Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac

As you can likely infer from the title, we’re entering some difficult territory with Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mac. This is a nonfiction book that confronts the challenging discourse surrounding sex work wherein the authors recognize that it would likely be better for women if sex work did not exist at all, but, since it does, we are obligated to establish better practices for protecting those in the industry.

A foundational aspect of the text is defining sex work as work, in some ways like any other. People often make moral arguments against sex work and decry (especially, but not exclusively) women selling or “renting” their bodies for a fee. The argument starts to break down, though, when you try to explain the difference between a sex worker selling her body and the destruction any number of people subject their bodies to for work. Consider, more directly, a miner whose body is perpetually sore or, to take it further, an Uber driver who never sleeps and so subjects themself to any number of illnesses. Gig economy work notwithstanding, we have a number of protections for workers—so what is the difference? The line of reasoning is reflective of the authors’ approach. Not that their work isn’t data-driven, but Smith and Mac tend to wax more philosophical and offer reasoned arguments for the ethical treatment of sex workers. They remain consistently informative, if a little general, and probe into the paradoxes of the industry.

Particularly compelling to me is the way they break down sex work prevention laws and expose them for their injustice. For example, in an effort to eradicate sex work, several countries have decreed that there shalt be no brothels and have put in anti-trafficking measures. The problem, though, lies in the definitions of these practices. For instance, a brothel is defined as any place in which sex work takes place by more than one worker. What does not get factored in is whether the workers are there at the same time, whether they know each other, and so on. Smith and Mac give the example that two women engaged in sex work might rent an apartment together to save on rent and be around as backup in the case of unsafe situations. Even if they are not working at the same time, and even if they also live where they work, their apartment gets counted as a brothel. Similarly, if you ‘harbour’ anyone involved in sex work, depending on where you are, you might get classed as a sex trafficker—including if you have a friend or family member in your life that engages in sex work and happens to sleep over at your house. These laws effectively serve only to cut off sex workers from their communities and make sex work less safe.

Another measure that people have attempted is to criminalize not sex workers but their clients. While we’re all prepared to shame people for being in the industry, the reality is that there are people willing to buy sex. Smith and Mac are quick to point out, though, that sex workers need the money, while their clients do not need to buy sex—there is an unevenly distributed need. And, like abortion—making it illegal means it will still happen, just less safely. So, when clients are criminalized, it has a few effects; it decreases the amount of vetted, trusted clients. In turn, workers are more willing to accept riskier clients—clients more prone to violence or not paying or having STIs. 

Smith and Mac expose a number of hypocrisies that arise from not listening to the lived experiences of sex workers. Early on, they note that anti-prostitution organizations hire unpaid interns for months with no arrangements made for housing. These jobs, which could be paid, are nonetheless advertised as unpaid internships. The women most able to take on these roles are those who can afford to do unpaid work—that is, women in a position of privilege from where sex work is something to be abolished, not a pathway open to women who have suffered at the hands of national and global policies. Smith and Mac continually return to the notion that sex work is a product of circumstances imposed on desperate people—people who have been rendered illegal as they flee from circumstances beyond their control, and so forth. Particularly when it comes to trafficking, we could make a pretty circular venn diagram of people who oppose migration and those who oppose sex work. Well, in the case of trafficking, making everyone “illegal” paves the way for exploitative sex work of the people they claim in another breath that they want to protect.

Revolting Prostitutes is thus a difficult book to grapple with. It exists in a space of grey areas: prostitution is not ideal, yet needs to be protected. We want to reduce the necessity of sex work, but can’t criminalize it. We want to help people get out of the industry while recognizing that it is a viable income for some subset of the population. There are also, I imagine, far more sex workers in the world than you expect, especially if you broaden the definition beyond prostitution alone. This is not a book of easy answers, but is certainly a book of compassionate ones.

Happy reading!

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami

For years, I’ve seen Hiromi Kawakami’s short story collections on the shelf at the book store and think “I should really read some of her work.” Well, by coincidence, her book Under the Eye of the Big Bird was shortlisted for this year’s 2025 International Booker Prize and my partner has purchased the shortlisted works for me so that I can judge for myself. So, I’ve finally dived into Kawakami’s writing.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a strange book. I hesitate to call it a short story collection, because each section takes place in the same world, but I hesitate to call it a novel because it’s profoundly episodic. The characters between each chapter change, for the most part, although some characters repeat or we see a throughline between the narratives. Readers are thrown into the book without context and it feels truly alienating. We are the outsiders caught up mid-stream trying to figure out how the world operates.

