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hanelisil's review
4.5
There were parts with the art museum that were the most magical realism-y that I got a little lost in. But otherwise this was so weird and wonderful.
milohno's review
challenging
slow-paced
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
scout_05's review
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
4.0
There were huge swaths of this book that felt like they went completel over my head. But there were also parts that reached out and shook me because they felt so achingly familiar. I need to come back to this in a few months and try it again and see how I feel.
atticmoth's review
3.0
A review on the front of this book reads, “Revenge of the Scapegoat made me bounce-laugh so hard my cheeks and belly kept jiggling while reading the pains.” I’m not quite sure I read the same book as you, Steven Dunn! Not that it wasn’t funny, but it was much more of an exhale-through-your-nose-slightly-louder-than-usual book than whatever that guy was going through. The closest comparison I can make is The Crying of Lot 49, though I find that book a lot funnier. Caren Beilin plots her book the same way Pynchon opens his: something mundane leading to a chain of increasingly surreal events, though it’s much less intricately crafted than the conspiracy theories that Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas endures.
In Revenge of the Scapegoat, a creative writing professor undergoes a mental breakdown after receiving a packet of letters her father wrote her when she was a teenager. What follows is a plausible adventure tinged with the surreal: a foray with an artist who is raising cows bred by the Nazis to stomp on peoples’ hearts. There’s obviously a lot of metaphor at play, with irreverent references to concentration camps (Beilin’s likely autobiographical protagonist is the descendant of Holocaust survivors) but ultimately without a central idea to link the story together.
I expect Beilin’s style to be polarizing, but I found it refreshing when I was in the right state of mind. She will drop you in the middle of a paragraph with no context about who is talking, leaving the reader to form their own assumptions about a character or scene, and then clarify much, much later. I found this technique revelatory. Other things I didn’t like so much: her arthritic feet’s extended dialogue, uninteresting philosophical tangents, and frankly bizarre word choice (“Twomblish”). Beilin is a professor of creative writing, like her protagonist (you know how much I loooove it when authors have zero distance from their characters!!!) and what annoyed me the most is she would do something with her narration and then immediately say “I’d told my students looong ago, ‘Don’t make adult women reconcile or admit anything in your writing.’” The irony is almost too pronounced to be clever. I bought this book knowing nothing about it, solely because it had my favorite painting (a Kirchner!) on the cover, but it pretty much exemplified why we don’t judge books by their cover.
In Revenge of the Scapegoat, a creative writing professor undergoes a mental breakdown after receiving a packet of letters her father wrote her when she was a teenager. What follows is a plausible adventure tinged with the surreal: a foray with an artist who is raising cows bred by the Nazis to stomp on peoples’ hearts. There’s obviously a lot of metaphor at play, with irreverent references to concentration camps (Beilin’s likely autobiographical protagonist is the descendant of Holocaust survivors) but ultimately without a central idea to link the story together.
I expect Beilin’s style to be polarizing, but I found it refreshing when I was in the right state of mind. She will drop you in the middle of a paragraph with no context about who is talking, leaving the reader to form their own assumptions about a character or scene, and then clarify much, much later. I found this technique revelatory. Other things I didn’t like so much: her arthritic feet’s extended dialogue, uninteresting philosophical tangents, and frankly bizarre word choice (“Twomblish”). Beilin is a professor of creative writing, like her protagonist (you know how much I loooove it when authors have zero distance from their characters!!!) and what annoyed me the most is she would do something with her narration and then immediately say “I’d told my students looong ago, ‘Don’t make adult women reconcile or admit anything in your writing.’” The irony is almost too pronounced to be clever. I bought this book knowing nothing about it, solely because it had my favorite painting (a Kirchner!) on the cover, but it pretty much exemplified why we don’t judge books by their cover.
600bars's review
4.0
Beilin starts off with a bang with some of the most crazy ass metaphors I’ve ever read: “I had on very very dark-green shoes, a black-green vegan leather more like a liquid you would press from a hot tampon you are pulling now, by the lamplight, out of a toad’s omnibus of Anais Nin” (1). Who says that lol but it tickles you and it is exciting to read something so odd. At least from that you know just about what you’re getting into, there will be a lot of “i'm bleeding out of my cunt” and wackiness and such. Revenge of the scapegoat is a surreal autofiction tale of someone named Iris receiving a package from her father that completely derails her. The package contains letters that her father had written to her as a teenager, which devastated her at the time, and traumatized her anew reading them in her 30s.
