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THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE

Name: THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE
Author: Nikki Gemmell
ISBN: 0-00-716226-X

by Nikki Gemmell ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2004

Proof that the feminist movement has brought women barely out of the Dark Ages.

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English-Australian Gemmell (Alice Springs, 1999, etc.) pens a strangely unnerving fourth novel in the second person, published anonymously in England last year, about the sexual tribulations of a bourgeois wife grasping for gratification within marriage and without.

A journalism professor at the University of London marries in her mid-30s and quits her job at the urging of new husband, international art restorer Cole, to become a full-time wife. Months later, on a delayed honeymoon in Marrakech, she overhears Cole on the phone with her best friend, Theo, and decides the two must be having an affair—thus beginning her path of crushing emotional revenge in the form of frigid withdrawal and, eventually, full-blown sensuous enlightenment with Gabriel, a Spanish-English virgin actor. Little by little, addressing herself and the reader as “You,” the unnamed narrator reveals some of her shockingly repressed secrets: she can’t stand her husband in bed, and she’s never, never had an orgasm. She wants to love her husband for his steady ability to provide, yet she gets enormous erotic charge by initiating Gabriel into her wildest secret desires. Her salvation, she decides, will come through writing a book, inspired by a medieval family heirloom called A Woemans Worth, written anonymously and espousing the substitution of a more able man in the place of an inadequate husband. The narrator finds new purpose both in marriage and affair by haunting the London Library for research and rendezvousing with Gabriel once a week. But when it comes time to make the right choice, will she return to the husband she doesn’t love, ensuring a lifetime of devastation? The story is fashioned as something between a diary and a sexual primer, chock-full of women’s feelings about sex and sexual fantasies of all sorts. Though already used to baring their souls on TV, American women might still cleave to Gemmell’s stuttering earnestness.

Proof that the feminist movement has brought women barely out of the Dark Ages.

Pub Date: March 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-00-716226-X

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.