I’m not sure I have the specifics, really, though towards the end there is some more explicit exposition. Come to think of it, Kawakami might have shown some more restraint and trusted the readers a little more—one character gives the entire history of the world in a conversation with children. In any case, the world feels foreign. The events are taking place hundreds or thousands of years in the future, and humans are just about extinct. They now reside in what we can infer as separate communities without any contact, vaguely united by “mothers” and “watchers” who care for them. Meanwhile, each of the characters seems to be a replica or reincarnation of a previous version of themselves. In one community, this means they have names like 32 of 6 (the 32nd copy of the 6th model or something to that effect). In other communities, it means that you might open the door and find a younger version of yourself, which is your cue to get out of town and be replaced.

That very thing happens in the early chapter “Narcissi.” The chapter’s opening line is “I turned up today. / I opened the front door, and there stood a much younger me, with long hair” (13). The two engage in conversation as the new model moves in. This leads to some of the most interesting grammatical and conceptual content of Under the Eye of the Big Bird. The boundary between self and other-self gets muddled in an interesting way: “As I watched me walk away, I recalled the day the great mother had left” (20). This odd mirroring and duality of selfhood then becomes even more strange as the two swap memories and experiences. The new version of the character arrived in a hovercraft, hid it in the bushes, and approached the home of her predecessor. The predecessor, now having to leave, creeps into the bushes and finds the hovercraft “she” rode in on. It’s an engaging concept, especially because it’s so early on and everything is unfamiliar; Kawakami reels you in as you try to explain the scenes.

On the topic of swapping memories, there are also characters that can essentially connect with other creatures telekinetically. It almost reads like Animorphs except the character seems to be inside a hawk’s brain, witnessing its world, while their physical body remains in place. This psychic connection emerges in several of the stories to explore Kawakami’s themes of love and connection. In one section of the book, split over two parts, Kawakami recounts the tragic story of two lovers. Each has the ability to ‘scan’ the other—that is, dive into the depths of one another’s minds and retrieve any kind of thought or feeling. The woman is both clairvoyant and telepathic and, out of respect, the man refuses to scan her. He comes across as noble and kind until he becomes jealous enough to scan her, finds her complete love of him, and then disappears out of shame. It’s a Blackbeard’s closets kind of situation. In the next section, though, the perspective switches to the young woman’s and we see that she is unfaithful and that her clairvoyance has led her to see how their relationship would operate, how he would behave, and so on and so forth. Him reading love within her mind is chalked up to his lack of practice with scanning—he’s pathetic and she pities him.

Those two chapters stand out as being self-sufficient in their story arcs, while others are components in Kawakami’s narrative mosaic. Eventually the book builds to a section where there is only one great mother left and two girls. Hope for the human race is essentially zero until one of the girls draws on knowledge from the past and starts cloning animals. She has some success over about eighty years, and you might expect it to end there before she’s successfully cloned a human, but then since these beings live for hundreds of years you realize she’s still got some time. If you’d like the spoiler version of the story, I offer it following this sentence. As it turns out, when the human race began to decline, they started experimenting with cloning to help the human race survive; then, they tried to use AI to enhance the defects and whatnot until it became the case that AI embedded itself into human DNA. The mothers are previous iterations of AI that get replaced with the younger versions of themselves; the great mother is the AI that’s miles ahead of the others—but now that seems to be failing and there is likely no hope left.

There’s a lot to like about Under the Eye of the Big Bird—it’s an impressive foray into some creative territory with some cutting-edge concepts that remain the human touch. The downside to the book is that the characters are, by necessity, forgettable and largely underdeveloped. I didn’t feel all that connected to the characters and then before long they would be replaced by another set that drove the world-building forward but felt more like conceptual devices than individuals. It’s a catch-22 with high concept books.

I have to give Kawakami points for offering such a unique project. Now next time when I’m in the bookstore maybe I’ll need to actually pick up her short story collections.

Happy reading!

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

        [Editor’s note: I actually missed the Ferrante book club, so oops.] Three months ago, I read The Wall by Marlen Haushofer as a book club novel for Type in Toronto. In the latest installment of book club, we’re taking a look at The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, another book where a woman is blindsided into isolation and must care for dependents with an increasing level of frustration. It seems that Type has a type. But I’m underselling it for comedic effect. The Days of Abandonment is a challenging, existential work about relationships, responsibilities, and selfhood. 

