmed: A Review
Basha Krasnoff reviewed on Dec 21, 2020
A Review of The Blue Red Lyrae
by Mehreen Ahmed written by Basha Krasnoff
Editor, Portland Metrozine
it was amazing: 5 Stars
I have been intrigued by Mehreen Ahmed’s “way with language” for some time: as a reader, as a writer, and as an editor. Several of her stories have appeared in the literary publication I edit and in fact one of them has been woven into the fabric of this volume, The Blue Red Lyrae. The two companion stories, “Offing” and “The Cheshire Grins” are a complementary pair.
In both stories, Ahmed uses fluid language like crystal clear spring water that gently bubbles over the sharp places in the story line. She constructs her sentences and images to flow around and through the reader’s senses to pull the imagination onto alternative paths of reality. As Ahmed writes, “my soul never at peace, oscillated between here and there, between a temporary world of the body and elsewhere, a life of the mind or of the spirit. Of the mind, I noted with care. An inner self of being, where dreams took place, more so in hibernation.”
Typically, in mid-sentence, Ahmed asks the reader to suspend disbelief that the character could know or do or act in a particular way and be open and willing to follow to the completion of the story where the author leads us. As she tells us, “Destiny, life’s destination had to be made of course.”
The protagonist in “Offing,” Rhonda, expresses an affinity between herself and Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Like Clarissa, Rhonda wants to show empathy for her husband but reflects on her emotional dilemmas with brooding dissatisfaction. As tension and disharmony increase in her marriage, Rhonda wonders about her husband’s place in her life. She is conflicted over what made her marry him in the first place. And like Mrs. Dalloway she engages in self-torture wondering what she might have missed not marrying the man who longed to marry her so many years ago. Both characters spend a good amount of their waking hours in wistful longing.
Ahmed tells us that her character “has been seized by a hunger, a hunger to see a blue butterfly in the first Sun, and a dazzling, plumed peacock of extraordinary colours.” The author proceeds to unfold for her characters and her readers dazzling images of extraordinary colors. Yearning gives her protagonists a profound capacity for emotion, which many of her other characters lack. Even so, her protagonist is always concerned with appearances and keeps herself tightly composed, seldom sharing her feelings with anyone. Constant streams of internal dialogue and external convivial chatter and activity keeps her soul locked safely away, which make her seem shallow even to those who know her well.
In “The Cheshire Grins,” the protagonist lives alone on a hill with her Cheshire cat, King George who is, much like Alice in Wonderland’s cat, a very significant character in Joe’s life. In this narrative, Joe is a neglected and abused child, who is abandoned and consigned to live in an orphanage by her evil stepmother. Joe grimly makes her way through unspeakable horrors to one day recede to a cabin high up in the hills with her cat. Except one stormy night, George, who hates the rain, disappears into thrashing winds and a biting downpour.
For this character, Joe, time begins to “slip surreptitiously.” Sometimes, she feels as though “the past had blanked out. That time didn’t exist” at all.” Joe felt as if nothingness defined her existence. The author tells us that “time is the ultimate reality, an eternity.” And that ‘our finite existence within this infinite reality is a paradox. This existence only gives us the illusion of an eternity of false reality. Hunger, pain, and desires are all finite and false realities that exist in the head.”
Slowly as she searches unsuccessfully for her Cheshire Cat, Joe began to see a different self. “It was her, the little girl in the orphanage but her small body was gone. It had vanished. It had grown into a new person in a new body. This newness, it was all her.” The author explains how fate opens new paths for people, new openings and new endings and that it is the “I”, the individual, that accounts for the suffering of every man and every woman throughout the ages.
While constantly overlaying the past and the present, Ahmed strives to reconcile a life lived in a mind filled with potent memories - with life-affirming acts. Throughout her stories, and through her references, the author tells us, “In wakefulness, she slept. In sleep, she woke up. There was a dream. That she had fallen into an abyss; she tried to breathe. There was no breath left in her lungs, but she resuscitated. Her dreaming paved a way to a parallel world in another reality of wakefulness.”
Ahmed is fascinated by the paradox of living in a physical world while believing that it is embedded in another realm that exists beyond the senses. She knows that the senses fall short of detecting all of reality but somehow we must continue to live in the “real” world. If you enjoy mind challenging scenarios filled with literary, historic, and philosophical references, every one of Mehreen Ahmed’s works will prove a challenge, and a delight.
