Beautiful Soon Enough: Stories

In 23 brief, dreamy stories set in locales from Paris to Cuba, poet, actress and photographer Berdeshevsky remains transfixed by beauty and desire. “Window,” the first piece, sets the tone: a woman stands at the window wearing a garter belt and motions to her lover standing outside in the snow. Elsewhere, seductions occur in places like church, where a narrator waits to meet her neighbor; on the streets of San Francisco; within a community of Russian émigrés in Paris; or by the waiter in a Parisian cafe bathroom—scenes all depicted with a certain aloof obliqueness. Evocations rather than development are Berdeshevsky's forte, as in “Cage,” where a caged white female monkey in a Manhattan pet store becomes a metaphor for the protagonist, who is sexually assaulted in the store. In many of the pieces, accompanied by photographs of statues and nudes by the author, the protagonists wait “for a beautiful thing to happen.” These moody moments can be evanescent, but as stories they're not quite satisfying. (Nov.)