Women and their desires

books for chores #6, fictions for people who also want and want and want

women and their desires - a fantasy in gouache

Justine, Lawrence Durrell

This is one of those books you wish you could write, but it has the quality of being unrepeatable. Nothing happens here and yet I wanted to keep listening. Alexandria looms large over all the characters. A bunch of expatriates try to find themselves while being very philosophical about it. The writing is so beautiful I couldn’t listen to it for sleep, although the narrator was incredibly soothing. I was losing too many details. Every word and every turn of phrase was worth listening to and being as lucid as possible to ingest them fully. I savoured it. It’s not the kind of writing I could ever even try to learn how to do. It’s esoteric. Alexandria itself is a mood, its heat and squalor reflects in the heat and squalor of relationships, the many affairs, their consequences. Yet it’s all a mirage, distorted by heat, by how exotic and foreign it is to the narrator. 

Justine is an obsession, her presence creates the universe. The city takes on her aroma, her mystery and all of Alexandria is only a tapestry where her lover must find her body again and again. All of life is about the relationship with her. One the lover feels guilty about but which he must also protect in the face of dangers that are both real to him and yet elusive when he moves to confront them.

What I took from it, other than the sheer pleasure of the words, is that maybe the more I read things like this the osmosis effect might happen infecting me with some better ways of weaving words.

Book mood: sweet seduction, transgression, danger, the city as a main character

What I’ll steal: Doing interiority right is hard, but here the characters spend almost unbearable times in introspection, turning things this way and that and I loved it. 

Magic Lessons, Alice Hoffman

Magic is by turns earthy and fragrant, it’s dangerous and necessary depending how you use it, magic is feminine and discreet, hidden in the song of the birds, the whispers of rivers, in the fragrance of herbs, it’s layered and tempting. Magic is both power and poison. The main character absorbs magic and becomes it although this doesn’t protect her from the perils of the world. Her protector is burned for her skill, she herself falls in love when she should know better. It’s not an all encompassing shield to hide behind unless you want to avoid real living and choose isolation. Love, loss and betrayal touch her, sometimes all at the same time, sometimes one by one. Violence is inescapable when men are involved. And even gifted women forget this and make unfortunate choices.

Maria, the main character, insists on doing the best she can to nourish growth and put only good out in the world, in spite of how entitled she’d be to bring on destruction. Even if she knows how to work little and big spells, her life is the life of an ordinary woman who wrestled from the world the privilege of making choices for herself, which is compelling enough without the supernatural. It’s a life where she needs to find answers, to grapple with doubt, to run after love that is not hers and then come to terms with what isn’t there, to save herself from the harm that comes from the hands of other people, to save herself from herself. Supernatural is not really the right word for what is woven into her life. A sense of the world is a better description of what she has, a way of working with nature for both good and bad, a sense which pushes her towards independence and towards action , both in tiny and in grand ways. I loved accompanying her.

Book mood: finding your way, seeing the magic all around and in small, hidden things

What I’ll steal: a story is about a place as well, places seep into us and add to who we are