Tag: feminism

Book review: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

Woman on the Edge of Time book cover

I forget where I heard about Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, but as its cover proclaims it is “the classic feminist novel” and it’s speculative fiction written a woman, it’s not hard to see why I added it to my wishlist at some point.

This is quite a dark, grim, even shocking, book. And it’s also a vision of a hopeful, more equal future. Or is it?

In 1970s New York City, middle-aged Connie tries to stand up to her niece’s abusive pimp and he has her committed to a mental institution. Conditions there are pretty bleak and no-one listens to her, or any other patient – particularly people of colour. Connie is Hispanic, which means she isn’t treated quite as badly as Black patients but she is still “othered” by the doctors, spoken of as more animal than human. What it comes down to is these patients are all poor, and therefore expendable. And she is also a woman, while the pimp is a man. Connie’s one relief from her awful situation is her ability to contact a community in the far future.

Continue reading “Book review: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy”

Book review: Butter by Asako Yuzuki

2 Comments

I don’t read all the books that get a tonne of hype, but I try not to be prejudiced against them either. If a blogger or bookseller I know shares my taste – or even better, a friend – recommends a book to me, I’ll give it a chance. And let’s face it, Butter by Asako Yuzuki (translated by Polly Barton) has been everywhere this year. But thanks to a friend recommending it, I get it. Because it’s really good. And even better, it contains a lot to talk about.

The narrative (mostly) follows Rika, a journalist at a prestigious weekly news magazine in Tokyo. Unmarried in her mid-30s, she is at once judged and admired for being a careerwoman – not an easy thing to be in Japan, we’re told. She’s the only woman in her department and works long hours, often seven days a week. She lives on junk food and sees her sort-of boyfriend Makoto only occasionally – usually when he is out drinking late and needs a nearby bed to sleep in.

Her best friend is Reiko, in some ways Rika’s opposite. Reiko is married, cooks every night and has quit her job in PR while she tries to get pregnant. She’s also full of curiosity and (genuinely) helpful advice for her friend.

With the prospect of a promotion on the horizon, Rika needs a big story and she might now have it. Convicted serial murderer Manako Kajii is awaiting retrial at Tokyo Detention House. She would date rich men, cook gourmet food for them, lived a lavish lifestyle thanks to them, and then one by one they died in mysterious circumstances. It was a huge sensational case, in part because Kajii was already Internet famous, with a popular blog about food and cooking.

Kajii has never given an interview to the press, but Rika thinks she can be persuaded by someone open to the possibility of her innocence. Rika is certain that all the press around Kajii’s original trial was steeped in misogyny and fat-shaming, which may have influenced the jury.

Continue reading “Book review: Butter by Asako Yuzuki”

Book review: The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by Patrícia Melo

The simple art of killing a woman book coverFor about six months now I’ve been subscribing to the Good Book Club. Their ethos is intersectional feminist fiction from women, queer men and writers who identify as non-binary. They only choose books from indie publishers and celebrate diverse stories, often in translation. Since March, in addition to being a monthly postal subscription, they run an online book group to discuss that month’s book.

Their April book exemplified all the above. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by Patrícia Melo (translated by Sophie Lewis) is a Brazilian novel about violence against women, with a particular focus on Indigenous women. It’s angry, funny, provocative and gave us a lot of fodder for discussion in the book group.

An unnamed young lawyer from Sao Paolo narrates this story. After she is hit by her boyfriend she takes a temporary project on the other side of Brazil. It’s a study of femicide cases in Rio Branco, a small city near the border of Bolivia in Acre, a rainforest region. The narrator attends court cases, interviews fellow lawyers and the families of the deceased.

Continue reading “Book review: The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by Patrícia Melo”

Book review: The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

Robber Bride book coverIn my late teens and early 20s I read almost solely literary fiction, and in particular anything reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement or the broadsheets. This being before social media or Wikipedia, pretty much all I knew about each book would be one article I’d read in the paper. Back then I thought of Margaret Atwood as a literary fiction writer and I remember my surprise on discovering she also wrote brilliant science fiction.

These days I think of Atwood as primarily a writer of science, or speculative, fiction. So I experience the opposite surprise when I pick up one of her books that’s straightforward fiction. The Robber Bride was published in 1993, Atwood’s eighth novel, of which just one had been science fiction (The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985). It is loosely based on the folktale The Robber Bridegroom, but with all the major characters reimagined as women.

In October 1990 three old friends meet for lunch in Toronto. Roz, Charis and Tony met at college back in the 1960s, but the real reason they have stayed friends is Zenia – and their shared hatred of her. As they finish their lunch Zenia walks into the restaurant. Which is surprising as they held a funeral for her four and a half years ago, truly thinking her dead.

Continue reading “Book review: The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood”

Book review: The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule by Angela Saini

1 Comment

The Patriarchs book coverHow did men become dominant in human society? When did patriarchy begin? Was it inevitable or could the world have been different? Angela Saini looks at all the available evidence to answer these questions in her book The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule.

Having read (and loved) her previous books Inferior and Superior, I knew I was in safe hands as I embarked on this journey to discover how human inequality began. To begin with two of the few solidly definite answers Saini can provide: no, patriarchy was not inevitable and no, it has not always been the way most human societies are structured. Reaching those answers required sifting through centuries of research, a task at which Saini excels.

Societies that are matrilineal (where family lines are tracked through the mothers) and/or matrilocal (where women stay in their childhood homes to raise their own children – sometimes with husbands going to live with them, sometimes without co-parents ever co-habiting) have existed as far back as prehistory and still exist now in pockets all over the world. Matriliny and matrilocality don’t necessarily equal matriarchy but they do lend themselves to more equal society overall, in which women can hold positions of power, own property and receive education at parity with men.

