BookBrowse Reviews Cecilia by K-Ming Chang

In the first few pages of K-Ming Chang's bizarre yet engrossing novella Cecilia, Seven, the repressed chiropractor's assistant who serves as our narrator, discusses the respective urine streams of the doctor ("insistent," "unflagging," possessing "volcanic power") and the receptionist (near-silent, imagined as "a rain like bestial breathing"). She also reflects upon the "bouquet of dark hair" gathered by the vacuum cleaner and relates that her brother hides money in his crusty old socks to ward off thieves: "[I]n my family, we weaponized our stench."

All this is before she reunites with the titular Cecilia, a childhood friend who sends her into erotic overdrive. Seven recalls memories of her youth spiked with surrealism and grotesquerie, which meshes with the narrative's feral sexual longing in ways that might repulse readers of a sensitive disposition: Cecilia's spit turning into ...