The Review Backlog

I know I’ve been shamefully absent. I blame summer (and summer romance for that matter). But just because I haven’t been writing, doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. And since I’m becoming increasingly intimidated by my review backlog, I’m going to do a quick review blitz, since apparently no one wants to read a long review online anyway.

Gods Behaving Badly, by Marie Phillips

This one was an enthusiastic recommendation from a fellow KIRBCer, and it certainly was an amusing little romp – easy to read, but sharp and intelligent. Philips explores what would happen if everyone’s favourite Olympians were still alive, living in London in the modern day, forgotten, their powers waning. The plot is driven not only by their predicament, but, as in the old tales, the ambroisa-eaters meddling in the affiars of mortals – specifically, two almost-lovers: Neil, an architect, and Alice a cleaning lady. When Eros spears Apollo with one of his famous arrows, Apollo falls in love with Alice, and everything goes to . . . Hades. Philips  knows the mythology well, and the novel is filled with intelligent barbs as sharp and true as Eros’ arrows  (Aprodite to Hermes: “You’re the God of coincidences aren’t you?” He replies: “I’m the God of everything nobody else wants to do.”) and good-humoured  satire.

Blindness, by Jose Saramago

This has already been reviewed for the KIRBC by M-Shaw, my reactions ranged from jawdropped in horror while on public transport (the initial announcements when they are first interred “In the event of a fire getting out of control, whether accidentally or on purpose, the firemen will not intervene,” proved to be the least of the horrors the book had in store), to being charmed by the dog of tears or the tenderness between the woman with the dark glasses and the old man with the eyepatch, to being astounded at scenes of such unique and lasting beauty such as the three women washing clothes on the balcony in the rain. This moment was, for me, the greatest of the entire book, a brief moment of purity, companionship, and hope amongst all the darkness (or rather, obliterating whiteness). A brief excerpt, which perhaps one cannot fully appreciate without the intense devestation and despair which has preceeded it:

“They cannot imagine that there are moreover three naked women out there, as naked as when they came into the world, they seem to be mad, the must  be mad, people in their right mind do not start washing on a balcony exposed to the view of the neighbourhood, even less looking like that, what does it matter that we are blind, these are things one must not do, my God, how the rain is pouring down on them, how it trickles between their breasts how it lingers and disappears into the darkness of the pubis, how it finally drenches and flows over the thighs, perhaps we have judged them wrong, or perhaps we are unable to see this as the most beautiful and glorious thing that has happened in the history of this city, a sheet of foam flows from the floor of the balcony, if only I could go with it, falling interminably clean, purified, naked.”

Yes, the sentences are mostly that long. And the dialogue, being all in one paragraph requires close attention. But of course it is worth it — for like the doctor’s wife, we are called to be witnesses to selfishness and corruption alongside courage and kindness.

And though I haven’t watched it yet, the movie trailer  (which doesn’t look great to me, but I won’t judge a movie by its trailer):

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson

I discovered Winterson only recently, through a story in Four Letter Word. It lead me to Lighthousekeeping, which I adored, so I was thrilled to find Oranges at a garage sale. It’s an interesting exploration of relgious fanaticism (it reminded me of the earlier parts of Zadie Smith’s brilliant White Teeth) and of ungovernable love (admittedly another sort of fanaticism). Oranges follows a young woman’s sexual awakening as she falls in love with another girl, an unpardonable offense in the eyes of her mother, and the church which was the foundation of her life and her worldview. For me it was most successful in its humour, which grabbed me right on the first page as the girl describes her mother: “She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies. Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms),  Next Door, Sex (in its many forms), Slugs. Friends were: God, Our Dog, Auntie Madge, The Novels of Charlotte Bronte, Slug Pellets.” I foud my attention wandered as Winterson strayed into fairy tale allegory, sometimes recruiting Arthur’s knights, notably Percival, the pure of heart, to prop up against the failed Biblical allegories. It seeemd heavy handed, and lacked the vivacity and poignancy of the first-person narrative. I’m sure some deeper digging would yield richer results, though, I’m sure this one has found favour with critics and academics.  So although I wasn’t head over heels for Oranges as I was with Winterson’s other work, it was still worthwhile and engaging read.

Phew, caught up. As for upcoming reviews, I’ll admit I’m currently reading The Host, which so far has been far more gruelling than any of the Twilight saga books, which I hope to follow with something to repair my damaged brain cells like Suite Francaise, or Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love.

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On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

Seeing as I’m quite backblogged at the moment, I’ll keep this review as short and sweet as the book itself. On Chesil Beach is a psychological foray into the minds of two virgins on their wedding night in 1962. They are kindred spirits, as Anne would say, and look forward to a long and happy life together. There’s just one small thing they need to get out of their way – sex. For Edward, this is the culmination of everything he’s desired. His lust is at a fever pitch, and he is filled with joyous anticipation. Florence, on the other hand, is not just apprehensive but terrified.

With a less adept writer at the helm, this novella could fall flat, but McEwan enters the thoughts of his characters effortlessly. For as McEwan slides back and forth between the eager bridegroom and his reluctant bride, the reader can empathize with both, and shares the couple’s foreboding that everything is about to go horribly wrong.

