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screen_memory's Reviews (234)
Here Goytisolo's informal trilogy comes to its end for me, although the end as I know it is marked by the trilogy's beginning. Yes, I have read the series backwards, not deliberately but because I prefer most often to leave myself at the whim of what is stocked at my local bookstores.
It's been interesting to note the development of Goytisolo's so-called serpentine style as it has developed in reverse during my backwards reading; the explosive, acidic language of Landless had cooled to a near boil in Julian and simmered to a tepid outrage here in Marks. The narrative is linear, as linear as is possible with Goytisolo, whose prose is as characteristically windward as ever, although there is a more distinct delineation here between divergences in style or stories whereas they all melded together like a convulsive fever of dreams in the later books, but only if you're paying attention - stories and narrative modes still verge in and collapse in on one another, perspectives shift from a character witnessed in the third-person to the accusatory YOU of the second; a perspective which casts the reader as an exile, as landless, as one without a home.
Exile is heavily dealt with here, as is the Spanish civil war which produced Goytisolo's lifelong voluntary exile, as he puts it in a title of a book published decades later, "from almost everywhere." When one suffers exile, one is forever landless. The exile seeks comfort in the Muslim culture of the Moors in Spain or the Algerians in France, but neither can Allah or the culture produced unto His influence grant him the comfort he seeks.
The novel is not without Goytisolo's farcical sense of humor, however. In one notable scene, characters encounter an individual who claims to be on the side of the Republic the same as them, having served in the civil war on Franco's side. They correct him, explaining that if he fought for Franco, he fought against the Republic....
He insists he is telling the truth, and recalls the anthem they sang. "You've got your wars mixed up," one of the guys tells him. "That was against the Algerians." They all have a laugh at his expense, and one of them remarks thereafter: "The guy solved the Spanish problem once and for all. Everyobdy should follow his example.... Erase it and start all over again."
It's been interesting to note the development of Goytisolo's so-called serpentine style as it has developed in reverse during my backwards reading; the explosive, acidic language of Landless had cooled to a near boil in Julian and simmered to a tepid outrage here in Marks. The narrative is linear, as linear as is possible with Goytisolo, whose prose is as characteristically windward as ever, although there is a more distinct delineation here between divergences in style or stories whereas they all melded together like a convulsive fever of dreams in the later books, but only if you're paying attention - stories and narrative modes still verge in and collapse in on one another, perspectives shift from a character witnessed in the third-person to the accusatory YOU of the second; a perspective which casts the reader as an exile, as landless, as one without a home.
Exile is heavily dealt with here, as is the Spanish civil war which produced Goytisolo's lifelong voluntary exile, as he puts it in a title of a book published decades later, "from almost everywhere." When one suffers exile, one is forever landless. The exile seeks comfort in the Muslim culture of the Moors in Spain or the Algerians in France, but neither can Allah or the culture produced unto His influence grant him the comfort he seeks.
The novel is not without Goytisolo's farcical sense of humor, however. In one notable scene, characters encounter an individual who claims to be on the side of the Republic the same as them, having served in the civil war on Franco's side. They correct him, explaining that if he fought for Franco, he fought against the Republic....
He insists he is telling the truth, and recalls the anthem they sang. "You've got your wars mixed up," one of the guys tells him. "That was against the Algerians." They all have a laugh at his expense, and one of them remarks thereafter: "The guy solved the Spanish problem once and for all. Everyobdy should follow his example.... Erase it and start all over again."
Another series of corridors cast in Goytisolo's narrative labyrinth through which the serpent here winds through the hedge maze of visions and dreams, fables false and fabricated - Ariadne's thread fumbled - and myths all deposed toward the singular aim of recounting the life of Eusebio. Who is Eusebio? He is at once a sage, destitute and surviving off nothing but alms and words of prophets, and an ascetic; a homosexual and a poet; an exile and a political dissident - all of these things at once, and, perhaps most likely, none of these at all.