The book opens with Olga’s husband leaving her, seemingly spontaneously, after years of marriage. This sends Olga into a spiral of obsession and rage, especially when she discovers that her husband has left her for an inappropriately younger woman. She engages in rash behaviours, all the while fearing that she is descending into a misanthropic trope she witnessed in her childhood: the poverella, who was similarly abandoned and similarly acted erratically. Now that she is in a similar position, Olga finds herself unable but to attack her husband when she sees him in public and engage in a sordid and failed sexual encounter with her neighbour, whom she hates. Meanwhile, her dog and her son are incredibly sick, much to her annoyance, and her daughter offers her intense judgment while she dissociates to the point of needing her daughter to stab her to bring her back to reality. The group of them gets locked in their apartment and the book spirals into a frenetic madness. 

Plot-wise, the book is pretty thin. Depth-wise, it’s incredibly rich. It’s a finely wrought exploration of the psychological dynamics of identity, relationships, time, and existence. I ended up documenting a number of passages from the text, and, admittedly, I’m about as chaotic in my notetaking as Ferrante’s narrator is in her actions.

The initial pull of the book is the secrecy in which the abandonment is shrouded. There is a history of her husband trying to end the relationship and so Olga has a level of doubt that he may return. Upon reflecting about a previous attempt for him to end the relationship, she notes, “five days later he telephoned me in embarrassment, justified himself, said that there had come upon him a sudden absence of sense” (10), and says that “the phrase made an impression” about lingered with her. The question of whether he will come back lingers and, as she gets into increasingly desperate attempts to get in touch with him, it builds towards the conversation of whether there’s another woman. He says there is, but for a reader, I found there was that little bit of doubt: is he lying about a paramour because it’s the easiest way to make a clean break?

Of course, it is eventually confirmed that Mario is indeed seeing another woman and is not coming back. Olga gets more paranoiac, more obsessive. It’s uncomfortable to observe, but the book challenges its readers by presenting a feminine version of the male messiness at which nobody blinks. The vulgarity of her speech, the crassness of her comments, the repetitiousness in her thought patterns are all recognizable—in someone like Henry Miller. Olga notes that as a girl she “had liked obscene language, it gave [her] a sense of masculine freedom” (22). She continues, “Now I knew that obscenity could raise sparks of madness if it came from a mouth as controlled as mine” (22).

Indeed, Ferrante’s novel offers a kind of metacommentary on the literary history of the rejected woman. Her narrator describes being given a book and reading it, “But when [she] gave her back the volume, [she] made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed sentimental fools” (21). Olga’s narration continues, “I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts” (21). Her writing philosophy opens the door for the very messiness (that is, complexity) of human emotion: “I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced. And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno” (21). When childhood Olga tells her teacher that, her reaction suggests that she lost someone and it is only twenty years later that she suspects the same thing is happening to her. The passage continues with repetitive disbelief: how could Mario leave? How could he “become uninterested in [her] life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought” (21). 

Olga obsesses over the past. Now that her marriage has collapsed, she sees herself in her distraught elementary school teacher; she sees herself in the poverella; she sees herself in the novel she had so abhorred: “Of that book from my adolescence the few sentences I had memorized at the time came to mind: I am clean I am true I am playing with my cards on the table” (22). She reflects, though, that “those were affirmations of derailment” (22). Again, Ferrante offers a hint to the style of obsessive rejection: “I had better remember, always put in the commas. A person who utters such words has already crossed the line, feels the need for self-exaltation and therefore approaches confusion” (22). There are several other moments in the text in which she recalls the need for commas, the lack of which point towards her increasing deterioration (“Hold the commas, hold the periods. It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world” (70)).

Throughout the entire book, there’s a divide between what Olga rationally knows against the unfathomability of being left. On the one hand, she admits, “I was ashamed of myself” (34) while on the other she “couldn’t do anything about it” (34). Her desperation leads to a self-destructiveness, hoping that in performing her inability to exist without Mario that it will lure him back. She notes, “I couldn’t think of anything except how to get him back I soon developed an obsession to see him, tell him what I could no longer manage, show him how diminished I was without him” (34). It’s a psychologically complex response in which she attempts to align their different conceptions of reality: “I was sure that, stricken by a kind of blindness, he had lost the capacity to place me and the children in our true situation and imagined that we continued to live as we always had, peacefully. Maybe he even thought we were a little relieved, because finally I didn’t have to worry about him, and the children didn’t have to fear his authority, and so Gianni was no longer reprimanded if he hit Ilaria and Illaria was no longer reprimanded if she tormented her brother, and we all lived—we on one side, he on the other—happily” (34-35). She wants to try to force Mario’s perception, which is such a limited point of view and yet feels completely plausible in the context of loss: “I hoped that if he could see us, if he knew about the state of the house, if he could follow for a single day our life as it had become—disorderly, anxious, taut as a wire digging into the flesh—if he could read my letters and understand the serious work I was doing to sort out the breakdown of our relationship, he would immediately be persuaded to return to his family” (35).

