Such an interesting read! The story somehow reminded me of Kapuściński . There is a lot of vivid scenic detail of unpleasant places, and the harshnessSuch an interesting read! The story somehow reminded me of Kapuściński . There is a lot of vivid scenic detail of unpleasant places, and the harshness of economic strife is never far from these pages. The translation feels oddly like it was done by a non-native speaker. This isn’t a criticism...I don’t have access to the original as I write this but I enjoyed the way the language here feels like it inhabits an interstitial space between languages. A unique read....more
I love Ruby Hamad for this attempt to navigate the knotty nexus of gender, race, and feminism. I felt more like I was talking with a friend than I wasI love Ruby Hamad for this attempt to navigate the knotty nexus of gender, race, and feminism. I felt more like I was talking with a friend than I was reading a manifesto. That approach has pros and cons.
It reminded me of the reading experience I have with Richard Dawkins. With both of these authors I feel they are making assumptions about what’s obvious to them—that everyone already knows this thing they’re talking about—and in other cases they overexplain what really does feel obvious. I just didn’t fit well with Hamad’s assumptions about her general reader.
Another thing I found interesting here is that Hamad sometimes wrote as “we” in her sentences, and sometimes addresses “you” or “women,” and I wasn’t always sure who belonged to “we” or “you” or “women.”
On the whole it was enjoyable and enlightening....more
Three Plastic Rooms by Petra Hůlová is the story of an aging prostitute and her relationship with her own body, a novel rendered from Czech into hauntThree Plastic Rooms by Petra Hůlová is the story of an aging prostitute and her relationship with her own body, a novel rendered from Czech into hauntingly poetic English by Alex Zucker. Oh, my goodness. How can there exist a novel that is at once so open to beauty and yet in which every sentence is some new shocker? Here you go. This is that book. It’s the kind of book that nineteen out of twenty readers will say is too upsetting to love, or maybe even to finish, and the twentieth person will say "this book changed my life" or maybe: "this book convinces me that we are nowhere near the end as a species of exploring all the ways human language can be called upon to express new things."
As I write this, there has not been a single review of the novel on Amazon, which is surprising. It seems the book that would make people angry enough to write about it. Let’s see. It’s the kind of book that you can open on any page and be unbelievably disturbed. Let me try now:
the true mumsyfuckers have enough of that little drama at home, and the fuckshop, a quiet backwater of kissed knees, offers a gulf of solace, because what an orgasm means to these men’s wives was drilled into their heads by all those sex scene disasters you see at the multiplex, which whenever they happen my sticker-inner farts with laughter in my seat, and I would only be willing to moan during them, as I said, for the enjoyment of a man all my very own, so that sitting there in the seat next to me, in the dark, he would get an urge to stroke himself, or maybe just enjoy my sights, or maybe all of me, or, sigh, even love me.
I'm amazed this writing, for the way the harshness of the language resolves suddenly into vulnerability and poetry at the end of this paragraph...and also, damn, I'm amazed by translator Alex Zucker that he has done such an amazing job making this writing accessible to me.
Wonderful. Harsh and nearly unreadable at times but I'm so glad to have read it....more
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