I read Beilin’s argonaut format nonfiction book about her copper IUD giving her RA last year. Which was strange for me because I also have one and I have a completely different relationship to it. The same topics from BTIUD come up often– her friend Ray’s job is to work for a medical device manufacturer that recycles car parts to be stapled in people’s wombs. There’s copper stakes shoved into trees to kill them (this is real). I always have this issue when reading autofiction or memoirs where it’s harder to evaluate the work because I get bogged down in my feelings on the writer personally and I get way more “do I like them or not”, which is funny because I’m always like “people are idiots for thinking an unlikeable character makes for a bad piece of art” but then I have trouble in my mind having critical distance between the character and author when I know they’re the same when I really should not be thinking of it this way. But I can’t help it. You could argue that Beilin uses the IUD as a scapegoat in her previous book, but I’m getting off topic and a comparative essay is not in the cards today.
The conversations in the book sound transcribed, which is revealed in the postscript to be the case, and I thought of Tao Lin’s Taipei when I watched the movie that went along with it and realized that the convos were in fact transcriptions. I felt somehow betrayed and like the words I was reading were cheapend, but then I was like I gotta get to the bottom of this feeling. Am I saying that something made up is better than something from real life? Because the writer has to do mental work to think of it? Is it because we think of writing as a solitary art form and to bring collaboration into it dilutes its power? Which makes no sense because nearly every other art form like movies or music requires the minds and efforts of many people. It’s a strange protestant work ethic thing in my mind that something can only be good if lots of effort and time went into it, which is not actually true. Iris also muses on the relationship between effort and art “A black and white photograph like that turns anything into a photograph of a sculpture. It wasn't fair, I thought. It seemed to me like a cheap trick, to use black-and-white photography in this kind of Germany, the camp kind, but it’s good, to, I thought, to be lazy like that, as an artist. Especially if you’re a woman. Fuck work” (131) . Hmmm I think she might be right!
She’s also right about the sculpture thing— in our bathroom there is no mirror above the sink, so we have some paintings to look at so you don’t need to be bored while washing hands. There is a black and white version of Elohim Creating Adam by William Blake, which I stare at all the time and I was shocked to discover, when I saw a color version, that it was a painting and not a photo of a sculpture! It looks so much like a sculpture.
As the title suggests, the book is about scapegoats. Iris and her friend Ray both felt they were the scapegoats of their family, someone to channel all the anger and blame onto in order to preserve the integrity of the whole. This is paralleled with both of their personal identities– Irises feet (who are characters in their own right because they hurt so bad, they are named after characters in a Flaubert novel and their convos are like a little greek chorus) have a conversation about Jewish people playing the role of scapegoat over and over again through history: blamed for the black plague, blamed for inflation in Weimar germany, blamed today as a convenient explanation for the the myriad horrors of the world. Ray is queer and getting top surgery throughout the book, and the queer community is in the process of becoming a scapegoat as we slide toward fascism as the source of “degeneracy” and “cultural marxism". The bucolic scene felt exactly like the setting of the Black Spider by Jeremias Golfhoelf, one of my favorite stories about the dangers of scapegoating. I also read Earthlings by Sayaka Murata the same week, another excellent story about an abused child who is the scapegoat of her family.
We hear some painful things from Ray about their childhood and their experience of being a scapegoat. And throughout the book we are reminded of terrors like the holocaust, even when it’s in a silly way: the cows at the museum Iris stays at are the “heart stepping cows of Sachsenhausen concentration camp” (they gently step on hearts idk what to tell you). But then when you finally read the letter from Iris’s father which has been hyped up so much, it feels anticlimactic because it doesn’t seem particularly cruel. Iris’s mother had MS, and the letter seems to be mostly him pleading with his teenage daughter to have less outbursts and help with chores more. Tfw ur trauma and pain are banal!!!! Which is so painful unto itself!!!!!! But this banality is addressed in a review of the art show within the book that the letter appears: “This guy doesn’t get what’s so fucked up about it, I guess. ‘Olin has branded a letter from a father to a teenage daughter onto all of the cows she’ll butcher this month. It’s unclear if this was a letter Olin’s father might have written to her or if it’s just fiction. The letter disappoints, though.’--what??--’ Its largest crime? Being boring. Here is a middle class dad’s typical angst over his daughter’s lack of responsibility…The recipient, whether it is Olin or not, seems only selfish, as teenagers typically are, and the father is having none of it. Alas, it’s nothing to kill the cow over…Get over it, you know?’” (150).