The book is premised on the assemblage of a literary society composed for the sole purpose of narrating Eusebio's life through the tales, anecdotes, writings, and research heard and retold and conducted by the writers, all twenty-eight of them - one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet. The society gathers to meet across three weeks, exchanging their stories, each of which follows a different narrative style, and, once the narrative project has come to its conclusion, the society considers a name for the fabricated single author of the novel, deciding on the name Juan Goytisolo. I know I mentioned Calvino and his If on a Winter's Night in an earlier review, but I don't know if I made this specific connection: Both books, above all, are about the pleasures of storytelling and of reading; about stories told for the simple pleasure of their telling.
One of the more interesting stories concerns, like many of the stories, individuals who seem to have no connection to the primary subject, Eusebio, whatsoever. It's a story that seems straight out of Ovid (but which may be more a nod to One Thousand and One Nights) where a man turns into a stork and flies to where his wife has moved for work for a handful of years in order to spy on her, witnesses her infidelity, but is then taken in and adopted by his wife and tended to and given free license to roam about the house as "she" (as he's mistakenly called) wishes, shitting all over the house and the bed, which her secret lover eventually leaves in order to sleep on the couch. The story has no evident connection to the subject at hand until the end when we learn the author retold his story as he heard it from his friend who heard it from his neighbor, and who was his neighbor but the elusive Eusebio?
The book is premised on the assemblage of a literary society composed for the sole purpose of narrating Eusebio's life through the tales, anecdotes, writings, and research heard and retold and conducted by the writers, all twenty-eight of them - one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet. The society gathers to meet across three weeks, exchanging their stories, each of which follows a different narrative style, and, once the narrative project has come to its conclusion, the society considers a name for the fabricated single author of the novel, deciding on the name Juan Goytisolo. I know I mentioned Calvino and his If on a Winter's Night in an earlier review, but I don't know if I made this specific connection: Both books, above all, are about the pleasures of storytelling and of reading; about stories told for the simple pleasure of their telling.
One of the more interesting stories concerns, like many of the stories, individuals who seem to have no connection to the primary subject, Eusebio, whatsoever. It's a story that seems straight out of Ovid (but which may be more a nod to One Thousand and One Nights) where a man turns into a stork and flies to where his wife has moved for work for a handful of years in order to spy on her, witnesses her infidelity, but is then taken in and adopted by his wife and tended to and given free license to roam about the house as "she" (as he's mistakenly called) wishes, shitting all over the house and the bed, which her secret lover eventually leaves in order to sleep on the couch. The story has no evident connection to the subject at hand until the end when we learn the author retold his story as he heard it from his friend who heard it from his neighbor, and who was his neighbor but the elusive Eusebio?
This novel is an utter farce of the anachronistic and the bizarre which I am usually a fan of (see: Malaparte, Kundera, Gombrowicz), but this one fell a bit flat. For being what I know to be the last of Goytisolo's works translated into English, maybe I approached the text with expectations heightened by that recognition as well as my mounting enchantment with Goytisolo's works.
It was a terribly short work - gone in a day - which might qualify it for a re-read soon to see if my view can't be corrected, but, with that said, Goytisolo, as always, is nothing if not thematically/conceptually peculiar: A pedophilic Frenchman's soul enters a sort of thereafter in the form of a cybercafe where he views all sorts of images of all sorts of corpses, victims of war and of terrorist actions (Goytisolo is ever the necrophilic aesthete), and soon comes into contact with the leader of a terrorist unit led by the bizarre "Alice" (the quotations are part and parcel of her identity), a woman who, when he is not performing in pornographic revues dressed in tights and garters, is coordinating attacks on the world the dead Frenchman left which he seems able to return to at will - and, no, the shift in she/he pronouns was no mistake; "Alice"'s gender shifts with every pronoun.
Goytisolo, fond of blurring dreams, visions and reality into an indistinguishable image; of synthesizing reality and irreality produces a seamless and nonsensical shifting of identity - of man or woman; of body or spirit - without ceremony and without explanation; it is a mere fact of Goytisolo's universe the same way most in this world do not question the fact of their simple physiological existence.
