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zalenaThe past few days has featured several repetitions; I thought I would report their existence here:
Author Slavenka Drakulic has a new book out about the life of Frieda Kahlo. Her book of essays How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed has been a staple in understanding everyday life under Soviet-style Communism and the challenges faced by both countries and individuals now that it is gone. Just this week Ilyena was telling me about how bras only came in two sizes under Soviet rule, and how her mother made alterations to try to get her one that fit while she was breast feeding her son. It was a total Drakulic moment (who has an essay that proposes the failure of Communism as being in large part a failure to provide for everyday needs---particularly for women---such as tampons). I've been talking about her book a lot, never even thinking the 1993 title might have a follow up (Cafe Europe, 1999), or that the author (who is apparently also a journalist) might have other works.
I am reading ghost stories, lately, including my latest review for teenreads The Ghosts of Kerfol by Deborah Noyes. It's based on a ghost story by Edith Wharton, whose supernatural tales have a subtlety I find truly terrifying. (That one about the New Years coven, where a bedridden women assumes she is in a house full of people, only to discover she is utterly and entirely alone.) I also thought I might be able to write an interesting review on it; I'm not disappointed. The book definitely has some shivers of the gothic variety, though it takes the entire five tales to get the full impact. Each tale builds on the previous (the first two are based on Wharton's original tale) and I have to admit that by the time I got to the last story in which a deaf boy 'hears' the ghosts, I had to stop reading, get up, turn on some lights and the radio, and eat a pickle before finishing the book.
I also zoomed through Sarah Addison Allen's two books, which are kind of magical realism lite, not unlike Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic. The first book Garden Spell is about gardening and women adrift. The two are set against each other in a juxtaposition of a balanced life. It was total book candy, especially since it featured a number of unsympathetic, unfleshed-out, characters, but I liked it enough to pick up her second book Sugar Queen and was pleased to discover that it was an improvement over the first.
Sugar Queen features Josey, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of a (now dead) wealthy man who cares for her invalid mother and has a stash of romance novels and candy in her closet, which she retreats to when life gets hard, or fails to materialize. One day she discovers Della Lee, a waitress, has moved into her closet, and refuses to leave until Josey has met unnamed conditions relating to her life. Secrets emerge and Josey starts leading her own life, making friends, and beginning a romance.
There is a slight twist at the ending that I found oddly moving. I will definitely be reading more of Addison Allen's books. It's nice to see how much she's grown as an author between the first two.
I talked to my mother today and told her about these books, both because I thought she would like them, and also because I see books of this type as a gateway opportunity for women to think about, identify, or talk about their problems. In this case, the book definitely deals with eating-disorders; perhaps not severe ones, but still the sort of cultural shame many women feel about eating. What's interesting about the book is that the author doesn't censure eating, or even the sensual pleasure of eating, but she does offer the character opportunities to experience both a larger variety of foods, and company in which to eat them.
Several years ago, working my way through books by Barbara Michaels, I was struck with how many of them contain bits and pieces of women's history, and women's issue, coded into the more sensationalistic plots. Since Michaels writes gothics, many times these histories or psychological burdens are manifest as literal hauntings, often times the vehicles are women's work: quilts, old clothes, journals, letters. The minutiae of a woman's life. I often thought as I read these books (and occasionally gave them to others) what a wonderful opportunity they represented for an education, or at least a way to start thinking about issues like social equality or domestic violence.
Kerfol, Wharton's story, is about a nobleman who is mauled by the spirits of his lady's pets that he murdered out of jealousy and a need to control his woman. One of the things she contrasts in her story is a worldview in which a Master has the right to curb his woman or kill his pets, and that people would not necessarily think of these things as being inappropriate or even exceptional. This is contrasted against our contemporary knowledge that these kinds of behaviors are signs not just of an unbalanced personality, but of impending domestic tragedy.
At the hinge of the story is a reference to his mother's tomb. Her effigy has a dog resting at her feet, a symbol of her loyalty and fidelity. His lady says something about how she wouldn't mind dying if her little pet would accompany her, shortly thereafter she finds her dog strangled, the first of many pets he destroys; they in turn return from their graves to avenge the abuse of their mistress. Kind of puts Hound of the Baskerville's to shame, no?
