Book reviews: Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque: Texts of Contemporary Excess by Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia. Christine Runnel. Transnational Literature Vol. 4 no. 2, May 2012. http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia, Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque: Texts of Contemporary Excess (Peter Lang, 2011) Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia took her doctoral degree in English Studies at the University of Aveiro, Portugal, in 2005. Her areas of expertise are Postcolonial Literatures and Contemporary Fiction in English. Here she presents a comparative analysis of two interrelated literary fields – postcolonial and feminist theory – through the prism of the grotesque. The author is interested in the deconstruction of postcolonial and gender politics. Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque: Texts of Contemporary Excess is a comprehensive study, drawing in a complex weave of theories and contemporary fictions. Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque divides into two sections: the first third of the text is devoted to cultural and literary criticism and the location of the Grotesque; the remaining section is given over to dialogical readings and practices of the postcolonial and feminist grotesque. Pimentel Biscaia systematically accounts for the canon, a pantheon of names whose usefulness as references might be enhanced with a handy index. She presents an historical overview, discusses dialogism as methodology and links the research to the poetics of the carnivalesque-grotesque. She also introduces various theorists – René Girard, Mary Russo, Julia Kristeva, Marthe Reineke and others – who provide the wall for a series of dialogical readings; these gender-informed perspectives are used to critique the iconic images of female grotesqueness, the abject and versions of a sacrificial economy. The author then focuses upon the contemporary novel as an extension of the hyperbolic carnival tradition. She envisages the carnivalesque-grotesque as a resurgent mode in postmodern literature and engages with a selection of ‘texts of contemporary excess’ by Githa Hariharan, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, Ben Okri and Robert Coover. The grotesque implies a curio – strange, fantastic, ugly or bizarre. The cover illustration of Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque shows a half-human half-plant figure, sculpted in stone as one of the supports to the balustrade of the convent of San Martin Pinario in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, photographed by the author. Pimentel Biscaia suggests that the grotesque axiom came into critical being in the early sixteenth century with the excavation of a hidden cave in Nero’s Domus Aurea (Golden Villa), revealing ‘ornamented grottoes of intertwining plants, flowers topped with figures and animalised humans’ (12). The astonishing discovery caught the imaginations of the artists of the time who were lowered into the cave to gawk. The hybrid forms strained the limits of credibility and imagination, engendering feelings of both fascination and revulsion because of their deviation from classical standards of beauty, restraint and order. Pimentel Biscaia quotes Rushdie: ‘If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance … perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teaming multitude, one must make oneself grotesque.’ 1 Imagine! In Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988), an Indian man experiences metamorphosis into a goat after he treads on English ground. What a metaphor! In a sanatorium this man encounters a great many other hybrid freaks, every one unique in appearance but in the same existential condition as himself. Pimentel Biscaia suggests that their strange stigmata and sense of estrangement from the world is the mark of their foreign 1 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1981) 109. As quoted in Pimentel Biscaia, 9.