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buddhafish 's review for:
Vladimir
by Julia May Jonas
62nd book of 2022.
Better than I thought it was going to be. The plot goes a bit wild in the end, which seems to be a running theme at the moment, if I think of other books like Mona by Oloixarac. I wonder why Jonas decided to write this book. The first half feels almost taken from Netflix's The Chair; I don't watch much television but I did catch the short series (which isn't returning for a second series, sadly) because it was a campus/professor thing. I'm a sucker for anything on a campus. The shift in plot towards the end didn't impress me, I wish she stuck with her earlier tone and rode that out to the end instead, though lots of things are 'resolved', or at least, readdressed. The funniest thing in the novel, like in The Chair is the critique of the modern generation. There are lecture scenes such as,
Or,
In my experience too, it was always my colleagues in university who never did the reading who moaned the most about the problems outlined in the second quote. Funny how Jonas identified the same thing.
Not a bad read, definitely better than some of the other debuts being published by women and being relentlessly called, 'sexy', 'dark', 'delicious', yuck and yuck, etc.
Better than I thought it was going to be. The plot goes a bit wild in the end, which seems to be a running theme at the moment, if I think of other books like Mona by Oloixarac. I wonder why Jonas decided to write this book. The first half feels almost taken from Netflix's The Chair; I don't watch much television but I did catch the short series (which isn't returning for a second series, sadly) because it was a campus/professor thing. I'm a sucker for anything on a campus. The shift in plot towards the end didn't impress me, I wish she stuck with her earlier tone and rode that out to the end instead, though lots of things are 'resolved', or at least, readdressed. The funniest thing in the novel, like in The Chair is the critique of the modern generation. There are lecture scenes such as,
In class we were comparing selections from Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the diaries of Alice James. "Why are all these white women so obsessed with being female?" asked a blond, female student who never did the reading. "Don't they recognize their privilege?" When I ventured to say that Chopin, for instance, began writing after being left widowed with six children as a means of support, she shrugged. "But she still walked through the world as a white woman." When I asked her if that meant she shouldn't write, she said, "No, she shouldn't complain." When I asked what writing that was non-complaining looked like, she said, "I don't know, like James Joyce."
Or,
Of course, "Rebecca" is, in many ways, a story that is erected in misogyny, demonizing women, demonizing the other, but I was not interested in that for them. I wanted them to see how suspense was created, how symbols were utilized, how repetition made the ghost of Rebecca rise from the page. Again and again I told them, you need to see these things, these forms. Oh, they drove me crazy, being so completely obsessed with whether or not people were represented well, wanting every piece of literature to be some utopian screed of fairness.
In my experience too, it was always my colleagues in university who never did the reading who moaned the most about the problems outlined in the second quote. Funny how Jonas identified the same thing.
Not a bad read, definitely better than some of the other debuts being published by women and being relentlessly called, 'sexy', 'dark', 'delicious', yuck and yuck, etc.