Author Slavenka Drakulic has a new book out about the life of Frieda Kahlo. Her book of essays How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed has been a staple in understanding everyday life under Soviet-style Communism and the challenges faced by both countries and individuals now that it is gone. Just this week Ilyena was telling me about how bras only came in two sizes under Soviet rule, and how her mother made alterations to try to get her one that fit while she was breast feeding her son. It was a total Drakulic moment (who has an essay that proposes the failure of Communism as being in large part a failure to provide for everyday needs---particularly for women---such as tampons). I've been talking about her book a lot, never even thinking the 1993 title might have a follow up (Cafe Europe, 1999), or that the author (who is apparently also a journalist) might have other works.
I am reading ghost stories, lately, including my latest review for teenreads The Ghosts of Kerfol by Deborah Noyes. It's based on a ghost story by Edith Wharton, whose supernatural tales have a subtlety I find truly terrifying. (That one about the New Years coven, where a bedridden women assumes she is in a house full of people, only to discover she is utterly and entirely alone.) I also thought I might be able to write an interesting review on it; I'm not disappointed. The book definitely has some shivers of the gothic variety, though it takes the entire five tales to get the full impact. Each tale builds on the previous (the first two are based on Wharton's original tale) and I have to admit that by the time I got to the last story in which a deaf boy 'hears' the ghosts, I had to stop reading, get up, turn on some lights and the radio, and eat a pickle before finishing the book.
I also zoomed through Sarah Addison Allen's two books, which are kind of magical realism lite, not unlike Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic. The first book Garden Spell is about gardening and women adrift. The two are set against each other in a juxtaposition of a balanced life. It was total book candy, especially since it featured a number of unsympathetic, unfleshed-out, characters, but I liked it enough to pick up her second book Sugar Queen and was pleased to discover that it was an improvement over the first.
Sugar Queen features Josey, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of a (now dead) wealthy man who cares for her invalid mother and has a stash of romance novels and candy in her closet, which she retreats to when life gets hard, or fails to materialize. One day she discovers Della Lee, a waitress, has moved into her closet, and refuses to leave until Josey has met unnamed conditions relating to her life. Secrets emerge and Josey starts leading her own life, making friends, and beginning a romance.
There is a slight twist at the ending that I found oddly moving. I will definitely be reading more of Addison Allen's books. It's nice to see how much she's grown as an author between the first two.
I talked to my mother today and told her about these books, both because I thought she would like them, and also because I see books of this type as a gateway opportunity for women to think about, identify, or talk about their problems. In this case, the book definitely deals with eating-disorders; perhaps not severe ones, but still the sort of cultural shame many women feel about eating. What's interesting about the book is that the author doesn't censure eating, or even the sensual pleasure of eating, but she does offer the character opportunities to experience both a larger variety of foods, and company in which to eat them.
Several years ago, working my way through books by Barbara Michaels, I was struck with how many of them contain bits and pieces of women's history, and women's issue, coded into the more sensationalistic plots. Since Michaels writes gothics, many times these histories or psychological burdens are manifest as literal hauntings, often times the vehicles are women's work: quilts, old clothes, journals, letters. The minutiae of a woman's life. I often thought as I read these books (and occasionally gave them to others) what a wonderful opportunity they represented for an education, or at least a way to start thinking about issues like social equality or domestic violence.
Kerfol, Wharton's story, is about a nobleman who is mauled by the spirits of his lady's pets that he murdered out of jealousy and a need to control his woman. One of the things she contrasts in her story is a worldview in which a Master has the right to curb his woman or kill his pets, and that people would not necessarily think of these things as being inappropriate or even exceptional. This is contrasted against our contemporary knowledge that these kinds of behaviors are signs not just of an unbalanced personality, but of impending domestic tragedy.
At the hinge of the story is a reference to his mother's tomb. Her effigy has a dog resting at her feet, a symbol of her loyalty and fidelity. His lady says something about how she wouldn't mind dying if her little pet would accompany her, shortly thereafter she finds her dog strangled, the first of many pets he destroys; they in turn return from their graves to avenge the abuse of their mistress. Kind of puts Hound of the Baskerville's to shame, no?
