Tag: books

Unavailable for Housework

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

In Motherland, Julia Ioffe tries to make the case that Soviet women were worse off than Soviet men because they did more housework.

The pesky fact that Soviet men were often unavailable to do housework because the regime murdered them at an enormously higher rate than women doesn’t seem to influence her argument. I’m on Chapter 30 out of 44, and in spite of Ioffe’s last name, I’m beginning to wonder if she’s not very smart. She’s recreating the meme “Men genocided. Women most impacted”, and doesn’t notice the weirdness of her harping on the housework when discussing Soviet genocide.

Video in English: BLM in Ukraine

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

I was going to post this story, as I usually do, but I realized that it’s easier to record it instead of writing it out and adding the images to a post. It’s a Friday in September, the hardest month both personally and at work, so I’m beat. The story in the video is good, though. It is about the efforts to make the BLM a big thing in Ukraine. It’s in English, so everybody can watch. I’m not a big maker of videos, so any comment or criticism is welcome.

Book Notes: Álvaro Pombo’s Gay Novel

~ Clarissa ~ 23 Comments

Contra natura – or “against nature” – is the magnum opus of the famous Spanish author Álvaro Pombo who finally decided to lay out his understanding of homosexuality after a lifetime of being openly gay. Pombo doesn’t write about the gays who imitate the heterosexual setup by getting married and setting up joint households. For those gays he has quite a bit of contempt because the kind of homosexuality that fails to embrace its unnatural (contra natura), anti-social dimension is, in Pombo’s eyes, pathetic and vaguely disgusting.

Pombo’s novel is about another kind of gays, the ones who are gay in order to avoid the complexities placed by women on the way to sex. That there is such a duality among homosexuals – the ones who want to be (or to marry) men who are like women and the ones that want a sex life free from female patterns – was a commonplace even in the prissy US 15 years ago. But now it’s all a big secret and we are supposed to pretend that the entirety of homosexuality can be reduced to the lifestyle embraced by Pete Buttigieg.

Pombo is blissfully unaware of political correctness and writes his novel to show what happens to the non-Buttigieg gays in old age. What do you do when you are 65, and your body simply can’t give you rapid-fire sex acts with a large variety of new partners? You have to buy the companionship of young men, Pombo says. You have to open yourself up to humiliation and abuse. To Pombo, that is perfectly fine. The gays, he says, should not be like the heterosexual

shit-eaters whom we have always envied and hated. Our purest connection is with failure, with marginalization and with death.

And that, Pombo believes, is fine. Gay men are the shadow of self-satisfied bourgeois propriety. They are a conduit to the darker, more painful and chaotic side of human beings, to the Dionysian rites of pleasure and pain that inspire non-reproductive creation. Instead of running down the streets in Pride parades, says Pombo, the love that dared not speak its name should now choose to not speak it in order to remain on the margins where, says Pombo, it belongs.

I am a heterosexual woman, and much of the novel’s text was hard for me to understand. It’s a beautifully written work of art. Pombo is one of the Spanish greats, having received every literary prize in existence, and deservedly so. But it took me far longer to read the novel because none of it was understandable to me or rooted in any sort of intuitive motivation. Which, of course, is the point.

I recommend the novel only if you are VERY open-minded, both from the left and from the right.

Carrère, Camus, and the Soviet Kommunalka

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

I finished reading Renaud Camus’s Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings. It’s an excellent book but there was something in it that shocked me. And it wasn’t a text by Camus. It was a letter written to Camus by another French writer, the mega best-selling novelist Emmanuel Carrère. I have written about Carrère here, if anybody needs a recap. In short, Carrère is a talentless hack and a Putin-loving lefty who accuses everybody of being a Nazi while praising actual, self-described Nazis like Eduard Limonov.