A Review of The Blue Red Lyrae
by Mehreen Ahmed written by Basha Krasnoff
Editor, Portland Metrozine
it was amazing: 5 Stars
I have been intrigued by Mehreen Ahmed’s “way with language” for some time: as a reader, as a writer, and as an editor. Several of her stories have appeared in the literary publication I edit and in fact one of them has been woven into the fabric of this volume, The Blue Red Lyrae. The two companion stories, “Offing” and “The Cheshire Grins” are a complementary pair.
In both stories, Ahmed uses fluid language like crystal clear spring water that gently bubbles over the sharp places in the story line. She constructs her sentences and images to flow around and through the reader’s senses to pull the imagination onto alternative paths of reality. As Ahmed writes, “my soul never at peace, oscillated between here and there, between a temporary world of the body and elsewhere, a life of the mind or of the spirit. Of the mind, I noted with care. An inner self of being, where dreams took place, more so in hibernation.”
Typically, in mid-sentence, Ahmed asks the reader to suspend disbelief that the character could know or do or act in a particular way and be open and willing to follow to the completion of the story where the author leads us. As she tells us, “Destiny, life’s destination had to be made of course.”
The protagonist in “Offing,” Rhonda, expresses an affinity between herself and Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Like Clarissa, Rhonda wants to show empathy for her husband but reflects on her emotional dilemmas with brooding dissatisfaction. As tension and disharmony increase in her marriage, Rhonda wonders about her husband’s place in her life. She is conflicted over what made her marry him in the first place. And like Mrs. Dalloway she engages in self-torture wondering what she might have missed not marrying the man who longed to marry her so many years ago. Both characters spend a good amount of their waking hours in wistful longing.
Ahmed tells us that her character “has been seized by a hunger, a hunger to see a blue butterfly in the first Sun, and a dazzling, plumed peacock of extraordinary colours.” The author proceeds to unfold for her characters and her readers dazzling images of extraordinary colors. Yearning gives her protagonists a profound capacity for emotion, which many of her other characters lack. Even so, her protagonist is always concerned with appearances and keeps herself tightly composed, seldom sharing her feelings with anyone. Constant streams of internal dialogue and external convivial chatter and activity keeps her soul locked safely away, which make her seem shallow even to those who know her well.
In “The Cheshire Grins,” the protagonist lives alone on a hill with her Cheshire cat, King George who is, much like Alice in Wonderland’s cat, a very significant character in Joe’s life. In this narrative, Joe is a neglected and abused child, who is abandoned and consigned to live in an orphanage by her evil stepmother. Joe grimly makes her way through unspeakable horrors to one day recede to a cabin high up in the hills with her cat. Except one stormy night, George, who hates the rain, disappears into thrashing winds and a biting downpour.
For this character, Joe, time begins to “slip surreptitiously.” Sometimes, she feels as though “the past had blanked out. That time didn’t exist” at all.” Joe felt as if nothingness defined her existence. The author tells us that “time is the ultimate reality, an eternity.” And that ‘our finite existence within this infinite reality is a paradox. This existence only gives us the illusion of an eternity of false reality. Hunger, pain, and desires are all finite and false realities that exist in the head.”
Slowly as she searches unsuccessfully for her Cheshire Cat, Joe began to see a different self. “It was her, the little girl in the orphanage but her small body was gone. It had vanished. It had grown into a new person in a new body. This newness, it was all her.” The author explains how fate opens new paths for people, new openings and new endings and that it is the “I”, the individual, that accounts for the suffering of every man and every woman throughout the ages.
While constantly overlaying the past and the present, Ahmed strives to reconcile a life lived in a mind filled with potent memories - with life-affirming acts. Throughout her stories, and through her references, the author tells us, “In wakefulness, she slept. In sleep, she woke up. There was a dream. That she had fallen into an abyss; she tried to breathe. There was no breath left in her lungs, but she resuscitated. Her dreaming paved a way to a parallel world in another reality of wakefulness.”
Ahmed is fascinated by the paradox of living in a physical world while believing that it is embedded in another realm that exists beyond the senses. She knows that the senses fall short of detecting all of reality but somehow we must continue to live in the “real” world. If you enjoy mind challenging scenarios filled with literary, historic, and philosophical references, every one of Mehreen Ahmed’s works will prove a challenge, and a delight.
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