Ray reassures Iris that her feelings over the letter are valid. It can be so difficult to communicate the experience of suffering if it isn’t extremely obvious to others. This also applies to Iris’s experience with RA and chronic pain. Sometimes it is easier to blame sadness on the one big obvious trauma that has happened to me, because it is legible to others, than to explain all the small things that I’ve ever been upset or hurt by that “don’t seem that bad”. Another way in which we use scapegoating, using one traumatic incident as a scapegoat for why your life is so fucked up, or using one big traumatic event as a scapegoat for all the other small traumas. Ray is able to understand why the letter was so hurtful because they have experienced something similar and therefore they understand why the death by a thousand cuts Iris felt from her family can be as painful to her as something that is outwardly dramatic like being hit.
On the last page we see a typewritten letter by a young Beilin asking if she can interview her dad about the Holocaust. This made me tear up tbh. This sounds all serious and sad but the book is very funny, the surreal and absurdist scenes cracked me up but more hilarious was the wordplay and asides. There is a song that Iris listens to in the car on repeat called SCAR and I somehow got it stuck in my head even though I didn’t know the melody. I just made one up I guess! There I go using an unnecessary “just”. Iris rants about hating the word “just”, and I’ve had the same problem with knowing it weakens every sentence and having to go back whenever I write something from a text message and take it out everywhere but it keeps sprouting up like a little mushroom. “The word is used notoriously by women who who plead, who can’t help but plead, who say it, just, because they are begging you, born into a pitiful life of hoping”.
I read Beilin’s argonaut format nonfiction book about her copper IUD giving her RA last year. Which was strange for me because I also have one and I have a completely different relationship to it. The same topics from BTIUD come up often– her friend Ray’s job is to work for a medical device manufacturer that recycles car parts to be stapled in people’s wombs. There’s copper stakes shoved into trees to kill them (this is real). I always have this issue when reading autofiction or memoirs where it’s harder to evaluate the work because I get bogged down in my feelings on the writer personally and I get way more “do I like them or not”, which is funny because I’m always like “people are idiots for thinking an unlikeable character makes for a bad piece of art” but then I have trouble in my mind having critical distance between the character and author when I know they’re the same when I really should not be thinking of it this way. But I can’t help it. You could argue that Beilin uses the IUD as a scapegoat in her previous book, but I’m getting off topic and a comparative essay is not in the cards today.
The conversations in the book sound transcribed, which is revealed in the postscript to be the case, and I thought of Tao Lin’s Taipei when I watched the movie that went along with it and realized that the convos were in fact transcriptions. I felt somehow betrayed and like the words I was reading were cheapend, but then I was like I gotta get to the bottom of this feeling. Am I saying that something made up is better than something from real life? Because the writer has to do mental work to think of it? Is it because we think of writing as a solitary art form and to bring collaboration into it dilutes its power? Which makes no sense because nearly every other art form like movies or music requires the minds and efforts of many people. It’s a strange protestant work ethic thing in my mind that something can only be good if lots of effort and time went into it, which is not actually true. Iris also muses on the relationship between effort and art “A black and white photograph like that turns anything into a photograph of a sculpture. It wasn't fair, I thought. It seemed to me like a cheap trick, to use black-and-white photography in this kind of Germany, the camp kind, but it’s good, to, I thought, to be lazy like that, as an artist. Especially if you’re a woman. Fuck work” (131) . Hmmm I think she might be right!
She’s also right about the sculpture thing— in our bathroom there is no mirror above the sink, so we have some paintings to look at so you don’t need to be bored while washing hands. There is a black and white version of Elohim Creating Adam by William Blake, which I stare at all the time and I was shocked to discover, when I saw a color version, that it was a painting and not a photo of a sculpture! It looks so much like a sculpture.