Nothing much makes sense, and even less is explained. As always, Goytisolo leaves everything obscured by ambiguity. The search for answers or for sense in Goytisolo's universe is a desperate and useless endeavor.
It was a terribly short work - gone in a day - which might qualify it for a re-read soon to see if my view can't be corrected, but, with that said, Goytisolo, as always, is nothing if not thematically/conceptually peculiar: A pedophilic Frenchman's soul enters a sort of thereafter in the form of a cybercafe where he views all sorts of images of all sorts of corpses, victims of war and of terrorist actions (Goytisolo is ever the necrophilic aesthete), and soon comes into contact with the leader of a terrorist unit led by the bizarre "Alice" (the quotations are part and parcel of her identity), a woman who, when he is not performing in pornographic revues dressed in tights and garters, is coordinating attacks on the world the dead Frenchman left which he seems able to return to at will - and, no, the shift in she/he pronouns was no mistake; "Alice"'s gender shifts with every pronoun.
Goytisolo, fond of blurring dreams, visions and reality into an indistinguishable image; of synthesizing reality and irreality produces a seamless and nonsensical shifting of identity - of man or woman; of body or spirit - without ceremony and without explanation; it is a mere fact of Goytisolo's universe the same way most in this world do not question the fact of their simple physiological existence.
Nothing much makes sense, and even less is explained. As always, Goytisolo leaves everything obscured by ambiguity. The search for answers or for sense in Goytisolo's universe is a desperate and useless endeavor.
Another metanarrative following 11 years after Quarantine, this time centered on the Siege of Sarajevo arising during the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. The narrator of the book's first part, a mysterious J.G. who may or not himself be fictional, dies in an artillery strike on his hotel. The body and his passport both disappear. All that remains behind as a record of his existence is a manuscript which may or not have been doctored; a manuscript of apocryphal writings predicting events that occur during the siege after the alleged and perhaps non-existent author's death, verses celebrating sodomy and defecation, as well as a number of poems whose authorship is similarly doubtful. At no point do we arrive nearer toward any resolution as to the author's identity; each time something edging toward an explanation occurs, some further meddling is discovered, casting the whole affair into increasing degrees of complexity.
The novel doubles as a sort of attack on the West's indifference. The actual blockade lasted roughly four years, and characters in the text often wonder why they have yet to receive the slightest assistance from anyone anywhere. It also muses on the normalcy of tragedy; of the normalization of living as though one were constantly in a sniper's sights (many often were) or would find themselves in the blast radius of an artillery strike; of the awful but simple fact that 'tragedies that go on for too long are boring.' (After all, aren't tragedies, at least while they're shiny and new, a perverse form of entertainment? [Goytisolo I'm sure might have had a few words similar to Baudrillard's regarding the Gulf War]).
I cannot help but think that the explosion of the bomb that took his mother's life in his native Spain has echoed throughout every work across every year until the end of his life. Familiar to Goytisolo's readers are gruesome images of bodies bloodied, bullet-ridden, and blown apart....
I've noticed when victims of the violence are given singular mention (and are not swept over in descriptions of corpses amassed atop countless others), they are often women; perhaps literary projections of the recurrently murdered mother. The last lines of the novel before the appendix of poems describes a woman dead from a bullet in the neck; the novel's final image of the recurrently murdered mother.
The novel doubles as a sort of attack on the West's indifference. The actual blockade lasted roughly four years, and characters in the text often wonder why they have yet to receive the slightest assistance from anyone anywhere. It also muses on the normalcy of tragedy; of the normalization of living as though one were constantly in a sniper's sights (many often were) or would find themselves in the blast radius of an artillery strike; of the awful but simple fact that 'tragedies that go on for too long are boring.' (After all, aren't tragedies, at least while they're shiny and new, a perverse form of entertainment? [Goytisolo I'm sure might have had a few words similar to Baudrillard's regarding the Gulf War]).
