feminist literature

I sat down and tried to read, but I couldn’t. After ten pages I was in a state of cold fury. Read! I didn’t want to read, it was just a substitute for living.

Funny words coming from an author (speaking through her semi-autobiographical protagonist) in the middle of her first novel, but Elaine Dundy wasn’t afraid to ruffle feathers or flout convention. Her debut (and by all accounts best) novel, The Dud Avocado, was a critical success and was popular in its day, but has fallen out of print at least once since its original publication and just returned to print in mid-2007, less than a year before Dundy died. The book earned her plaudits from Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, and Groucho Marx, who wrote to Dundy:

I had to tell someone (and it might as well be you since you’re the author) how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream and guffaw (which incidentally is a great name for a law firm). If this was actually your life, I don’t know how on earth you got through it.

The novel follows American ingénue Sally Jay Gorce as she tries to make her uncertain way among the Bohemian set in Paris in the 1950s, “tries” being the operative word, as Sally Jay is hapless in just about every matter that matters, foremost among them love. She enters a tepid affair with a cartoonish and quite married Italian diplomat, falls in love with a smarmy American from her hometown, and goes on a mistake-prone jaunt with a man she’s never met but who has developed a crush on her after seeing her on stage. She has a tremendous knack for wearing the wrong thing, and is developing a habit of saying the wrong thing. Oh, and she loses her passport during a night on the town.

Dundy said in later letters and in the afterword to this most recent edition of the book that all of Sally Jay’s bad decisions mirror her own from her time in Paris, which I would imagine was a lot less funny to live through than it is to read about. The intimate connection with her scattered protagonist clearly helped Dundy infuse the character with the spirit for which she and the book are praised, but also a self-awareness that Dundy probably didn’t have as she lived through these misadventures:

Was I beginning to have standards and principles and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in the way?

There is an interesting plot beyond Sally Jay’s bad-luck-in-love escapades, and aside from the coincidence that drives the book’s final chapter or two (perhaps a comment on the inescapability of one’s destiny) the story is very tight. But it’s the humor that carries it into a class with Scoop, Lucky Jim, and your better Wodehouse novels.

Sorry to be rushing through these a bit, but I’m still two books behind what I’m reading; I’m probably a day away from finishing Rabbit, Run, after which I’m looking at a re-read of Catch-22.

I’m only doing a brief writeup of Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, in part because I’m a little pressed for time, but also because there’s so little to say about a book with no plot. The best description I can offer is that it’s an Algerian feminist Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and while I didn’t quite hate it as I hated the Joyce book, I was never remotely invested in Djebar’s words or characters.

The core theme is the difficulty of being a woman in an Islamic society, particularly one born into a somewhat liberal home environment within a generally conservative society. A woman could write a pretty good book about this, but Djebar tries to intertwine that thread with one about the French invasion and occupation of Algeria, and another about the narrator’s experiences as a supporter of the Algerian rebels during the war of independence; in fact that main thread about women in Islamic cultures is dropped for a good chunk of the book, so that when it’s reintroduced, you’ve lost the plot, literally.

I also have to question the quality of the translation. Djebar makes a point of saying that she’s writing in French (her second language) and abhors metaphor and florid language, but the translation is full of bizarre and at times fabricated vocabulary – perhaps she’s the Algerian Chabon, but more likely we have a literal translation rather than one that considers the usage patterns of the two languages.

Next up: I’m about 40% through Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, and I’m headed out on vacation on Wednesday, with five books in the suitcase, including Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

The Dud Avocado.

Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade.

Archives