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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
I feel as though I may have liked this book more if I had read it in college. Or maybe high school. A time when I was more impressionable maybe. I appreciate the sentiment but it felt so pretentious I hated many of the characters... and I do enjoy unlikable narrators. Also... I hate saying this but the movie Secretary was better than the original source.
Alright. I respect her and her stories, HOWEVER, I could not make it through this collection. I got about half way and had to stop. I thought a couple of the stories were alright and had some poignant themes, but I couldn’t connect with the characters in most of them and found myself just waiting waiting waiting for the story to be over. I’m hoping something else of hers will pique my interest more!
a brilliant collection of stories. bizarre in a good way. the film secretary was based on one of gaitskill's stories.
more of a 3.5 rounded up deal, mostly because i was not consistently drawn to every short (although this may just be a me and short stories thing.) i really loved the last one and the one right before secretary (which was the reason i read the collection in the first place and ended up being one of my least favorites. having seen the movie first (and loving it), the tone of the short felt sufficiently different in an expectation-crushing sort of way. again - no fault of the author's, but it wasn't what i wanted.) that said, the characters are all fascinating (even when the stories aren't), and some of their thinking felt acutely familiar (even if their circumstances weren't.) also pretty sexy if you're into that with your reading ;)
The pleasure of pain. The pain of pleasure. Life: miscues, missed opportunities, and misguided attempts to find happiness.
A favorite passage:
"It was true that in the summer the air shaft had an oddly poetic aspect. On days when the apartment air was heavy and stifling as a swamp, noises and smells came floating up it on clouds of heat, lyrical blends of voice and radio scraps, drifting arguments and amorous sighs, the fried shadow of someone's dinner, a faded microcosm that lilted into their apartment and related them to everyone else in the building." (164)
A favorite passage:
"It was true that in the summer the air shaft had an oddly poetic aspect. On days when the apartment air was heavy and stifling as a swamp, noises and smells came floating up it on clouds of heat, lyrical blends of voice and radio scraps, drifting arguments and amorous sighs, the fried shadow of someone's dinner, a faded microcosm that lilted into their apartment and related them to everyone else in the building." (164)
Not my thing. At all.
A very 80s set of stories: squalor and social striving usually set in grubby NYC, populated by unlikable men and aimless women, too many of whom are aspiring artists or writers. Stories blend together and seem to be about the same set of people, just using different names. They revolve around sex in a distinctly unsexy way. (I'm rather amazed at how different the movie Secretary is from the story that supposedly inspired it.) I liked 3 stories: "Connection," "Other Factors," and "Heaven." These stories leave behind the joyless S&M to focus on older, more self-assured women and their relationships with other women. Given the strength of these stories, I'm curious to see what Gaitskill's more recent fiction is like.
Edited to add: I realize I've read one of Gaitskill's novels, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, but all I remember about it is feeling bad.
A very 80s set of stories: squalor and social striving usually set in grubby NYC, populated by unlikable men and aimless women, too many of whom are aspiring artists or writers. Stories blend together and seem to be about the same set of people, just using different names. They revolve around sex in a distinctly unsexy way. (I'm rather amazed at how different the movie Secretary is from the story that supposedly inspired it.) I liked 3 stories: "Connection," "Other Factors," and "Heaven." These stories leave behind the joyless S&M to focus on older, more self-assured women and their relationships with other women. Given the strength of these stories, I'm curious to see what Gaitskill's more recent fiction is like.
Edited to add: I realize I've read one of Gaitskill's novels, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, but all I remember about it is feeling bad.
I don't know why it's taken me 34 years to discover some very essential things about myself, the most obvious to others, but it has. This book sort of follows that thought, except it's more precise and well written and cuts straight down the middle of things. It's truly about bad behavior and in that, mostly about sex or prostitution of sorts, and I don't relate to the behavior per se, or more the situations, but I relate to these women (mostly). The writing is so astute. There's a sentence or a paragraph in each essay that just nails it for me. Nails a behavior or insight that I could not articulate before. It's uncomfortable and I don't really enjoy reading it and I don't even know that I would recommend it for fear of the subject matter, but it's just so damn good.
The last two essays are my favorite - not overtly sexual, or at all, and just expansive and not all bleakness.
The last two essays are my favorite - not overtly sexual, or at all, and just expansive and not all bleakness.
I have to say that I am shocked to have enjoyed this collection as much as I did. Because I have read Gaitskill's other works, often twice, I did not expect as much from her older work. This book, however, had a certain raw honesty that grabs a reader by the neck and shakes gently, teasingly, and never squeezes too hard. Broaching the, urm, unpleasantness of prostitution and aimless sexual relationships, Gaitskill drops the small realizations felt by characters who are drowning in the muck, but still gasping for air; still fighting toward land they might no longer see.
I love it.
I love it.