At this point, you may be noticing how much of Ferrante’s text is being reproduced here in full. There are a few reasons for that. First, I think that Ferrante’s prose is compelling since it so accurately captures the desperation of her character. The skewed logic, the lapse in clear-thinking (which harkens back to what Mario had said to her). The other reason I want to replicate Ferrante’s words faithfully here is because the excess in Olga’s speech is, I think, critical to the work.

I mentioned Olga’s parallel to her husband. Mario claims a “sudden absence of sense” (10). That becomes an underlying apothegm for the novel. She has lost her sense and the novel offers a glorious conclusion to the throughline. When Olga is able to meet her husband on a level playing field, she admits that she no longer loves him. He makes some assumptions, which Olga then corrects: “I don’t love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true” (185). When her husband says it was true, she again corrects him: “No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body” (185). I love the way these lines simultaneously offer a visceral response (“plugged up the hole with Carla’s body”) and an existential one. She confronts the depths of her own sorrow and disassociation from herself head-on, leaning into the isolation rather than trying to overcome her loneliness with other men—although there is one scene, where…well…

But more importantly, the novel confronts the relationship of Olga—and women in general—to time. Again, it becomes a kind of inversion between Mario and Olga. She remembers a conversation they had and narrates it as follows:

I don’t know exactly what he said. If I have to be honest, I think that he mentioned only the fact that, when you live with someone, sleep in the same bed, the body of the other becomes like a clock, ‘a meter,’ he said—he used just that expression—‘a meter of life, which runs along leaving a wake of anguish.’ But I had the impression that he wanted to say something else, certainly I understood more than what he actually said, and with an increasing, calculated vulgarity that first he tried to repress and which then silenced him I hissed:

‘You mean that I brought you anguish? You mean that sleeping with me you felt yourself growing old? You measured death by my ass, by how once it was firm and what it is now? Is that what you mean?’ (40)

Ferrante illustrates the way women embody time. I’ve seen a number of novels and philosophers which suggest that women have a deeper connection to time (whether it be through the notion of a ‘biological clock’ or something more metaphysical). But the way that Ferrante offers such a scathing critique of the hypocrisy of male midlife crises is so compelling here. This is particularly so because in the pages that follow, Olga follows her husband with “a million recriminations” in her mind. The actual objection she raises, though, is about how she provided him time; she created time. While the argument has been trod before, Ferrante does so in a particularly compelling way. She narrates, “I wanted to cry: don’t touch anything; they are things you worked on while I was there, I was taking care of you, I was doing the shopping, the cooking, it’s time that belongs to me in a way, leave everything there. But now I was frightened of the consequences of every word I had uttered, of those that I could utter, I was afraid I had disgusted him, that he would go away for good” (42). Again, there’s the tension between the righteous critique of her husband and the desperate fear of losing him for all time.

In many ways, The Days of Abandonment is a book about self-sacrifice, of losing oneself to others, and how women are especially subject to such demands. Continuing on with the discussion of time, Olga elaborates:

I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful. I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his. At every crisis of despair I had set aside my own crises to comfort him. I had disappeared into his minutes, into his hours, so that he could concentrate. I had taken care of the house, I had taken care of the meals, I had taken care of the children I had taken care of all the boring details of everyday life, while he stubbornly climbed the ladder up from our unprivileged beginnings. And now, now he had left me, carrying off, abruptly, all that time, all that energy, all that effort I had given him, to enjoy its fruits with someone else, a stranger who had not lifted a finger to bear him and rear him and make him become what he had become. It seemed to me an action so unjust, a behaviour so offensive that I couldn’t believe it, and sometimes I thought his mind had been obscured, he had lost the memory of us, was helpless and at risk, and it seemed to me that I loved him as I had never loved him, with anxiety rather than with passion, and I thought he had a pressing need for me. (63)

I love that passage. The personification of time—or rather its becoming material—-is particularly effective. The way Olga equates her gestures into quantifiable, measurable units, makes the impact felt that much more powerfully. The latter half of the passage provides a more refined discussion around types of love.

