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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Friday, June 22, 2012

Fresh and surprising voice in current New Yorker

More props to The New Yorker for yet another good and unexpected story, from a writer anticipating publication of her first novel, Shani Bioranjui (?) - (just looked it up, I was close: it's Boianjiu) possibly an Israeli writer, as the story is set at an Israeli military checkpoint on the West Bank?, though it appears to be written in English (no translator credited: story called something like Measures for Crowd Management - (just looked it up, it's Means of Suppressing Demonstrations) - focuses on a 20-year old Israeli woman Army officer, doing her time in a remote outpost where not much ever happens, each night she engages in pretty violent and masochistic sex with the soldiers in her command - she claims her body is numb and she feels nothing and needs this inflicted pain to become aroused apparently. To everyone's surprise, one day 3 Palestinians show up at the checkpoint and rather than turn away the resist, but in an extremely polite way: they want the Israeli soldiers to put down their minute demonstration in hopes of attracting media attention. As a result, over a series of days, soldiers work through the manual - the title of the story - toward increasingly more aggressive measures of crowd control: sounds, tear gas, rubber bullets, live ammunition - it's kind of comical in a way - the officer carefully reading the instruction manual while the protesters wait patiently. Won't give away the end here, but the last sentence is quite a kicker. Story gives us a very sharp and believable glimpse of life in the occupied territories, it's political without being polemical, and Boianjiu tells the story through characters and through detailed observation: we feel a good deal of sorrow and empathy for the central character, confined or assigned to a detail that she variously considers futile and immoral, her life on hold and perhaps derailed forever by the events over these four days.

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