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A review by evelyn261999
Bricks and Mortar by Clemens Meyer
2.0
I have found two comments which best describe ‘Bricks and Mortar’: first, the blurb’s claim that it ‘finds inspiration in the films of Russ Meyer, Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé and David Lynch’. It is disconcerting to start a book by an author about something as gendered as prostitution whose cinematic forebears are all men who have been accused of misogyny and have famously used women’s bodies and, often draw out and even titillating, portrayals of physical/sexual violence against them as lynchpins to create cheap emotional payoffs. Thankfully, this brings us to the second comment: its translator, Katy Derbyshire, writes that ‘this is a book with a lot of bathos’. Despite their puerile and blunt wholes, the rape scenes in, for example, Miike’s ‘Ichi the Killer’, Noé’s ‘Irréversible’ and Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ were genuinely visceral and upsetting, but I cannot recall feeling anything while reading ‘Bricks and Mortar’, except for mild annoyance at the repetition of the phrase ‘pendulous breasts’ (‘hängenden Brüste’).
Nonetheless, just as I have sometimes found personal and artistic merit in these filmmakers, Meyer sometimes does write well, such as in the final chapter, ‘I’d like to get a horse, one day’, Meyer, with Derbyshire’s astute translation, subtly shows how much advertising has infiltrated the very thoughts of its narrator. Further, there’s a particularly interesting line where a character is looking at some fridge drawers and Meyer writes that they are opened or closed, an incredibly obvious detail which highlights how much everything at once is and is not in this book, where the nonlinear structure and constant shifting of time mean that everything is and was and will be all at once.
Through a feminist lens, this could have absolutely fascinating thematic ramifications about the conception of women as Schrödinger’s whores and what being a whore actually means when women are consistently under immense economic and misogynistic pressure either to actually become prostitutes or their ‘respectable’ equivalents, wives, or both, and to be both punished and rewarded no matter the ‘decision’. In such a reading, the nonlinear aspects might also reflect on the centrality of misogyny to women’s experiences and indeed, the necessity of sexism in the creation of the very category ‘woman’, such that ‘women’ always were, are and will be linked to misogyny. Thus, a commentary on the oldest conception of women as whores.
But for a 600+ page polyvocal book about prostitution, Meyer really doesn’t seem all that interested in the complexity of women’s interiorities at all. Not to unfairly compare everything to Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’, but it is concerning that I have a far better sense of Dolores as a person in a book told exclusively from the perspective of her pedophilic rapist than any one of the women whose inner monologue the reader is actually granted access to. It would have been so interesting to read about the impact of capitalism, an otherwise overarching theme which is often strangely dropped in the women’s sections, and the fall of the Wall on the transwoman in the chapter ‘Transfer (Bye-Bye, My Ladyboy)’, especially when the GDR had far better trans healthcare than its Western counterpart, but instead there’s just a clichéd narrative about her transphobic father and her idolisation of Audrey Hepburn that makes the reader wonder why Meyer even bothered to include it at all.
As with David Lynch’s derivative films (watch Cecelia Condit and Maya Deren), I was often left wondering whether Meyer had lost control of his own narrative in favour of a poor, if recognisable, facsimile of other, better experimental authors, such as Joyce, Döblin, even Céline, a morally reprehensible author whose mordant writing is still preferable to this purportedly ‘neutral’, washed out presentation of an intrinsically political industry. In the end, when asking what Meyer’s use of experimental techniques actually achieves, one can definitively say it does not create a compelling exploration of prostitution around the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Nonetheless, just as I have sometimes found personal and artistic merit in these filmmakers, Meyer sometimes does write well, such as in the final chapter, ‘I’d like to get a horse, one day’, Meyer, with Derbyshire’s astute translation, subtly shows how much advertising has infiltrated the very thoughts of its narrator. Further, there’s a particularly interesting line where a character is looking at some fridge drawers and Meyer writes that they are opened or closed, an incredibly obvious detail which highlights how much everything at once is and is not in this book, where the nonlinear structure and constant shifting of time mean that everything is and was and will be all at once.
Through a feminist lens, this could have absolutely fascinating thematic ramifications about the conception of women as Schrödinger’s whores and what being a whore actually means when women are consistently under immense economic and misogynistic pressure either to actually become prostitutes or their ‘respectable’ equivalents, wives, or both, and to be both punished and rewarded no matter the ‘decision’. In such a reading, the nonlinear aspects might also reflect on the centrality of misogyny to women’s experiences and indeed, the necessity of sexism in the creation of the very category ‘woman’, such that ‘women’ always were, are and will be linked to misogyny. Thus, a commentary on the oldest conception of women as whores.
But for a 600+ page polyvocal book about prostitution, Meyer really doesn’t seem all that interested in the complexity of women’s interiorities at all. Not to unfairly compare everything to Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’, but it is concerning that I have a far better sense of Dolores as a person in a book told exclusively from the perspective of her pedophilic rapist than any one of the women whose inner monologue the reader is actually granted access to. It would have been so interesting to read about the impact of capitalism, an otherwise overarching theme which is often strangely dropped in the women’s sections, and the fall of the Wall on the transwoman in the chapter ‘Transfer (Bye-Bye, My Ladyboy)’, especially when the GDR had far better trans healthcare than its Western counterpart, but instead there’s just a clichéd narrative about her transphobic father and her idolisation of Audrey Hepburn that makes the reader wonder why Meyer even bothered to include it at all.
As with David Lynch’s derivative films (watch Cecelia Condit and Maya Deren), I was often left wondering whether Meyer had lost control of his own narrative in favour of a poor, if recognisable, facsimile of other, better experimental authors, such as Joyce, Döblin, even Céline, a morally reprehensible author whose mordant writing is still preferable to this purportedly ‘neutral’, washed out presentation of an intrinsically political industry. In the end, when asking what Meyer’s use of experimental techniques actually achieves, one can definitively say it does not create a compelling exploration of prostitution around the fall of the Berlin Wall.