Olga demonstrates love in many ways to her other dependents, albeit with frustration and increasing dissociation. She hates their dog, for example: “Stupid dog, stupid dog, whom Mario had given as a puppy to Gianni and Ilaria, who had grown up in our house, had become an affectionate creature—but really he was a gift from my husband to himself” (54). She critiques Mario for his selfishness, since he “had dreamed of a dog like that since he was a child, not something wished for by Gianni and Ilaria, spoiled dog, dog that always got its way” (54). There are a number of moments where Olga abuses the dog, alternatingly being obliged to care for it.

Indeed, the dog becomes a symbol of Ogla’s obligations. Partway through the novel, Olga gets trapped in the apartment with her children and the dog, Otto. They are accidentally locked in and Olga cannot get the key to work. The obligations pile up and cause her to spiral into the self-destructiveness that she had formerly tried to portray to Mario—now, unseen by anyone else, she lives out her own prophecy. Problem after problem emerges. The dog gets sick. The son gets sick. There are ants: “they ran in a line along the base of the bookcase, they had returned to besiege the house” (126). With the ants in particular, Ferrante offers an interesting suggestion. The ants are described as “perhaps [...] the only black thread that held [the apartment] together, that kept it from disintegrating completely” (126). The notion that this flaw is precisely what grounds the apartment in reality for Olga is indeed reflective of the bigger picture: without her wards, Olga would fall apart completely. As for the ants,

without their obstinancy [...] Ilaria would now be on a splinter of floor much farther away that she seems and the room where Gianni is lying would be harder to reach than a castle whose drawbridge has been raised, and the room of pain where Otto is in agony would be a leper colony, and impenetrable, and my very emotions and thoughts and memories of the past, foreign places and the city of my birth and the table under which I listened to my mother’s stories, would be a speck of dust in the burning light of August. Leave the ants in peace. Maybe they weren’t an enemy, I had been wrong to try to exterminate them. At times the solidity of things is entrusted to irritating elements that appear to disrupt their cohesion” (126).

That final line seems to serve as a key to the text as a whole. Fissures are what reflect reality, what draw Olga back—as I mentioned, Olga gets her daughter Ilaria to stab her when she starts to lose focus while trying to tend to all of the issues she’s facing.

One of those issues is her disassociation from herself. Her loss of self manifests in various ways throughout the novel. In one gruelling encounter, she tries to give herself to her neighbour in one of the most (intentionally) awkward sexual encounters I’ve read in a novel. At first, Olga disassociates from herself using her body, but later uses her body to return to herself. All the while, she “thought of beauty as a constant effort to eliminate corporeality” (97). She describes how she “wanted him to love [her] body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty. [She] thought anxiously. Is this forgetfulness. Or maybe not” (97). She blames her mother for “the obsessive bodily attention of women” and describes a moment of connection when a young office mate of hers “farted without embarrassment and, with laughing eyes, gave [her] a half smile of complicity” (97). Again, we are psychologically contradictory. On the one hand, she wants to eliminate her corporeality. By the same token, it is her corporeality that allows her to connect with herself and others. In a pivotal moment, she describes taking off makeup and seeing herself in a triptych-style mirror. She sees “the two halves of [her] face separately, far apart, and [she] was drawn first by [her] right profile, then by the left” (123). The fragmentary nature of her reflection renders all angles of her unfamiliar to herself. She then rearranges the mirrors to see herself differently and remarks, “there is no technical means of reproduction that, up to now, has managed to surpass the mirror and the dream” (123). While using a mirror as symbolism for a fragmented identity is a little trite, Ferrante still renders the scene compelling. Two of the three reflections speak against Olga and “over those two half portions, Olga had scant control, she was not very resistant, not very persistent” (123). There is “the worse side, the better side, geometry of the hidden” (123). She continues, “If I had lived in the belief that I was the frontal Olga, others had always attributed to me the shifting, uncertain welding of the two profiles, an inclusive image that I knew nothing about” (123). She reflects on which version of herself she thought she was giving others and who others received.

