AIMEE BENDER AND THE REALISM OF THE FANTASTIC
a review and overview of the work of Aimee Bender
By Vanessa Hernandez
In Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Joseph, a teenage boy, becomes a chair and it is not a bit of fantasy, or sci-fi, or an allegory about puberty, but a horrible, painstaking reality.
I don’t even know how to describe it, what I saw. There was no blood at all, and how good it would’ve been, to see blood—to see it pouring out of his leg, and the surgery he would’ve needed, the painkillers, the beige rug soaking through… Instead there was only that shimmer of a human leg around the leg of a chair, a soft fading halo of humanness.
In both style and structure, Bender achieves a perfect balance between the real and surreal that gives Joseph’s transformation an eerie resemblance to a child slowly and painfully dying. Like any one who suffers from a terminal disease, he becomes less animate, less able to communicate, less able to understand his debilitating situation and less a part of the living world. Finally, he becomes just a symbol, although a very realistic one at that.