In his letter to Renaud Camus, Carrère chides the philosopher for his belief that there are way too many migrants in France. He says that if a horde (his word, not mine) of African migrants were to invade his apartment, he would not complain because such an act would bring about global justice. Carrère also says that the French have absolutely no right to live in France that supersedes the right of any recent arrival to live there. Not only does he find no validity in the nation-state, he seems unaware that such a concept even exists.

In response to Carrère’s fantasy of a horde of Senegalese and Afghanis moving into his beautiful apartment and exiling him and his family into one single room while they rubbish up the rest of the place, Camus, who is intellectually on a much higher level, responds that what Carrère seeks is the repetition of the Soviet kommunalka. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, normal people were forced to accept families of uncultured peasants moving into their apartments. The owners would be relegated to one tiny room and would have to co-exist with drunk, chaotic, nasty lumpenproletarians who would blow their noses into the curtains and spit on the floor. If Carrère were at least a bit educated, he’d know that his dream was already put into practice and led to very bad results.

Carrère is very famous in France. His books sell amazingly well. He is considered a true intellectual authority in spite of being a very weak writer and a shallow person. The mega-well-read Camus, in the meantime, is banned, cancelled, and persecuted by the country’s legal apparatus for wrongthink. Another significant difference between them is that the untalented but rich Carrère is a Putinoid and the intelligent, massively banned Camus is pro-Ukrainian. This cannot possibly be any other way because birds of a globalist feather flock together, and Carrère has natural sympathies towards the aggressively neoliberal goals of Putin’s Russia.

Book Notes: Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

Emily Wharton’s relatives are horrified by her plan to marry Ferdinand Lopez. He is not a British gentleman, and the Wharton family is convinced that the marriage will be a disaster. Emily disagrees because Ferdinand is living like (or, as we would say today, identifies as) a British gentleman, and that’s just as good. Or is it?

To her horror, Emily soon discovers that living like and identifying as are not the same as being. A British gentleman is a historically, culturally and temperamentally circumscribed entity. Try as he might, Ferdinand cannot keep the pretense of being “just like” one but unfortunately he and Emily are already married, and she cannot escape.

Unlike many 19th-century authors, Trollope was a master at creating profound, nuanced and memorable male characters. The European novel is replete with interesting female heroines, which is not surprising since, in the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were written primarily for female audiences. We all know the names of Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Fortunata and Jacinta, Eugénie Grandet, Jane Eyre, Clarissa, Pamela, and many others. Of course, there are also Robinson Crusoe, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Mauprat but one of them is a shipwreck, two are children, and the fourth you probably never heard of.

Trollope buckles the trend and gives us a large cast of complicated, strong, sometimes nasty and often deeply admirable men. In The Prime Minister, we once again meet my favorite male character of all times, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium. Trollope was great at creating meaningful character names. You don’t need to think hard to understand the social and economic status of somebody called the Duke of Omnium who lives at Gatherum Castle.

In a previous post, I talked about Plantagenet Palliser when he was a young husband who goes to heroic lengths to save his marriage to a capricious, self-indulgent woman. In The Prime Minister, Palliser is now my age and holds the highest political office in the land. His wife is as emotionally incontinent and demanding as always and tries to meddle aggressively in the way the Prime Minister runs his government. He has to keep her lovingly at bay while preserving his sense of duty and dignity both in his marriage and his public career.

I cannot think of another author who wrote about male friendships, male mentorships, and male interests as much and as beautifully as Trollope. What it means to be a husband, a father, a brother, a colleague were the issues that he explored time and again in his beautiful, long novels. The world of Trollope’s books is long gone but what a fascinating world it was. I am not sure we have gained much by leaving it so completely behind.

Book Notes: Anthony Trollope’s Cousin Henry

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

Trollope is my favorite Victorian novelist, both as a writer and a human being, and I always read something by him when weather gets colder and nights grew longer because he’s such a cozy author. What an extraordinary culture the one that he describes! What a lovely way of being! The system of property relations and the legal system are just amazing, especially if you are aware what was in existence in other places at the time. If you believe that Jane Austen didn’t write enough, you should be reading Trollope who wrote a stunning lot and in a similar, if somewhat more complex and elevated fashion.