I really like the way Ferrante explores the question of how we see one another. At one point, her daughter makes a statement about how Olga hits the children. Olga objects: “I didn’t hit them, I had never done it, at most I had threatened to do it” (102). She thinks, though, that “maybe for children there’s no difference between what one threatens and what one really does” (102). She continues, “the words immediately made the future real, and the wound of the punishment still burned even when I no longer remembered the fault that I would or could have committed” (102). She remembers her mother threatening to cut off her hands, “and those words were a pair of long, burnished steel scissors that came out of her mouth, jawlike blades that closed over the wrists, leaving stumps sewed up with a needle and thread from her spools” (102-103). Nonetheless, she tries to explain to her daughter that she never hit her and at most said she would slap her, but realizes “there’s no difference [...] and hearing that thought in [her] head scared [her]” (103). The difference between reality and our perception erodes and Olga “ended up in an alluvial flow that eliminated boundaries” (103). Again, the bodily is what comes to matter most: “The word ‘slap’ is not this slap” (103). Olga then slaps her daughter to prove the point. It’s chilling.

Later, when Ilaria puts on makeup, Olga is disturbed by her imitator: “What did it mean, we were identical, at that moment I needed to be identical only to myself” (121). She is nauseated by the experience and “Everything began to break down again” (121). Olga starts to wonder, “Maybe [...] Ilaria herself wasn’t Ilaria” (121). Again, Olga refers back to stories from her past—The Vomero and the poverella. She wonders if they have somehow transcended time and are actually these figures from the past, feeling, “without realizing it, I had been transformed into one of them, a figure of childish fantasies, and now Ilaria as only returning to me my true image, she had tried to resemble me by making herself up like me” (121). Olga enters the abyss. Her lapse of sense is characterized as follows:

This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when. Now any resistance was useless, I was lost just as I was laboring with all my strength not to lose myself, I was no longer there, at the entrance to my house, in front of the reinforced door, coming to grips with that disobedient key. I was only pretending to be there, as in a child’s game. (121)

I’m rambling. I’m giving away the best parts and existential reflections. At the same time, I’ve withheld a number of scenes. The actual beats in the plot have been wildly underreported. One of the things I’ve hardly mentioned is the sordid affair she has with her neighbour, which leads to a number of reflections on sex and connection. She hates him, he hates her dog, she hates her dog, she needs him to help save her dog, and—when they can’t—to bury it. There’s a moment too when she thinks she sees her dog: “it seemed to me that the shade of Otto had joyously crossed the scene like a dark vein through bright, living flesh, I wasn’t frightened. The whole future—I thought—will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. But it wouldn’t be worse than the past” (176).

Returning for a moment to the topic of sex, I’ll offer one passage that reflects the crassness that Olga reclaims it with justified feminine rage:

we consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women [...] “we take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives. I was about to swallow some pills, I wanted to sleep lying in the darkest depths of myself. (74).

Throughout the book, Ferrante offers perceptive insight into our internal storms. Whether it’s about the bodily or conceptions of self or time or relationships, there is a dark undercurrent that makes us question how we ought to live. The fissures seem to guide Olga’s way and when everything is going poorly she relies on the mantra “I love my husband and so all this has meaning” (88). She repeats that sentence as she falls asleep—of course, there’s some irony there which begs the question of—when she no longer loves her husband, does this journey then have no meaning?

As you can see, there is a lot to talk about for The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. I have barely scratched the surface and worry about over-citing the book and offering very little commentary. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to make it to the book club, because I would love to have heard what others had to say about this descent—this true descent, not Mario’s superficial crisis.

Happy reading!

All About Love by Kemmerick 'Bing Bong' Harrison

     

        Sometimes a book isn’t so much about the book as it is about the context of that book. All About Love is a book of poems by Kemmerick ‘Bing Bong’ Harrison, a Barbadian poet and joke writer. While on vacation, I met Harrison on the resort hawking his books. I passed him by one night and he caught me peeking at his books but we were running late for dinner, so I said I’d take a look later. The next afternoon, he was setting up his booth and he has quite the memory because he recognized me and beckoned me over.

Bing Bong told me to pick a number and then recited, from memory, the poem written on the page of the number I said. He has his books memorized and gave very dramatic readings of his poems and jokes. When I read his poems, I can hear his voice and remember his delivery. He’s a really charismatic guy, even though I don’t really share his humour.

I think the same is true for his poems. All About Love is a collection about love of different kinds: romantic, familial, religious, lustful, and so on. The collection is tonally disparate; there’s some comedically intended poems about unfaithful partners or gold-digging women presented alongside pleas for the government to against incest and for people to protect themselves from AIDS. There’s a sincerity to the collection that gives it a certain charm, but the poems have the sing-songy rhyme scheme of a budding high school poet. The rhyme scheme sometimes forces him into awkward line constructions. 

