Hello!
As my blog has just celebrated its first year, I wanted to blow out the first candle in good company. And what better company than Nikki Gemmell ? I love this Australian author since I read after Crossing, Wild Wedding and sumptuous Love Song , beautiful, hot, melancholy love song that I advise all of you.
So I read, as one sips a drink tasty, bittersweet, flavored with honey and wormwood, her latest novel The bride stripped bare .
A novel she wrote while she was in the motherhood up to his neck, exhausted, neurons grilled by hormones and short nights, longing desperately for a little solitude benefactress in a world of babies crying or laughing. The same world from which Mary had written Darrieussecq The Baby a little book that I love as it is right, and I read ... when I was immersed in the same universe and that I too was wondering if one day I could sleep and if one day I would find a semblance of intellectual and social life. With other topics of conversation that "should we let him cry between 5am and 7am? or "is it normal that my baby will never be exhausted at the same time as me?"
Nikki Gemmell, therefore, had desperately wanted to write and retrieve "A little control over his life," a little freedom in this great turmoil and weakening. The mother she threatened to devour everything as her love was great, as she went in search of the woman she felt dissolve in it. His favorite book was then a strange collection Elizabethan WoEman "s Worth , published anonymously and perhaps written by a man" very close to his mother "or a young wife without the knowledge of her husband. Naturally, Nikki preferred the second proposal and it took the game to write this anonymously wife answered equally anonymous, from four centuries of distance turn to share his love and sexual dissatisfaction, his desires, dislikes, all this intimate lives of women that runs beneath the surface and that men do not.
She wanted to publish it anonymously, first to emancipate his writing of the visceral fear of hurting his little world. Then because she liked the idea of a husband one day falling on the book, browsing and asking anxiously: "Is my wife who wrote this?"
But we do not always get what you want: Journalists dug up the scoop and traquèrent writer, forcing her to perform publicly the authorship of his novel ... It does could compete on this stage, whatever may be the collateral damage, because its purpose was honesty in the relationship. With such a subject, he had to take what she had written to anonymously ...
She wanted to discuss honesty as a principle subversive bastion as compelling to conquer. Because women lie to their people. All the time, and in all latitudes. They lie about their desires, their pleasure, what they dislike. They do not just lie, but they lie about many things ... to protect their lovers, not to make them vulnerable to keep them, because they prefer their pleasure above their own, and a very old education has always been taught to them. They lie omission, with the best intentions, without even realizing it. And impenetrable world shuddered just beneath the surface of the "woman" they give to see. Virginia Woolf said that anonymity was a refuge for women writers. Secrecy is also a refuge, since time immemorial, which protects, at the risk of choking like fire under ashes, the privacy of women. What man really knows his girlfriend? You tell me, is equally true the other way: what do we know of men that we love, from which we sleep with whom we make love and children? Nikki Gemmell would like to read one day the male version of his novel, and he was sure it would be just as exciting!
Honesty is a risk, a danger whose ravages can practice long after, coming from the sea, like a wave. Journalists have forced the writer to confront this honesty she had concealed, and she can not yet assess the impact on his life. But she is finally happy that this dam, disposing of, has released a voice of women into his private life. His experience is about to conquer a new world. Follow it, do you want?
Here is "the bride", which is never named, who is all women and no. She is a woman who has her thirties, a "good wife", water that sleeps and all that shimmer like the quiet. Her husband is a good husband, she found him in a shelter against the tumult of the world. An expectant father for her children. A companion, an accomplice. Their life is gentle, yet she is not bitter, and yet:
"Your trust in you as the wife slowly shrinking. Do not you ever tell him. That sometimes you feel that all men who have crossed your life, lovers, colleagues, bosses, with their vociferous and their requirements, they would have worn. "
But now his secret wakes me through the disappointment: she suspects Cole, her husband having an affair. The weariness, the feeling of betrayal, will release in it the secret forces which might have sleep all his life. That his desires do not want to be nice, be polite, fade:
"You do not want this retreat within marriage, this small bubble of intimacy that proved so comfortable. "
All parts of it that remained buried now claim a place in his life at risk to undo the balance patiently built. And while this woman goes bravely in the conquest of itself and the legitimacy of his desire, seed the idea of responding to the anonymous Elizabethan wife who wrote the outrageous little book that never leaves her more:
"You must dedicate yourself to your own book, you must implement: it requires a backbone to your life.
And then it hits you, with the same beauty and obedience even a necklace tangled since you are trying long to resolve, a simple loop from its ranks of smooth pearl through another node and discards magic.
You will meet your mysterious author of the seventeenth century.
You will write a book in secret, just like her. "
But if the book is a covert subversion, if its purpose is to say aloud that this woman has ever dared to say about love and desire, the novel by Nikki Gemmell famous anyway ... because the secret personal quest of the hero to succeed, must remain secret. The pleasure is in hiding, even if we feel that once found it might be able to change the color of this marriage. Maybe. But not sure. For it is difficult change a bad habit that has strengthened over time. And maybe her husband does not want the new woman to him revealed. Maybe he preferred the old, the familiar, even to complain of its boundaries or to look elsewhere for what piqued her desire.
If honesty is a risk, to become the woman that is so is. Can be seeded in any way fragile china feelings of another. You can get lost in his own maze and no longer know how to find cohesion in these contradictory impulses and these ambivalences of desire. For desire is an elusive animal is always hungry, he is the genius of the lamp that it was not convene because he no longer wants to belong to this:
"You'd be perfectly happy never to have sex with your husband, except for a child of married friends have already told you that. Cole represents something larger than sex: it is embedded in your project to life.
But where does the desire? fugitive This feeling eventually he fainted? Or, now that he has fallen will remain there to watch you, all emaciated and dissatisfied, until you're old, waiting to trip your life? "
What does desire, ultimately? Can harmonize with the rest of existence or is it that disorder, chaos of life when he is an alchemist and manufactures a child?
Certainly you will find in the grief and emotions of the bride hearing about your own feelings, your questions. Certainly his style delicate, soft and sharp, who writes with the heart dances of desire will keep you captive (er) s. It is a novel that speaks to readers of these men and their wives, which is not the battle of the sexes, but meet more sincere with each other. Is it possible? The secret can be revealed and the bride "laid bare"? It is certainly a fair bet.
Finally, I thank all those who make me want to feed this blog and celebrate more birthdays ... I think back to the time when I was 2 much loved readers (yes, Doune and the Turtle, it's nice to you I speak!) and where I was desperate to cross one day a hiker lost in these pages. Thank you to you who do not forget me when I'm away and I read when I return. And now, part of the birthday cake?
soon!
Read the reviews on Cune The Bride bare , that of Eireann Yvon on Marriage and wild Love song and that of Thom on Love Song !
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