As the title suggests, the book is about scapegoats. Iris and her friend Ray both felt they were the scapegoats of their family, someone to channel all the anger and blame onto in order to preserve the integrity of the whole. This is paralleled with both of their personal identities– Irises feet (who are characters in their own right because they hurt so bad, they are named after characters in a Flaubert novel and their convos are like a little greek chorus) have a conversation about Jewish people playing the role of scapegoat over and over again through history: blamed for the black plague, blamed for inflation in Weimar germany, blamed today as a convenient explanation for the the myriad horrors of the world. Ray is queer and getting top surgery throughout the book, and the queer community is in the process of becoming a scapegoat as we slide toward fascism as the source of “degeneracy” and “cultural marxism". The bucolic scene felt exactly like the setting of the Black Spider by Jeremias Golfhoelf, one of my favorite stories about the dangers of scapegoating. I also read Earthlings by Sayaka Murata the same week, another excellent story about an abused child who is the scapegoat of her family.
We hear some painful things from Ray about their childhood and their experience of being a scapegoat. And throughout the book we are reminded of terrors like the holocaust, even when it’s in a silly way: the cows at the museum Iris stays at are the “heart stepping cows of Sachsenhausen concentration camp” (they gently step on hearts idk what to tell you). But then when you finally read the letter from Iris’s father which has been hyped up so much, it feels anticlimactic because it doesn’t seem particularly cruel. Iris’s mother had MS, and the letter seems to be mostly him pleading with his teenage daughter to have less outbursts and help with chores more. Tfw ur trauma and pain are banal!!!! Which is so painful unto itself!!!!!! But this banality is addressed in a review of the art show within the book that the letter appears: “This guy doesn’t get what’s so fucked up about it, I guess. ‘Olin has branded a letter from a father to a teenage daughter onto all of the cows she’ll butcher this month. It’s unclear if this was a letter Olin’s father might have written to her or if it’s just fiction. The letter disappoints, though.’--what??--’ Its largest crime? Being boring. Here is a middle class dad’s typical angst over his daughter’s lack of responsibility…The recipient, whether it is Olin or not, seems only selfish, as teenagers typically are, and the father is having none of it. Alas, it’s nothing to kill the cow over…Get over it, you know?’” (150).
Ray reassures Iris that her feelings over the letter are valid. It can be so difficult to communicate the experience of suffering if it isn’t extremely obvious to others. This also applies to Iris’s experience with RA and chronic pain. Sometimes it is easier to blame sadness on the one big obvious trauma that has happened to me, because it is legible to others, than to explain all the small things that I’ve ever been upset or hurt by that “don’t seem that bad”. Another way in which we use scapegoating, using one traumatic incident as a scapegoat for why your life is so fucked up, or using one big traumatic event as a scapegoat for all the other small traumas. Ray is able to understand why the letter was so hurtful because they have experienced something similar and therefore they understand why the death by a thousand cuts Iris felt from her family can be as painful to her as something that is outwardly dramatic like being hit.
On the last page we see a typewritten letter by a young Beilin asking if she can interview her dad about the Holocaust. This made me tear up tbh. This sounds all serious and sad but the book is very funny, the surreal and absurdist scenes cracked me up but more hilarious was the wordplay and asides. There is a song that Iris listens to in the car on repeat called SCAR and I somehow got it stuck in my head even though I didn’t know the melody. I just made one up I guess! There I go using an unnecessary “just”. Iris rants about hating the word “just”, and I’ve had the same problem with knowing it weakens every sentence and having to go back whenever I write something from a text message and take it out everywhere but it keeps sprouting up like a little mushroom. “The word is used notoriously by women who who plead, who can’t help but plead, who say it, just, because they are begging you, born into a pitiful life of hoping”.
nhewitt99's review
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
emilytracy's review
5.0
One of my favorites this year. You never really stop being a teenager, even at thirty-six pretending to be a cowherd. Sardonic and surreal and self-pitying and goofy, at times. Everything heavy turns laughable when someone else looks at it, then turns into a high-brow reference that makes the narrator feel good about herself and makes you feel good about yourself for catching it before making you feel bad about yourself for being just as pretentious as everyone in this book. I loved every page of it.