Continue reading “Book review: The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule by Angela Saini”

Book review: Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith

Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith is such a lovely book. Using that word, I fear undersells or even undermines it, but it’s precisely how I feel about it.

Sisters Anthea and Imogen live together in what was their grandparents’ home in Inverness. Their relationship is strained, fractious, as they see the world very differently. Imogen enjoys her job in marketing at Pure, a large corporation that is looking to bottle and sell the local water. She even got Anthea a job there too, but Anthea is less keen. Corporate isn’t really her.

Through the sisters, their lives and love lives, Smith explores Ovid’s Metamorphoses in a modern setting, in particular the story of Iphis and Ianthe. It isn’t hidden away in the subtext; one character explains this story to another, but Smith makes that feel entirely natural. (There are also Shakespeare references that are a little more hidden, but I don’t think the reader who doesn’t spot them will miss anything. No doubt there are allusions I didn’t see too.)

Continue reading “Book review: Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith”

The years slip by, stealthily, on tiptoes; they whisper behind our back, making fun of us

The Sum of Our Days book coverThe Sum of Our Days
by Isabel Allende
translated from Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden

This is the third volume of memoir that Allende wrote, which is perhaps an odd place to jump into someone’s life. When I bought this I was attracted purely by her name, after having read and loved House of the Spirits. But it was made extra odd by the circumstances in which this book was written. Allende’s daughter Paula died in 1992. The following year she published her second memoir Paula, mostly written while Paula lay in a coma that they knew she probably wouldn’t wake up from. She started writing this third memoir after Paula’s death and addresses it directly to her daughter, updating her on the extended family as if she had moved away rather than died.

Allende talks candidly about her writing process, her relationships, her hopes and fears, along with all the details of her life. And Allende’s life is surprisingly eventful. Admittedly, this book covers 13 years but the big stuff all happens in the first couple of years following Paula’s death.

Continue reading “The years slip by, stealthily, on tiptoes; they whisper behind our back, making fun of us”

Recent(ish) reads in brief

Since mid-June, when we made the decision to reserve a dog from a litter that had just been born, that decision has pretty much dominated our lives. We dug out the dog training books we’d bought 10 years ago just after we moved into this house – which we chose in part for its doggy-suitable garden and layout – and bought a few more books on the subject, just to be safe. While my non-doggy-reading didn’t dry up completely, my ability to write thoughtful, detailed reviews of books afterward certainly did.

That said, I have continued to make some notes and highlight/bookmark some passages as I read, so I do have a little more to say about most of the books I’ve read than the single-paragraph synopses I write for my monthly reading round-ups. And I even found that trying to write brief reviews of a handful of recent reads led me to write full-sized reviews of a few of them, so look out for those in the coming week.

Continue reading “Recent(ish) reads in brief”

K-drama review: Because This is My First Life

2 Comments
Because This is My First Life still
Lee Min-ki and Jung So-min co-star.

Finally, the first K-drama in a while that I have thoroughly enjoyed without any caveats. Because This is My First Life (TvN, 2017) is unashamedly romantic but also modern and, dare I say it, feminist?

Nam Se-hee (Lee Min-ki) is an app designer who is struggling to pay the mortgage on his home. Yoon Ji-ho (Jung So-min) is an assistant TV writer who can’t afford to rent a place on her own in Seoul (she had been sharing with her brother but when he gets married their parents decide Ji-ho must move out). So it’s initially an ideal situation for Ji-ho to rent Se-hee’s spare room. They’re both in their 30s, reserved, love football and like to keep a clean home.

It becomes apparent that other people are uncomfortable with the idea of an unmarried man and woman living together. So they do what seems logical: they get married, promising to each other that it is purely a financial arrangement. But of course, not only does the rest of the world have ideas about what marriage is, they also find themselves questioning what it means for their relationship to be quite so transactional.

Continue reading “K-drama review: Because This is My First Life”

Women’s inventions have been neglected by evolutionary researchers

Inferior book coverInferior: the True Power of Women and the Science That Shows It
by Angela Saini

This is such an important book. It’s not the first on this topic but it’s the one that has managed to take off and get the message out there (partly thanks to the brilliant Jess Wade, who has been campaigning to get this book into school libraries).

Saini interrogates the claims of scientists about the differences between the sexes. She explains what we do and don’t know about whether men and women’s different positions in society are the result of physical biological differences, or hard-wired differences in ability, or if they’re the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of society and culture being skewed.

Are men’s and women’s brains really wired differently? It’s a very complicated area of science, and despite some excitable newspaper headlines, we don’t yet know for sure. It appears that there is more variety within each sex than there is between them. And importantly, even if there are physical differences, we have to be extremely careful about extrapolating reasons for those differences.

Can we learn about our ancestors from anthropologists’ studies of 20th-century hunter-gatherers? A limited amount, yes, but the surviving hunter-gatherer communities are all very different from each other. The only real conclusion we can reach is the variety of what human beings – and women particularly – are capable of.

But that hasn’t prevented more than a century of evolutionary research being skewed to ancient hunting habits (because men were presumed to have done most of the hunting) and often ignoring or downplaying other human activities such as gathering food and childcare (which were assumed to be wholly female activities). Which has knock-on effects including that theories about the development of human language are largely based around hunting and it is only recently that scientists have begun to question whether a more likely scenario for language development is the need to pass information from mother to child.

Continue reading “Women’s inventions have been neglected by evolutionary researchers”