I cannot help but think that the explosion of the bomb that took his mother's life in his native Spain has echoed throughout every work across every year until the end of his life. Familiar to Goytisolo's readers are gruesome images of bodies bloodied, bullet-ridden, and blown apart....
I've noticed when victims of the violence are given singular mention (and are not swept over in descriptions of corpses amassed atop countless others), they are often women; perhaps literary projections of the recurrently murdered mother. The last lines of the novel before the appendix of poems describes a woman dead from a bullet in the neck; the novel's final image of the recurrently murdered mother.
Is the narrator dead, or is he merely dreaming? The narrator, who is in the midst of actively writing the narrative we are reading, has followed a friend into the underworld, and what follows are Goytisolo's familiar convulsion of images, although what occurs in the underworld is nearly indistinguishable from what occurs in a dream, or in reality. The images of masses of dead and dying bodies of the underworld are not unlike the bullet-ridden corpses shown in broadcasts from the Gulf War.
Everywhere there are bodies bloodied and blown apart, bullet-ridden or beaten; desolate temples, fallen monuments, sites sacred to man devastated. However, the morbid images are interrupted by brief coruscations of brighter images - this novel is, in parts, a celebration of friendship, after all! You only need to crawl through levels of the underworld and over hordes of corpses to get there.
This novel is additionally, and perhaps above all, about the art of literary creation. The very fabrication of the narrative is a meditative journey through the afterlife, through the human condition as it is in life and after the spirit has passed on. Once the novel has been written - once we have reached its final page - the spirits of the dead have been released, and the spirit of his friend is put to rest. The only way, she says, for her to carry on after the death of her body is for Goytisolo to continue writing about her. The multifarious narrative levels is reminiscent of Calvino in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler if Calvino's magical realism occurred in a world indescribably more gruesome and barbarous.
I've grown so used to Goytisolo's self-professed serpentine style. It's what I've grown to love him for, and here in Quarantine, arriving 16 years after the last book of his monolithic trilogy, but - what the hell is this? - there are periods, for Christ's sake; capital letters. The familiar convulsion of images now occurs within the constraints of a more formal structure of language the serpent, drained of its venom and no doubt exhausted after over two fevered decades of violence, has been caged here. Every period is a wall, a hindrance, beyond which language must begin its course anew.
I still love Goytisolo in this book, of course, but it's amusing; in his case, his traditional structure of language here in Quarantine takes some getting used to after having lost myself in a number of labyrinths of his architecture.
Everywhere there are bodies bloodied and blown apart, bullet-ridden or beaten; desolate temples, fallen monuments, sites sacred to man devastated. However, the morbid images are interrupted by brief coruscations of brighter images - this novel is, in parts, a celebration of friendship, after all! You only need to crawl through levels of the underworld and over hordes of corpses to get there.
This novel is additionally, and perhaps above all, about the art of literary creation. The very fabrication of the narrative is a meditative journey through the afterlife, through the human condition as it is in life and after the spirit has passed on. Once the novel has been written - once we have reached its final page - the spirits of the dead have been released, and the spirit of his friend is put to rest. The only way, she says, for her to carry on after the death of her body is for Goytisolo to continue writing about her. The multifarious narrative levels is reminiscent of Calvino in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler if Calvino's magical realism occurred in a world indescribably more gruesome and barbarous.
I've grown so used to Goytisolo's self-professed serpentine style. It's what I've grown to love him for, and here in Quarantine, arriving 16 years after the last book of his monolithic trilogy, but - what the hell is this? - there are periods, for Christ's sake; capital letters. The familiar convulsion of images now occurs within the constraints of a more formal structure of language the serpent, drained of its venom and no doubt exhausted after over two fevered decades of violence, has been caged here. Every period is a wall, a hindrance, beyond which language must begin its course anew.
I still love Goytisolo in this book, of course, but it's amusing; in his case, his traditional structure of language here in Quarantine takes some getting used to after having lost myself in a number of labyrinths of his architecture.
