Word: budnitz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Although Judy Budnitz '95 was a VES and English concentrator, her most recent work and first novel, If I Told You Once, reads more like a disjointed Folklore and Mythology course text. Before embarking on the novel, she commented, "I have to outline it before I start, which kind of takes the fun out of it." This is close to what actually happened, for while her collection of short stories, Flying Leap, received critical acclaim, If I Told You Once lacks the candor, unexpected plots and zany characterizations of her first work. Budnitz's new book emerges as a poorly...
...Budnitz employs four women as narrators, all from different generations of the same family, who together grapple with the inconclusive questions of human existence. Ilana's narration greets, and scares, the reader first. Ilana is a woman of the old country, probably Russia, who somehow falls in love with a stranger and finds herself in an unnamed American city. Her journey comprises stories of rape and incest, murder and solicitation, placed in a mythical context of forests and magic. A "man in the forest laughing with little pointed teeth" violates her, yet gives her a Faberge egg. This egg becomes...
...nothing but bloody meat," then describes him "trying to put the animal back together, licking his fingers and crooning, cramming the limbs back into their sockets." This display of the grotesque is one of many that causes the reader to wince and writhe; while indicative of her poetic prowess, Budnitz's portrayal of old country rituals offers little to Ilana's narrative and destroys the integrity of her tale...
...initials next to drawings in the Crimson or Lampoon and think they know me. When such people meet me for the first time, they are often surprised that I do not have bulging eyes, tangled hair, extra fingers or huge feet. They expect me to be a living Budnitz cartoon, with a heavy black outline all around and my initials in my armpit...
Graphics Who else? Judy R. Budnitz...