The Oddities of Love

In these stories, many of which are prize-winning and already published, Rebecca Camu is seeking to navigate the oddities of love. The authoress Katherine Mansfield springs to mind in that Rebecca is both highly visual in her narrative and also demonstrates powerful insight.

The stories are all very different from each other. An example is 'Mum's Parcel', a published story which focuses on the despair of a cross-dresser who, in all his lodgings (and he goes from one to the other in his search to find one in which to safely cross-dress), comes across one particular landlady. She accepts him for what he is, and there ensues a touching love affair.

'The Nature of the Stone' explores the painful journey of a young girl trying to separate herself from the overwhelming devotion of her hard-working parents, while in 'The Gloved Hands' the family chauffeur unexpectedly finds his job on the line as a repercussion of the boss's daughter's infatuation with him.

At a wedding anniversary celebration dinner, a secret love affair of one of the protagonists with the other is exposed in 'War Couples'.

In 'Li's Story', another published prize winner, a starving refugee from the Khmer Rouge is taken into the household of a kindly benefactor and finds it is love as well as food which is necessary for survival.

Rebecca's are stories that stay with you, possibly because they make the unusual usual and announce very clearly the often different outcomes found in loving relationships.