God, I love Goytisolo. There is so much of his language that appeals to the aesthete in me. Whereas Musil's writing blooms with ideas where it is barren in plot (as it was meant to be), Goytisolo's garden is lush with language and imagery. Much of the pleasure of Goytisolo's language lies in its frenetic propulsion & the frantic convulsion of images coruscating in the reader’s mind.
Makbara is far more gentle than the books in his trilogy, having been published 5 years after Juan the Landless which closed the trilogy. Goytisolo compares his language to a snake - sly, sinuous, cunning - although it seems exhausted of its venom here in Makbara, although this is no point of complaint since its readers need not subordinate themselves to Goytisolo's abuse as was the condition for his earlier novels. One need only lose themselves in a sprawling and profusive language.
The serpent of Goytisolo's language slithers not through plot, but through a convulsion of images; this time through images of markets, North African bazaars, American malls, designer clothing, and Moroccan djellabas and kaftans; of bodies - in dress or in flesh - of vaginas, asses, cocks, hands, & eager mouths. These two dissimilar themes are, of course, synthesized; one cruises for commodities, products, and bodies alike as they walk along the streets of the bazaar or the aisles of the supermarket in Goytisolo's N. Africa. Maqbara is Arabic for 'grave', & Goytisolo used Makbara to refer to cemeteries where lovers steal away to be intimate.
The idea that Goytisolo intended Makbara to communicate the idea of sex as freedom is amusing to me since I took all of the passages conflating the market and the body, or commerce and sexuality, to be a more severe commentary on human sexuality, one devoid of intimacy. All of the talk of markets and bodies is not quite a language to liberate or an image to edify - Guyotat, too, writes of North African markets & bodies as does Goytisolo, although the same images give birth to savage sexual cruelty, and slavery in Guyotat's universe.
Makbara is far more gentle than the books in his trilogy, having been published 5 years after Juan the Landless which closed the trilogy. Goytisolo compares his language to a snake - sly, sinuous, cunning - although it seems exhausted of its venom here in Makbara, although this is no point of complaint since its readers need not subordinate themselves to Goytisolo's abuse as was the condition for his earlier novels. One need only lose themselves in a sprawling and profusive language.
The serpent of Goytisolo's language slithers not through plot, but through a convulsion of images; this time through images of markets, North African bazaars, American malls, designer clothing, and Moroccan djellabas and kaftans; of bodies - in dress or in flesh - of vaginas, asses, cocks, hands, & eager mouths. These two dissimilar themes are, of course, synthesized; one cruises for commodities, products, and bodies alike as they walk along the streets of the bazaar or the aisles of the supermarket in Goytisolo's N. Africa. Maqbara is Arabic for 'grave', & Goytisolo used Makbara to refer to cemeteries where lovers steal away to be intimate.
The idea that Goytisolo intended Makbara to communicate the idea of sex as freedom is amusing to me since I took all of the passages conflating the market and the body, or commerce and sexuality, to be a more severe commentary on human sexuality, one devoid of intimacy. All of the talk of markets and bodies is not quite a language to liberate or an image to edify - Guyotat, too, writes of North African markets & bodies as does Goytisolo, although the same images give birth to savage sexual cruelty, and slavery in Guyotat's universe.
I am not sure what to blame for my exhaustion; this novel, or my continuous reading through all of her books (aside from The Piano Teacher) which kindled the first spark of fascination a few months ago. This novel is repetitive which was tolerable perhaps within the first 200 pages, but afterward returning to musings on the same theme for the nth time was exhausting. The cyclical observations and musings would have been far better suited to a novel half of Greed's length. I only continued to power through it because I'm a filthy completionist, although I read most of the last half absentmindedly.
The setting is a rural mountain town, and the story revolves around a local policeman known around town (especially by the local women), and the disappearance and murder of a local girl. The mountain itself as well as the river into which the victim has been sunk are personified to the point that they figure as strongly as any other character into the plot, although this is only interesting up to a point - again, repetition inevitably spoils the charm.