Cousin Henry is an uncharacteristically short novel about the costs of indecisiveness. The Welsh squire Indefer Jones and his nephew Henry Jones are tragically indecisive, and the way that the author immerses us in their inner travails is priceless. The reason the Joneses vacillate so much is that they can’t figure out how to reconcile what they want with the strict moral code that was inculcated in them since infancy. This is Victorian literature, so of course, the moral code always wins, and that’s a good thing in Trollope’s universe of characters and events.

Some of Trollope’s novels can get heavy but Cousin Henry is very easy to read, clear and to-the-point. If you don’t have a lot of time to read but want to experience something high-quality, this novel could be just the ticket.

Book Notes: Victoria Kielland’s My Men

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

I’m very conflicted about this novel by the young Norwegian writer Victoria Kielland. It’s beautifully written. Kielland is a major talent. At only 39, she delivered a seriously impressive work of art.

However, there is something that is giving me serious creeps about My Men. It’s based on the life and experiences of the first known female serial killer in the US, Belle Gunness. And it’s not just loosely based or vaguely inspired. The main character is called Belle Gunness, and all the relatives and victims and events are like those of the real Belle.

I’m probably a major prude but I can’t get over it. Imagine if somebody wrote a novel about Ted Bundy, portraying him as this sad, tender, wounded, misunderstood victim who didn’t really want to murder anybody but he was kind of provoked into it against his will. We’d all be repulsed. But then why is it less repulsive to romanticize a woman who chopped up a couple dozen men and children all over the Midwest?

As I said, brilliantly written, major talent. And I do understand that Kielland is trying to show that even the worst piece of garbage evildoer perceives herself as a long-suffering, sweet little lamb. I get it. But I can’t get over, this bitch left behind a pile of corpses and you are making it sound cute? I’m probably a bad literary critic if I can’t place myself completely above these mundane considerations and value art above all. It is what it is, though. I loved the writing but quite hated the book.

Miranda July vs Moa Herngren

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

Miranda July (the author of All Fours) is more artistically gifted than Moa Herngren (the author of The Divorce). Still, if you are in the mood for a novel about the midlife crisis, I’d recommend Herngren.

For one, The Divorce gives space to both female and male experience of being in their early fifties. Herngren decided not to follow the fashionable trend of turning male characters into props who sit around waiting, supportively and silently, while their wives thrash around menopausally, destroying everything in sight. Herngren’s depiction of the male middle-aged life weariness is nuanced, kind, and very realistic.

Another reason is that Herngren’s characters aren’t rich, clueless bastards. These are regular people who struggle to pay the mortgage and worry about money. Most people can’t just drop everything and start bed-hopping around the country when middle age hits because nobody is rich enough for that. Herngren writes about normal, everyday people, and that makes the book a lot more useful. Middle age is difficult, and The Divorce reads like a handbook of what can go wrong and how to prevent it.

Of course, if All Fours were a literary masterpiece, none of this would matter. But it’s not. There’s talent there but not remotely enough to justify choosing this novel over The Divorce.

I recommend The Divorce very highly, even though the author piles it on way too thick to make her characters as representative of their type as possible. Besides, I’m eager to discuss it, so if you’ve read it or are planning to read, please make yourself known.

Book Notes: Moa Herngren’s The Divorce

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

After 32 years of “daily arguments about gender roles”, Niklas walks out on his wife Bea. Instantly, Bea’s sense of simmering irritation with the man she perceives as in constant need of her guidance turns to concern. Yes, she’s annoyed that Niklas spends too much time at the hospital where he works as a doctor, even though his earnings allow her to “do something meaningful with her life” in a vanity job. But still, how dare he walk out and avoid doing the chores she assigned to him!