The target audience is almost definitely not me. The collection gives Chicken Soup for the Lover’s Soul vibes, but I have a soft spot for Harrison because he’s such a charming guy. 

There’s one thing that I think is really interesting about the collection and that I’ll ask Bing Bong about next time I see him is that there are two poems that reference wrong number phone calls that ended in long-term love. “Blind Date” establishes a dialogue between Frederick and not-Juliette. Frederick calls the wrong number and then really hits it off with the woman. The poem “Reflections” reprises the idea: someone meets someone new, get their number, calls, and then dialed the number wrong and the poem ends: “Now I’m old, beginning to gray / I often reflect upon that day / ‘Twas because of that phone call / I have you, my kids and all” (40). I really wonder if those poems are rooted in truth.

Well, Bing Bong, if I ever run into you again, I’ll ask. In the meantime, happy reading!

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

  Taken once more from my file of “books Harneet arbitrarily told me to read but was somehow right about,” this review will focus on Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval. It’s a slim volume that focuses on a Norwegian woman, Johanna, moving to the fictional town Aybourne, Australia, to study biology. When she arrives, she finds herself in awkward social situations, edged out of housing by her Canadian counterparts, before eventually finding a room in a slightly renovated warehouse (or is it an old brewery where a girl drowned?). She moves in with Carral, who has a free and easy demeanour that Jo finds unusual and somewhat enticing (for example, that she freely talks while peeing). Their space has two mezzanines and paper-thin walls. This is important for reasons I’ll get into later. The novel recounts Johanna’s experiences with Carral and the strange, erotic charge between them.

A few months ago I read Nudités féminines. Images, pensées et sens du désir by Laurence Pelletier and I can’t help but feel that Paradise Rot would be of profound interest to philosophers of the body and its image. From the initial pages of the book, there’s a sordidness that permeates everyday moments—Jo rides on the subway, where a man’s pants have fallen down and his penis dangles out and is supported by others, who then throw him out at the next stop. There’s also a moment where Jo contemplates her urine in the bowl and mourns flushing that vibrant yellow colour. Throughout the book, Hval crafts that mix of the vile and the poetic; that which we consider disgusting is described with poetic detail while still maintaining an unpalatable aura.

Part of this is tied to Johanna’s seeming hypervigilance and hyper awareness of all that is sensual. Remember that Johanna and Carral live in a place where barriers and boundaries are largely non-existent. The ad that Johanna responds to lists the room as “.quiet.” with periods on both sides, which incentivizes her. After she moves in, that quietness forms the context for a sensitivity to sound verging on the superhuman. She senses Carral’s movements by sound alone: even Carral scratching her pubic hair gives Johanna a complete image. The synesthesia throughout the book (seeing through sound, the permeability of touch, etc.) is evident throughout. As one example, Johanna’s neighbour Pym has forced himself upon her and she recalls the words from a book that Carral continually reads and then notes the following:

Next to me Carral was trying to separate the pages of Moon Lips. She must have got to the part with the stain. Once she’d slid a knife between the pages and they came apart, she turned the page and sighed softly. The article in front of me displayed colourful images of thick mushroom stems and caps, but I couldn’t read at all anymore, just sat and listened to her breath, guessing how far she’d got. I didn’t notice her moving until her face almost touched mine. (90)

There is a pattern of Johanna listening to the sounds and simply sensing what Carral is doing. The fact that she can sense where she is in a book simply by the page turns demonstrates this deep connection (or at least projection) between Jo and Carral. Later on, Johanna “sees” Carral having sex with Pym, despite the fact that there is a wall between them. Based on sound, Johanna imagines their position and she can sense that Pym is taking Carral from behind, and knows that her and Carral are making eye contact as he takes her. It’s implausible, of course, but in the context of the book it feels like it’s absolutely real, absolutely plausible.

As I mentioned earlier, the book is loaded with an erotic charge. One of the things that makes the book so charged is its ambiguity; it certainly seems that both Jo and Carral are lesbians, but Carral continually talks about having sex with men and Jo has never had sex at all. When people meet Jo and Carral, they assume they are together, but they have to continually assert that they are just roommates—this despite the fact that Johanna notes several times that she senses Carral’s nipples under cotton even when they are not visible. Meanwhile, Carral keeps showing up in Jo’s bed, sometimes naked. You’re never quite sure, and throughout the book both of the women have sex with the same man at different times, and yet it feels like they’ve been together by transitive property.