I enjoyed the three books of hers I read prior to this one, so I figured I could continue through this one with unflagging desire, but it couldn't be so. Unfortunately, Jelinek was not able to maintain my interest across as many consecutive books as Goytisolo has for me.
The setting is a rural mountain town, and the story revolves around a local policeman known around town (especially by the local women), and the disappearance and murder of a local girl. The mountain itself as well as the river into which the victim has been sunk are personified to the point that they figure as strongly as any other character into the plot, although this is only interesting up to a point - again, repetition inevitably spoils the charm.
I enjoyed the three books of hers I read prior to this one, so I figured I could continue through this one with unflagging desire, but it couldn't be so. Unfortunately, Jelinek was not able to maintain my interest across as many consecutive books as Goytisolo has for me.
If you read one book by Jelinek, make it this one. She's at her prime here; all of the elements of mania, obsession, sexual deviancy/violence, and the conflict between the sexes is all present here, concentrated into a potent dose and sprinkled with some erudite musings on classical music and composition.
Accusations and insults introduce the mother and daughter from the first page when Erika, the piano teacher, is met by her mother, still awake, after returning from a long night out. Her whereabouts were unknown, but they are inconsequential - her mother expected her home sooner, and an abrupt slap across Erika's face establishes the stifling and controlling nature of their relationship. Jelinek said she was influenced by Hegel's master/slave dialectic in her writing, and this influence is represented most distinctly by Erika and her mother.
When Erika is not at her studio tutoring her pupils, she is at home watching television with her mother, dining with her, and, at night's end, sleeping with her - her room is not furnished with a mattress; she belongs to her mother.
Erika's stifling at her mother's hands and her sexual repression leads her to bizarre and sadomasochistic behavior. One of her repeated escapades are her outings to porno shops and into the private viewing booths. Nothing seems too odd besides the spectacle of a woman intruding in on a man's domain, where *men* do their business, until, in the middle of a viewing, Erika reaches into the garbage bin, pulls out a crumpled, soiled tissue and holds it up to her nose, indulging in the odor of the semen which is perhaps still moist in a sort of rapture - the sensory realm of sex overwhelms her in all of its immediacy.
Erika is only slightly bursting at the seams until she falls for one of her pupils, Walter Klemmer, and this relationship, which she resists to the best of her abilities, precipitates a total explosion of the carefully tended and composed persona she has maintained for years prior.
Erika doesn't know what she wants - she is at once master and masochist. She wants to be damaged and injured, but according only to her exact instructions, and her desires eventually leads to an absolute upheaval of her life as she knew it; an upheaval of Erika Kohut as she knew (or perhaps did not know) herself.
Accusations and insults introduce the mother and daughter from the first page when Erika, the piano teacher, is met by her mother, still awake, after returning from a long night out. Her whereabouts were unknown, but they are inconsequential - her mother expected her home sooner, and an abrupt slap across Erika's face establishes the stifling and controlling nature of their relationship. Jelinek said she was influenced by Hegel's master/slave dialectic in her writing, and this influence is represented most distinctly by Erika and her mother.
When Erika is not at her studio tutoring her pupils, she is at home watching television with her mother, dining with her, and, at night's end, sleeping with her - her room is not furnished with a mattress; she belongs to her mother.
Erika's stifling at her mother's hands and her sexual repression leads her to bizarre and sadomasochistic behavior. One of her repeated escapades are her outings to porno shops and into the private viewing booths. Nothing seems too odd besides the spectacle of a woman intruding in on a man's domain, where *men* do their business, until, in the middle of a viewing, Erika reaches into the garbage bin, pulls out a crumpled, soiled tissue and holds it up to her nose, indulging in the odor of the semen which is perhaps still moist in a sort of rapture - the sensory realm of sex overwhelms her in all of its immediacy.
