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A review by versmonesprit
Spanking the Maid by Robert Coover
challenging
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
5.0
If ever Sade were to have a literary heir — not a descendant; a true heir — it would undoubtedly be this masterpiece. Such a disservice to label either as erotica when they’re in fact provocative sociopolitical commentaries, revolutionary in the way they aim for an almost salacious façade to uproot the assumed uppity readers.
Days play out in sections parallel to each other, the repetitive nature of an almost limbo-like condition thus emphasised, blurring the lines of time and narration alike. There is a quality of Calvino too in not just these reoccurrences, but also in the wordplays that plague and confuse and elude the character of the master, as well as in the oddity and absurdity in the objects that appear mysteriously inside the bedcovers.
The book gives you enough crumbs about the characters’ motivations, but never explains or answers the fundamental why, instead prompting the reader to excavate the mindsets, the psychologies, the allegories hidden behind the characters: the innate desire to govern, but also to be governed; the eventually self-destructive crusade not for corrigibility which is the instruction itself, but for the ultimate perfection, for God, for a sort of martyrdom at heart, for salvation through suffering; the eventual consumption by the things that are made into life missions, purposes — the destructive nature of self-enforced duty and arbitrary principles of order; the mutually compulsive but monotonous nature of violence and perhaps of transcendence; the dissolution of limits, as a result of which the ending of the past and the beginning of the present become indistinguishable; the role reversal of the instructor and the instructed, but also its simultaneous reality…
Coover is purposeful in details and delightful in profundity. If you love books that make you think, truly dig and think and ponder, Spanking the Maid will make your day.
Days play out in sections parallel to each other, the repetitive nature of an almost limbo-like condition thus emphasised, blurring the lines of time and narration alike. There is a quality of Calvino too in not just these reoccurrences, but also in the wordplays that plague and confuse and elude the character of the master, as well as in the oddity and absurdity in the objects that appear mysteriously inside the bedcovers.
The book gives you enough crumbs about the characters’ motivations, but never explains or answers the fundamental why, instead prompting the reader to excavate the mindsets, the psychologies, the allegories hidden behind the characters: the innate desire to govern, but also to be governed; the eventually self-destructive crusade not for corrigibility which is the instruction itself, but for the ultimate perfection, for God, for a sort of martyrdom at heart, for salvation through suffering; the eventual consumption by the things that are made into life missions, purposes — the destructive nature of self-enforced duty and arbitrary principles of order; the mutually compulsive but monotonous nature of violence and perhaps of transcendence; the dissolution of limits, as a result of which the ending of the past and the beginning of the present become indistinguishable; the role reversal of the instructor and the instructed, but also its simultaneous reality…
Coover is purposeful in details and delightful in profundity. If you love books that make you think, truly dig and think and ponder, Spanking the Maid will make your day.