Reviews

Mercy by Andrea Dworkin

burritapal_1's review

adventurous challenging dark emotional informative sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

"... a dry fuck with a dry heart is being a man; a dry, heartless fuck with a dry, heartless heart..."

"In a culture which still believes that rape is every woman's fantasy, how is it possible to tell our story? How do we make ourselves heard? How are we to be believed? And finally, when woman. and children are being raped, tortured and abused every minute of every day, where is God? Are we His pornography?"

This is a brutal book; brutal to read and very triggering.

In the protagonist"s childhood, she had one teacher who was very strange:

".. one teacher in regular school made her pets stand behind her when she was sitting at her desk in the front of the room and you had to brush off her collar, just stand there behind her for 15 minutes or a half hour or longer and keep brushing her collar on her shoulders with your open hands, Palms down, stroking all the way whole way from her neck to her arms. She sat at her desk and we would be taking a test or writing something or answering her questions and she would say someone had to come up and stand behind her and she wore one of those fuzzy collars you put on top of sweaters and someone had to stand behind her chair facing the class and with their hands keep brushing the fuzzy collar down, smoothing it down, with one stroke from her neck to her shoulder, the left hand had to stroke the left side of her collar and the right hand had to stroke the right side of her collar, and it had to be smooth and in Rhythm and feel good to her or she would get mean and say sarcastic things about you to the class." 

Yes, this is how Andrea Dworkin writes: she has no paragraph breaks and she has long, long, run-on sentences. It's kind of intense, and hard to read. But I kept at it.

The protagonist helped to protest the Vietnam War. But as usual, women are not treated equal to men, even when they're doing their time in jail for protesting.

".. they let me get arrested because it was numbers for the Press; but once we were arrested the women disappeared inside the prison, we were swallowed up in it, it wasn't as if anyone was missing to them. They were all over the men, to get them out, to keep track of them, to make sure they were okay, the heroes of the Revolution incarnate had to be taken care of. The real men were going to real jail in a real historical struggle; it was real revolution. The nothing ones walked off a cliff and melted Into Thin air. I didn't mind being used but I didn't expect to disappear into a Darkness resembling Hell by any measure; left there to rot by my brothers; the heroes of the revolution. They got the men out; they left us in. Rape, they said. We had to get them out as a priority; rape, they said. In jail men get raped, they said. No jokes, no laughs, no Nazis; rape; we can't have the heroes of the Revolution raped. And them that's raped ain't Heroes of the revolution; but there were no words for that. The women had honor. We stood up to the police. We didn't post bail. We went on a hunger strike. We didn't cooperate on any level, at any time. The pacifists just cut us loose so we could go under, no air from the surface, no lawyers, no word, no solace, no counsel, no help; but we didn't give in...."

For a time, the protagonist went to Greece and stayed on the island of Crete:

".. there are lots of Amerikans on Crete, military bases filled with soldiers, the permanent ones for the bases and then the ones sent here from Vietnam to rest and then sent back to Vietnam. Sometimes they come to the cafes in the afternoon to drink. I Don't Go Near them except to tell them not to go to Vietnam. I say it quietly to tables full of them in the blazing sun that keeps them always a little blind so they hesitate and I leave fast. The Cretans hate Amerikans; I guess most Greeks do because the Amerikan government keeps interfering so there won't be a left-wing government. The C. I. A. Is a strong and widely known presence. on Crete there are Air Force bases and the Amerikans treat the Cretans bad. The Cretans know the arrogance of occupying armies, the billious arrogance. They recognize the condescension without speaking the literal language of the occupiers. Most of the Amerikans are from the Deep South, White boys, and they call the Cretans niggers. They laugh at them and Shout at them and call them cunts, treat them like dirt, even the old mountain men whose faces surely would terrify anyone not a fool, the ones the Nazis didn't kill not because they were collaborators but because they were resistors. The Amerikans are young, 18, 19, 20, and they have the arrogance of Napoleon, each and every one of them; they are the kings of the world all flatulent with white wealth and the darkies are meant to serve them. They make me ashamed...."

Me too.

The title of the book comes from a part where the protagonist is talking about how the mind never remembers the worst--it just blanks out. For example, she bailed a boy, a fellow protestor in Amsterdam who was sent to jail. They layer married,  and he began to beat her. or another example, books about the Holocaust, they are written so calmly, the author speaking so calmly, that the violence, the horror, doesn't come through the way it happened at the time.