Erika is only slightly bursting at the seams until she falls for one of her pupils, Walter Klemmer, and this relationship, which she resists to the best of her abilities, precipitates a total explosion of the carefully tended and composed persona she has maintained for years prior.
Erika doesn't know what she wants - she is at once master and masochist. She wants to be damaged and injured, but according only to her exact instructions, and her desires eventually leads to an absolute upheaval of her life as she knew it; an upheaval of Erika Kohut as she knew (or perhaps did not know) herself.
There is a peculiar reliance on language in Jelinek's books. So far each novel shows a different side of Jelinek. Lust is Jelinek at her most witty, with language games and puns abounding.
The language here is in service to, of course, lust and sexuality. Words are often followed by a homophonic twin, double entendres and playful or juvenile nicknames for genitals are as abundant as the husband's sexual whims. Remember how exhausting the ten-minute *YOU-KNOW* scene in Gaspar Noe's Irreversible was? I don't mean that this novel is as thematically gruesome, but it similarly aims toward exhaustion as an aesthetic effect, with sex scenes spanning numerous pages.The prose is smattered with semen and full of the anxious pressure that anticipates and demands sexual release - it is tense and taut with sexuality (a book I had to take care to guard from others' view on the bus and train).
This is not intimate love, however. This is a man exercising his will and control over what is his property by virtue of Austria's patriarchal society which, as was communicated in her Women as Lovers, allows women little hope for any course in life aside from that as a wife and a mother. Gerti is her husband's receptacle as the novel bluntly puts it, and little more. She is a mother as well, but the child exists as yet another recipient of the father's almighty will and frequent beatings.
Gerti searches for salvation in another lover, Michael, but, alas, her affair, despite her hopes, is certain to come to no good end - is he not yet another man compelled above all by lust?
The language here is in service to, of course, lust and sexuality. Words are often followed by a homophonic twin, double entendres and playful or juvenile nicknames for genitals are as abundant as the husband's sexual whims. Remember how exhausting the ten-minute *YOU-KNOW* scene in Gaspar Noe's Irreversible was? I don't mean that this novel is as thematically gruesome, but it similarly aims toward exhaustion as an aesthetic effect, with sex scenes spanning numerous pages.The prose is smattered with semen and full of the anxious pressure that anticipates and demands sexual release - it is tense and taut with sexuality (a book I had to take care to guard from others' view on the bus and train).
This is not intimate love, however. This is a man exercising his will and control over what is his property by virtue of Austria's patriarchal society which, as was communicated in her Women as Lovers, allows women little hope for any course in life aside from that as a wife and a mother. Gerti is her husband's receptacle as the novel bluntly puts it, and little more. She is a mother as well, but the child exists as yet another recipient of the father's almighty will and frequent beatings.
Gerti searches for salvation in another lover, Michael, but, alas, her affair, despite her hopes, is certain to come to no good end - is he not yet another man compelled above all by lust?
This book is odd. It deals, as the cover states, “women’s precarious position in a society dominated by money and men.” There are many beatings and alcoholic lovers and fathers. But never has Jelinek been so playful. The prose is terse and juvenile, often as though it were written by a teenager. Not one word is capitalized. There are no indents or tabs; no respect or consideration for the most common grammatical conventions.
The prose is detached from and uninterested in the emotional world of its characters; the beatings are described as perhaps an adolescent would describe the cooking of breakfast. It’s a mere occurrence, nothing more; nothing different from, say, a quiet walk through the countryside, or the total dissolution of a dream (a common theme in this novel). It is all of little consequence.
The story follows two women who seek the domestic life as a means of escaping the doldrums of their life in an alpine countryside - Brigitte who, on a whim, sets her heart on a prospective businessman, Heinz; and Paula, an adolescent who falls in love with Erich, a handsome but simple-minded Italian forester who loves alcohol and sports cars more than anything - and they continue their pursuit of the married life despite whatever misery or misfortune might follow (not due exclusively to the behavior of their desired husbands but due perhaps above all to life's tendency to fall into chaos of its own accord).
