Reviews and Comments

A recommendation from my co-worker who I have kind of a two-man book club going with. This feels like a good follow-up to "Sex Variant Women In Literature", which I read earlier this year. Excited about this one.

Thanks for cracking open my consciousness again, Clarice

When in doubt, Clarice

God I wish I’d had a copy of this when I was like 13. I’m usually more of a purple prose enjoyer, but the straightforward style made this feel so immediate and personal. I’m glad I was familiar with Feinberg’s life and activism before going in, because otherwise many moments in here would have felt very “and then everybody clapped”. But ze was really about it.

Much has been said about the brutality in this novel, but it was the soft squishy parts that really broke me. I had to put the book down and lie down many times.

It feels like a diary, a condensed history, an indictment, and a mirror all at once. This really nestled into my heart, I already know I’m going to re-read it in a few years’ time. A salve for my little outsider heart.

This play is all I can think about since devouring it in a sitting. I have a lot of feelings about this, none of which I’m ready to articulate, but suffice to say this really spoke to me. The more I read about the myths preceding the events in the play the more obsessed I become. This has the feeling of an epic but is so thoroughly distilled down to an emotional core. Also god this activates my feminine rage. I can see why Courtney Love once claimed that this play helped inspire the name “Hole”

i'm here to support women's wrongs

Went into this one somewhat blind and didn't realize how humorous / satirical it would be. Lots of wink-wink, nudge-nudge fourth wall breaks. It's both a love letter to and a satire of Virginia Woolf's lover and literature itself. There is a generous sprinkling of historical criticism and themes of loss (loss of love, loss of home, loss of time, loss of self). Also gotta love seeing two gender-fluid tri-centenarians win. Now i've got to tee up the movie adaptation.

back on my bullshit

Unfortunately i think this one may not be for me. I typically like poetic prose, but I just can't seem to drop into this writer's style in particular. It also feels a bit too navel-gazey for me. Makes me feel kind of how I felt trying to read Bluets.

cried during the translator's note. cried during the introduction. cried throughout the novel itself. her punctuation and cadence is so halting and breathless. the doomed and anxious nature of youth dotted with so much playfulness and joy, but you know there's no happy ending.

saw the french translation of this in a shop window late at night and stopped in my tracks. my lesbian-lit radar is strong. excited to be starting this and to seek out some translations of her poetry next.

tore through this one. i love a good meta-narrative / fourth-wall break. now i need to read up on gnosticism before finishing the trilogy.

This was a really insightful, albeit dated, history and literary criticism of lesbians in literature from antiquity to ~1950s. It was interesting to take a bird’s eye view on the many cultural pendulum swings that are covered here. Goes into women’s struggles to be published at various times, books being censored and / or banned, the lack of women in literary criticism, and lesbian characters as depicted by both women and men.

19th-century / turn of the 20th century women in literature continue to dominate my collection. the melodrama, the tangents, the purple prose, the way the narrative is told primarily through emotional impressions alone. putting her next to Collette on my shelf as they were neighbours in real life and maybe she'll be comforted there.

back on my bullshit