"... it's the only thing God did right in everything I seen on earth: made the mind like scorched earth. The Mind shows you mercy. Freud didn't understand mercy. The mind gets blank and bare. There's nothing there. You got what you remember and what you don't and the very great thing is that you can't remember almost anything compared to what happened day in and day out. You can count how many days there were but it is a long stretch of Nothing in Your mind; there is nothing; there are blazing episodes of horror in a great stretch of nothing. You thank God for the nothing. You get on your fucking knees. We are doing some construction in our apartment and we had a pile of wood beams piled up and he got so mad at me - for what? - something about a locked door; I didn't lock the door or he didn't lock the door and I asked him why not - and he picked up one of the wood beams and he beat me with it across my legs like he was a trained torturer and knew how to do it, between the knees and the ankle, not busting the knees, not smashing the ankles, he just hammered it down on my legs, and I don't remember anything before or after,..."

The most awful part of this book is a part where the protagonist has this beautiful dog that lives with her. But one night she wants to go out and drink: I don't know why she can't drink at home, that's what I do. But she went to a bar and she had vodka drinks, one after another, until she got so shit-faced that she could barely stand up and find her way to the door. She had $2 left on the counter in front of her, and the bartender told her to take a cab, instead of leaving it for a tip for him. So she went outside and it's pouring down rain and this cab pulls up alongside of her and she asks him if she can get home on that $2, and he says yes. So he takes her to her address, and then he asks her can he come inside. She should never have done that! It was the total most horrible thing. He stuck it his big nasty dick in her throat. And tore the muscles in her throat, and then stole her dog.

".. and then I fall back into the deep Blackness and when I wake up I look for her, I wait for her; I'm waiting for her now. My throat's like some small animal nearly killed, maimed for religious slaughter, a small, nearly killed beast, a poor warm-blooded thing hurt by some ritual but I never heard of the religion, there's deep sacrifice, deep pain. I can't move because the poor thing'd shake near to torture; it's got to stay still, the maimed thing. I couldn't shout and I couldn't cry and I couldn't whisper or moan or call her name, in sighs, I couldn't whisper to myself in sighs. I couldn't swallow or breathe. I sat still in my own shit for some long time, many, many days, some months of days, and I rocked, I rocked back and forth on my heels, I rocked and I held myself in my arms, I didn't move more than to rock and I didn't wash and I didn't say nothing. I swallowed down some water as I could stand it, I breathed when I could, not too much, not too soon, not too hard. If he put semen on me it's still there, I wear it, whatever he did, if he did it I carry it whatever it is I don't know, I won't ever know, whatever he did stays done, anything he tore stays torn, anything he took stays gone. I look for her; I scan the wall; I stare; I see; I know; I will make myself into a weapon; I will turn myself into a new kind of death, for them; I got a new revolutionary love filling my heart; the real passion; the real thing. .."

So she lost her beautiful dog, all because she wanted to go out drinking. 😥

This book is a very different kind of book, and it's not very well understood. I gave it four stars because I think it's very important for the truth that it points out: how women are treated so horribly by Men, by the system that's in place, by the patriarchy. That truth needs to be shouted from the fucking rooftops.

leelulah's review

1.0

I respect Andrea Dworkin, it's just her fiction doesn't do it for me. It happened with The New Woman's Broken Heart, as well. This is cruel after cruel thing done to a girl then woman named Andrea you can never separate from her even though you try to. About how she feels abandoned by God, used, not like anyone believes in her at all.

I understand that the many themes she tackles are serious, but this stream of consciousness is not like Woolf's. She also refused the idea that this book is entirely confessional, this seems to be the ghost women are perpetually escaping as a dismissive attitude towards their work, as if they had no depth because they were writing partly based on personal things, but it's deep when men do it.

Again, my quarrel is with the style, she sure talks about realism in the first pages, but this is just postmodern unreadable writing.

I much prefer her academic work. If you have to read about her life, read Heartbreak instead, it's much more rigorous in the sense of an autobiography.

devind9bde's review

5.0

Dworkin is often caricatured as a ‘bad feminist' who 'hates men'. From what I can see in this book, she hates what men did to her, and she wants justice. The MeToo movement is a direct descendant of her work, although she has been pushed into obscurity. This is worth a read for sure, to see her points made up close and personal. There are valuable insights here for feminists today. As another reviewer says, I wish this book made men care.

Furthermore, from a literary perspective this book is very good, and deserves to be read on it's literary merit alone, but I suspect the subject matter and the author hold many people back.