The prose is essentialist and reductive - Brigitte loves Heinz because he is Heinz, and one exceedingly telling passage describes a character’s hair as blonde as blonde hair is. X is X because it is X; this is the level of analysis the sophomoric prose is reduced to. But of course this effect is deliberate because what occurs in this story is total juvenalia, and, at times, even slapstick (calling Gombrowicz to mind).
Brigittes’s unwitting competitor for Heinz’ hand, Suzi, a young grammar school student receiving instruction on how to become the ideal housewife, accompanies Heinz and Brigitte on a walk, during which Brigitte periodically drags Suzi away to push her down and force her face into the mud. Brigitte and Suzi both race to the kitchen to be the first to prepare a meal for Heinz, scratching and slapping at each other in a competition to command the kitchen, paying no mind to Heinz and his parents who are all seated there in their midst. Paula purchases a car and drives her and Erich to Italy for their honeymoon with Erich imitating the engine noises of race cars all throughout the trip.
The novel is a lighthearted and humorous treatment of what no doubt would receive such heavy-handed literary treatment nowadays. There is no outrage, no argument, no polemics. Jelinek is too sophisticated and nuanced for that. The writing is a surprising departure from her other novels both in terms of style and in tone, but this further demonstrates her deft literary talent. It is humorous above all. For those who might be outraged by the subject matter (not by Jelinek’s treatment of it, of course, but by the subject matter itself), take a load off, relax those muscles that have been tensed in outrage for so long, quiet the shouting voice, and take a momentary rest to laugh along with Jelinek at the absurdity of it all.
The prose is detached from and uninterested in the emotional world of its characters; the beatings are described as perhaps an adolescent would describe the cooking of breakfast. It’s a mere occurrence, nothing more; nothing different from, say, a quiet walk through the countryside, or the total dissolution of a dream (a common theme in this novel). It is all of little consequence.
The story follows two women who seek the domestic life as a means of escaping the doldrums of their life in an alpine countryside - Brigitte who, on a whim, sets her heart on a prospective businessman, Heinz; and Paula, an adolescent who falls in love with Erich, a handsome but simple-minded Italian forester who loves alcohol and sports cars more than anything - and they continue their pursuit of the married life despite whatever misery or misfortune might follow (not due exclusively to the behavior of their desired husbands but due perhaps above all to life's tendency to fall into chaos of its own accord).
The prose is essentialist and reductive - Brigitte loves Heinz because he is Heinz, and one exceedingly telling passage describes a character’s hair as blonde as blonde hair is. X is X because it is X; this is the level of analysis the sophomoric prose is reduced to. But of course this effect is deliberate because what occurs in this story is total juvenalia, and, at times, even slapstick (calling Gombrowicz to mind).
Brigittes’s unwitting competitor for Heinz’ hand, Suzi, a young grammar school student receiving instruction on how to become the ideal housewife, accompanies Heinz and Brigitte on a walk, during which Brigitte periodically drags Suzi away to push her down and force her face into the mud. Brigitte and Suzi both race to the kitchen to be the first to prepare a meal for Heinz, scratching and slapping at each other in a competition to command the kitchen, paying no mind to Heinz and his parents who are all seated there in their midst. Paula purchases a car and drives her and Erich to Italy for their honeymoon with Erich imitating the engine noises of race cars all throughout the trip.
The novel is a lighthearted and humorous treatment of what no doubt would receive such heavy-handed literary treatment nowadays. There is no outrage, no argument, no polemics. Jelinek is too sophisticated and nuanced for that. The writing is a surprising departure from her other novels both in terms of style and in tone, but this further demonstrates her deft literary talent. It is humorous above all. For those who might be outraged by the subject matter (not by Jelinek’s treatment of it, of course, but by the subject matter itself), take a load off, relax those muscles that have been tensed in outrage for so long, quiet the shouting voice, and take a momentary rest to laugh along with Jelinek at the absurdity of it all.