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A review by karp76
The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch
1.0
“One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are, and to live without belief-that is a fate more terrible than dying.”
We have no choice but to begin. To digest this book is not so much to take it in but to swallow it whole in between dry gags, hoping to gulp it down before its taste and odor nauseates you. There is little good here. Nothing lies in the background, only the foreground. Its symbols and metaphors are not subtle accents but screaming airhorns. Subtlety is for art, and this is neither subtle nor art. Its poetry, its feminism, its environmentalism is heavy-handed and swung with a 20-pound mallet. You get hit again and again, each blow so slathered and drenched in juvenile language, gratuitous body horror, and poor sci fi elements (the bleached androgynous future humans, the "wars"), any narrative value is trodden and forgotten. At the end, if we can struggle through to it, we can only ask through strained senses, aching guts and boggled minds, why?
We have no choice but to begin. To digest this book is not so much to take it in but to swallow it whole in between dry gags, hoping to gulp it down before its taste and odor nauseates you. There is little good here. Nothing lies in the background, only the foreground. Its symbols and metaphors are not subtle accents but screaming airhorns. Subtlety is for art, and this is neither subtle nor art. Its poetry, its feminism, its environmentalism is heavy-handed and swung with a 20-pound mallet. You get hit again and again, each blow so slathered and drenched in juvenile language, gratuitous body horror, and poor sci fi elements (the bleached androgynous future humans, the "wars"), any narrative value is trodden and forgotten. At the end, if we can struggle through to it, we can only ask through strained senses, aching guts and boggled minds, why?