"Nicola Griffith - Yaguara" - читать интересную книгу автора (Griffith Nicola)

So what I tend to do is pluck an unfortunate character
from her familiar surrounds, drop her somewhere
strangeтАФto herself, and sometimes to the readerтАФand
watch with interest while she struggles to deal with an
alien milieu. The type and degree of aliennessтАФtime,
space, cultureтАФdonтАЩt matter as long as the details are
made utterly real to the character and, through her,
the reader. We should know how the ground feels
underfoot; the level of ambient noise; the taste of the
wind on the back of the tongue.
 тАЬThird, I had just read: an article in Science News
about how little epigraphers really know about Mayan
glyphs; Carl SaganтАЩs BrocaтАЩs Brain, on the evolution of
the mammalian brain; and a book by some fool of a
zoologist who went to Belize to study jaguars but ended
up killing five of the six animals under observation.
тАЬFourth, thereтАЩs a long tradition in lesbian erotica
(particularly that written for straight audiences) that the
characters and/or settings are hot, steamy, exotic,
sultry, privileged, lush, languorous, etc., etc., etc.
тАЬThe jungle, I thought, is hot, steamy, exotic, sultry,
lush, languorous, and so on. It is also a frighteningly
alien place for most of us, full of snakes and spiders
and strange diseases. There are no phones or fax
machines, no doctors, no brightly lit bars, just this vast,
moist, breathing thing stretching for miles. No one, no
matter how tightly armored, can venture into the jungle
and return unchanged.тАЭ




Jane Holford valued her privacy. That is why she became a
photographer: people would look at her pictures and not at her. As
an adolescent she had watched a film critic on television. The gaze of
the camera is not like grammar, he had said. After a while there is no
difference between subject and object. He pointed at a still of Marilyn
Monroe, dead for years. We ate her alive. Jane had decided then and
there that she would be neither subject nor object but invulnerable
observer. She would keep herself armored, inviolate, safe.
 And so Jane did not travel directly from England to Belize.
She packed her cameras and flew to the Yucatan, and from there
took a boat to Ambergris Cay. She would acclimatize to the heat
slowly, and in private.
On Ambergris, KatherineтАФex-governors niece for whom
Jane had once done the favor of losing a roll of incriminating
filmтАФwas drunk by ten oтАЩclock in the morning and forgot, most of
the time, that she had a guest, and the house servants probably
could not have cared less. But Jane still maintained a perfect
control. Even when the sun was licking at her shoulders and the