Bea hops on her bike and rides in search of the wayward Niklas. It does cross her mind that she should have brushed her teeth and combed her hair but she rejects the idea of making herself look good for her husband. Sweaty, stinky, in Birkenstocks over grubby socks, she confronts Niklas and is stunned by his refusal to scurry back home. I could have stopped reading right then because people who wear Birkenstocks over socks have nobody to blame when their marriages collapse but I’m very interested in the “wifely drama” genre.

Women use books like Moa Herngren’s The Divorce to run through all sorts of scenarios that can imperil a marriage and find solutions before a problem arises. “Husband suddenly walks out” is one of the favorite female scenarios to explore. Herngren makes it way too easy for her readers, though, offering up an image of such a sad excuse for a wife that one would have to try really hard to reach her level of marital uselessness. Bea’s inability to formulate a single sentence free of exasperation or demand is comical, and so is her shock at finding out that this approach doesn’t evoke deep sexual longing towards her in her husband.

Niklas is a piss poor husband, too, of course. He’s man enough to get himself a girlfriend but is so terrified of his wife that he fails to inform her of that fact for months, forcing the miserable, Birkenstocked Bea to beg him, again and again, to tell her why he isn’t living at home.

There are still some useful things one can pick up from The Divorce, though. For instance, Bea is shocked to discover that Niklas left her for Maria Axelsson, a woman with scented candles and animal-print cushions, whom Bea and Niklas had spent years ridiculing. Lesson 1: if a man spends years ridiculing some random woman, he likes her. She’s a source of danger, especially if she is armed with animal-print cushions and you wear sandals over socks and don’t use deodorant.

Lesson 2: telling a dude that you want him “to take initiative” by doing exactly what you want him to do while looking enthusiastic is not going to lead anyplace nice. When a man takes initiative, there’s a strong probability that you won’t always like how that looks, so don’t be a Bea and demand initiative when what you really want is slavish obedience.

I don’t know if we have any young, unmarried people around here but this novel is a veritable textbook on how to screw up a marriage. With anybody less beaten down than the miserable Niklas, it would take only a few years of Bea’s marriage-killing strategies to turn the relationship into a smouldering wreck. Read The Divorce and do the exact opposite if you want your marriage to thrive.

The novel is a lot of fun, people. Highly recommended, enjoyable, light reading that’s screaming fun. Read it in a day to get rid of the horrible aftertaste from Claudia Piñeiro’s The Time of the Flies, and the remedy worked.

Book Notes: Claudia Piñeiro’s The Time of the Flies

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

In spite of the inane quotes from Angela Davis and Rebecca Solnit, I still decided to give Claudia Piñeiro’s novel a chance and ploughed on until the bitter, bitter end. And bitter it was, indeed, because it turned out that the whole point of The Time of the Flies is that any man has “the right to be a woman” and it’s “a right that must be recognized.” These are quotes, in case anybody didn’t catch on.

As I’ve been saying, the narrative of “rights” leads to very insane places if we don’t approach this concept carefully and intelligently.

Aside from Piñeiro’s insistence that it’s crucial to trans children in schools and keep it secret from their parents (which is hard to ignore because it’s what the novel is about), nothing about the book works. The way it’s put together is clumsy. The characters make no sense. Everything is fake. And I swear, she used to be an excellent writer. When she wrote about Argentina and things that are happening in Argentina and are relevant to Argentineans, she was an excellent bloody writer. But then, for some utterly confusing reason, she decided to abandon all that and write for the English-speaking admirers of Angela bloody Davis, and I’m so upset because this was one of my favorite Latin American authors and now she’s all “rah-rah, let’s prattle on about the stupid Anglo fixation on transing kids like it’s the most important issue on the planet.” It’s so subservient, so pathetic. The woman threw away her God-given talent for … this? To appeal to some marginal group of overheated Anglos?

I’m really upset right now. I could have spent these two days reading something worthwhile and instead got saddled with this crap.