There’s an odd permeability to them. To return to the novel mentioned above, Moon Lips, it is a trashy romance Carral continually reads. She says how she studied serious literature but now all she reads is trash where women have sex with tough men and possibly monsters. Johanna reads some of the book and finds a sticky page. Presumably, Carral was masturbating and some stickiness from her hand transferred to the page. When Johanna touches it, it seems to linger on her—as if sex is contagious.

Before discussing contagion, I want to take a digression into the idea of eroticism by making reference to two other authors. First, in Camera Lucida (I think) by Roland Barthes, he talks about the most erotic photograph he knows of. It’s a picture of a naked boy with his arm stretched out towards the other end of the frame; all of our typically “sexy” parts are out of frame, and the picture has its erotic charge based on what it does not show. Similarly, in Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, there’s a discussion of looking through a hole in a sheet and seeing only bits of the woman on the other side a little at a time. There’s also discussion about how film could not show sex, so there’s a woman who takes a drink from a tea (I think?) and then the man drinks from the same glass, placing his lips on the same place she kissed (I might have this backwards). There’s no direct contact between them, but that’s what makes it so charged. Jenny Hval seems to take the same approach; the less direct the sex, the more powerfully it tunnels in.

Going back to the idea of contagion, it does seem to be critical to the text. The permeability of Jo’s consciousness and the synesthesia of the text reflects that. Johanna’s studies in biology take a particular interest in mycology, which then manifests in her apartment when a mushroom grows from a gap where the bathtub meets the wall (and also takes on phallic imagery, of course). Early in the book, Jo and Carral acquire an excess of apples and have an erotic exchange of eating them and biting through the skin and so forth. Then, throughout the rest of the book the apples are rotting in a compost bin, melting and decaying. Towards the end of the book, the two central characters start to rot together; Carral breathes onto Jo’s back and she feels spores growing in her. After Carral has sex with Pym, she seems to absorb his freckles into her skin. When Carral and Jo kiss, Jo gives an account of how they are sucking Pym out of each other and exchanging him between them. The house where they live seems to flood and mould and reach its tendrils to grasp onto Johanna. It’s like she becomes fused to the house and it gets increasingly surreal, so much so that the ending is deeply symbolic but also deeply ambiguous.

Carral and Jo fuse together in a really interesting way. Partway through the book, Johanna tells Carral a story where a “tough girl” at school tells her that people get pregnant by laying down together (as they are laying down together). Jo knows that she can’t actually get pregnant laying next to another girl, but because the girl is so tough she starts to believe it and gets dressed. She tells this story to Carral, but then much later there’s an incredible scene where Carral starts telling the story as if it is an anecdote from her own life. She starts telling the story and Jo says, “Yes, but that happened to me.” Then, Carral tells the story in more detail, adding points that Jo never said—but the details are right. It’s surreal and stunning and eerie. Jo later dreams “of two bodies, girls’ bodies, our bodies: our upper bodies had melted together and our necks twisted around each other, thin, and long like swans’ necks” (135). 

The book makes some pretty clear connections to the Garden of Eden, but in a bizarre and surrealist way. If I try to map the apple, Adam, Eve, and the snake, I’m not sure it’s an easy overlay. In some ways it also feels inverted: is Jo entering the garden? Or expelled from it? Is Pym the snake or the apple? Or is his manuscript the apple (it is found in the compost along with the apples, after all)? The conflict of the book is fundamentally ambiguous, too. Pym writes a manuscript for a novel in verse that describes a biologist (Johanna) creating a world and then having vigorous sex with Pym and Carral. Then, Carral writes an addendum where the two girls consume him. In reality, as I mentioned, when they kiss, it is like they are sucking Pym through them back and forth. Jo is frustrated with Carral for not telling her that she slept with Pym and Carral says she only did it because she was afraid Johanna would leave. It’s a painful psychological triangle where the intentions of its vertices are ambiguous.

The ending of the book, which I won’t spoil, is ambiguous, too. I hereby request someone read it and explain to me why things play out the way they do. It’s as if it’s transitions into a haunted house narrative or a ghost story, but it’s unclear to me why Johanna has to act the way she does. I’ll leave it at that for now.

All things considered, I really liked this book. It was oddly visceral, erotically charged, poetic and grotesque, beautiful and painful. It’s the kind of book people will write essays about; it connects to so many discourses and offers an endless well of discussion. If it isn’t a hit in the academy yet, it will be. I guarantee it.

Happy reading!