Month: November 2012

Lena reviews The Persecution of Mildred Dunlap by Paulette Mahurin

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Paulette Mahurin’s lovely book, The Persecution of Mildred Dunlap, is about ripples.  About the ways in which rumor spreads through a community and affects all its citizens emotionally and physically.

Even though the trial and subsequent conviction of Oscar Wilde on charges of indecency stands out as a significant moment a century later, its contemporary impact is often overlooked.  Ms. Mahurin examines the ripples of the Wilde controversy, halfway across the world from its epicenter.  She picks up her story in Red River Pass, a small ranching town in Nevada.  The news of Wilde’s sentence arrives by telegraph and quickly spreads by word of mouth through the small town.  Eventually it reaches Mildred Dunlap, a solitary woman who lives on the outskirts of town with her cousin, Edra.  Concerned that Wilde’s story might prompt the residents of Red River Pass to look closer at her own lifestyle, she concocts an elaborate scheme to throw them off the trail.  The results ripple throughout the town, changing its conventions and social hierarchy.

In exploring rumor and its effects, Ms. Mahurin touches on a theme that is still very prevalent.  As a reader it was refreshing to see the physical toll that rumors can have, the physical consequences of stress are so often overlooked in today’s world.  I also thought looking at the Wilde controversy through such a far-reaching scope made a lot of good points about how connected we are across the globe even in a time before phones and the internet.

I was quite impressed with Ms. Mahurin’s first book.  It’s a pretty ambitious project that I thought she handled quite well.  Not only is it a well researched book, but she clearly cares about her characters and there are some lovely passages that bring them to life.  I also appreciated that even though Ms. Mahurin took the time to fully explore some of her characters, there were still some who remained mysterious despite being fully realized presences in the text.  The book is certainly a worthwhile read for history fans or anyone in search of a good story.

Casey reviews Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson

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Although Jeanette Winterson’s 1997 novel Gut Symmetries is a book about a bisexual love triangle, it’s nothing like what you might expect from that description.  For one thing, it’s not a straight forward narrative of boy meets girl, girl meets girl.  You know from early on that Alice, the main character, falls in love with both Jove and his wife Stella.  So, when the two women finally begin their affair, it’s lovely, but not surprising.  This is not a ‘read-to-find-out-what-happens-next’ kind of novel.  Rather, it’s a read-to-find-the-next-beautiful-piece-of-writing kind of book.  Although there are some beautiful passages early on in Jove and Alice’s love affair, it’s Alice and Stella who really capture you as a couple.

What is really stunning about all of the descriptions of love is the way that Winterson weaves together musings on love with those about the nature of living and being.  You see, both Jove and Alice are physicists, and this fact is not insignificant.  It allows Winterson to describe in gorgeous language how the mysteries of the universe are beautiful, and eerily similar to the mysteries of love and desire.  She writes: “Perhaps it seems surprising that physicists seek beauty but in fact they have no choice.”  This is because when you go far enough, science is a kind of poetry, and love is a kind of physics.  As Winterson chronicles these strange and passionate love affairs, the beauty and mystery of the cosmos become undistinguishable from that of love.  She writes: “from the music of the spheres a perfect universe is formed.  Lover and beloved pass into one another identified by sound.”  My favourite of these passages, though, is this one:

Walk with me.  Walk the 6, 000, 000, 000, 000 miles of travelled light, single year’s journey of illumination, ship miles under the glowing keel.  In the long frost the sky brightens and the rim of the earth is pierced by sharp stars.  After the leaf-fall the star-fall, the winter shedding of too much light.  Walk the seen and the unseen.  What can be rendered visible and what cannot.

Like a lot of Jeanette Winterson’s work, her novel Gut Symmetries manages to be both contemporary and mythological.  Stella tells us, for example, that her “mother, big with child, had strange longings; she wanted to eat diamonds.”  After retrieving the diamonds when they exit Stella’s mother’s system, her father’s friends (diamond dealers, you see) discover one is missing.  Stella, apparently, is carrying this diamond inside her.  Alice’s father, after marrying her mother, promptly tells her he will not sleep with her until he is made director of a line at his job; years later, he abruptly flies home to England from New York to do so.

These two remarkable women meet in New York City for dinner, after Stella receives a letter telling her that her husband Jove is having an affair with fellow physicist Alice.  Shortly after their first encounter Alice tells us that “Stella turned towards me and crumpled my heart in her hand”; she asks Alice, “‘Do you fall in love often?’”  When they sleep together, Winterson cleverly reworks that old Freudian theory of homosexuality as narcissism through her description of Stella’s experience:

Her breasts as my breasts, her mouth as my mouth, were more than Narcissus hypnotised by his own likeness.  Everybody knows how the story changes when he disturbs the water.  I did disturb the water and the perfect picture broke.  You see, I could have rested there beside her, perhaps forever, it felt like forever, a mirror confusion of bodies and sighs, undifferentiated, she in me, me in she and no longer exhausted by someone else’s shape over mine.  And I had not expected such intense physical pleasure.  Why then did I trouble the surface?  It was not myself I fell in love with it was her.

Although this twisted love story takes an odd and grotesque turn near the end—you wouldn’t believe me even if I told you—I finished the novel with memories of Winterson’s exquisite deliberations on the nature of love, desire, and, dare I say it, the meaning of life.  I was particularly left with this heartening statement:  “Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.  This love suggests there is something beyond self-interest.”