And so it does, with one humiliation that changes the whole course of the newlywed’s lives – for their great love and their easy companionship can overcome everything – except sex. Of course the novella is about more than sex – I it’s ultimately about pride and its incompatibility with understanding.

My only objection to the novel was hinting that Florence had had a bad sexual experience.  Could not the simple fear of sex when she knows so little of it be enough? I felt this in some ways invalidated those who had not had a bad experience, but were still afraid – certainly for hundreds of years there would have been wives who approached their wedding beds with apprehension, if not terror. Setting it in the 1960s, the age of free love, made it even more compelling for me – suggesting that physical liberation wasn’t universal, making it that much more difficult for those who can’t join the love-in.

Though it lacked the scope of Atonement, On Chesil Beach is a worthwhile use of a couple hours, a chance to see two minds laid bare in a way that might only be possible in real life if we could let go of our pride.

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Orlando, by Virginia Woolf

My redmist book is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the acme of Bloomsburyish poppycock, a self-flattering appropriation of English literature and history, distilled from Woolf’s temporarily addled brain by the heat of her infatuation for the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West. Should be sold with a sick bag attached.

Tarquin Hall, writer

The preceding quotation comes from the article in my previous post about critics’ most loathed books. I read this article while reading Orlando, but despite this delightfully venomous criticism, I think dismissing Orlando as a convoluted trifle is a mistake (and just wait, I’m calling in the big guns to back me up). Of course I must admit I’m a lover of Virginia Woolf; To the Lighthouse and The Waves (which also gets slammed in the aforementioned article) are two of my favourite books. I am not, however, an indiscriminate lover of Woolf – I was never taken by Jacob’s Room, and to this day, I’ve been known to say things like, “That’s the Jacob’s Room of Craig’s albums.”

Woolf admits to writing Orlando for fun, for a change of pace from her usual work, but that’s not to say that it should be taken lightly, or that it has no valid points to make. It offers a delightful parody of biography, in which the biographer relies on narrative devices far more than on fact, and endlessly frustrates the scopophilic desires of the reader. At one point the biographer describes a fire that destroyed many important documents containing the particulars of Orlando’s life leaving “only tantalizing fragments which leave the most important points obscure.” And of course Woolf’s narrative is doing much the same.

It is well-known that Orlando is modelled after Woolf’s friend/lover Vita Sackville-West, and the academic editor (I was reading the Oxford World’s Classic edition), certainly drives that home, teasing out all the parallels between Orlando and Vita. Yet, I can’t help but wonder if this is not Woolf’s greatest joke: planting allusions for people to hunt for in their desperation to turn Orlando into the very thing it resists: a literal biography.

And while the satirizing of history, and biography and writers is amusing, Orlando‘s most important contribution is its challenge to static, vigorously enforced gender identities. Orlando is born male, and as a young man is magically transformed by three gender-bending witches into a woman.  Orlando’s change of sex is a theatrical production acted out by the witches, and Orlando must continuously re-enact her own gender throughout the rest of the book. The biographer discusses how Orlando sometimes chooses to dress as a man even after she has become a woman, and how she must modify her behaviour and act the part of her desired sex. She also continues to identify with her male self and is consequently always both male AND female, denying a singular gender identity and inhabiting the space between them.  Woolf writes:

Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

Unfortunatley, Woolf is forced to rely on existing sexual stereotypes to demonstrate Orlando’s dual gender (inhabiting a space between the sexes is of course dependant on their separate and identifiable existences). Nevertheless, Woolf highlights the conditions for intelligibility in various historical periods, all the while maintaining that Orlando herself cannot be limited by traditional sexual roles.

The sexual relations in the book also become complicated with Orlando’s sexual transformation – all of the sudden all of his/her relationships of the past and future are homosexual as well as heterosexual. Woolf cleverly escapes the perils of writing of openly gay relationship since Orlando only ever engages in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex; however, if she is still the same person, every heterosexual relationship is shadowed by a homosexual one.

To think all this was written 60 years before Judith Butler wrote about gender as performance and about the discursive construction of sex. Orlando is a literal representation of Butler’s theory – someone whose sex is changed by mere words, and is something that needs to be constantly re-enacted and reaffirmed. The body itself is secondary, and the sexed body is completely absent.  For example, when Orlando gives birth to a baby boy, it is a labour of words, in which Orlando simply comments on the world outside the window in a rushing, breathless stream, until all of the sudden a baby appears, seemingly born of the humanity observed outside the window, rather than of Orlando herself. Interestingly, there is no present father for the child, so it is possible that the baby was born of the male and female sides of Orlando – she is simultaneously mother and father to the child.

I’m going to wind up with a little Butler, who I’ve resisted quoting throughout (partly because I lack the willpower to re-enter the linguistic trenches of her syntax):

“Sex” is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the “one” becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility. (From Bodies That Matter)

And the struggle for cultural intelligibility is exactly why Orlando is so much more than a joke, or the result of an infatuation-addled brain. It pointedly demonstrates the ways in which a body of either gender is acceptable, all the while challenging these social mores with someone who exposes their very superficiality, turning sex not into a fixed restriction, but rather a performance that can be subtly altered over time. Woolf was writing A Room of One’s Own right around the same time as Orlando, and as she articulated the need for women to have their own physical space, it seems she was also calling for a new space for the psyche, an independent corporeal dwelling – a body of one’s own.

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