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“oh, The dear, the blessed nouvelle!”, she was grateful and at the same time is happy Henry James , master undisputed that the form in which a story expands or a novel shrinks to reach the deepest of the funds.
Now, a damn and even feared as Mary Gaitskill (Kentucky, 1954) you risk to wear this elegant and revealing model and triumphs high for everything with This is pleasure. One of those books -originally published last year in The New Yorker – which are deceptively small and meek on the outside but, once inside, a few pages, he discovers and understands and appreciates as not only oceanic but also rewarding and necessarily stormy. Although the pattern and cuts of this writer, if you are well-endowed with a natural elegance (check it out on this already classic and modern collection of stories that was Bad behavior, in the novel Veronica and the rest of their several titles not yet translated), are far from the aristocratic and neo-rich classrooms of the author of The portrait of a lady. What Gaitskill limits directly with the beast-like x-rays in his time revealed that never all that well-weighted genius of sleaze, male -, and alpha-illuminated (verify this in the next incarnation local, in the Bad Lands Editorial, their ambiguous and unstable and inestabilizador The club) that was Leonard Michaels .
And yet, in This is pleasure, Gaitskill -emerged next to authors cool of the generation MTV as Jay McInerney , Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis , but with an immediate past of a stripper and call-girl – offers a kind of brutal comedy of manners and a sophisticated reconsideration of the blast and residual effects of seísmico movement #MeToo . And it does so with a boldness and guts and balance worthy of admiration in times of extreme behaviors. And, yes, the topic is sexual harassment. And here’s what is admirable and risky: Gaitskill (ever raped, and the author of a notorious essay about the experience titled About not being a victim) dealt with manners of the most intense and dedicated of the harassing.
“This is pleasure”. Mary Gaitskill. Translation by Javier Calvo. Literature Random House, 2020. 112 pages. 12,90 eur
And does so in a logradísimo exercise/counterpoint in two voices: on the one hand is the up does nothing charming and seductive editor new york – Quinlan Maximilian Saunders alias Quin alias Q (one of the specialties of Gaitskill is her ability to the male voices) fallen into disgrace when their environment changes sign and recataloga, suddenly, Casanova funny, and a womanizer to a kind of runaway wolf always on the hunt. On the other is Margot or M: editor of a collection of writings of “authors masochists” and confidant for twenty years (after Q tried to seduce her in vain thrusting hand). And M wondering if, in truth, his great friend in free-fall, is guilty or just a victim of an abrupt and somewhat uncontrollable, and historical (and perhaps hysterical) climate disruption in the sign and but of the times that will run that many rush out of the sites that they used to frequent.
that Is: Q (someone who listens and understands women as few men, aconsejándolas to order about boyfriends or ways to masturbate) don’t understand what happened and why it happened to him after such a long time that should not pass through anything to be as it was and is. While that M understands perfectly what is going on but also can not but understand Q: something like proud member -even though their own and beloved wife does not consider him a predator to fear but, just, an “idiot”- of a species is not endangered, but to exterminate . And, yes, perhaps the punishment is a bit disproportionate to the crime committed and without the need of being confessed, reasoner M, because it does not all and all he was aware of the behavior of Q for both and even celebrated as if it were one of those characters of Philip Roth (who had the sense of the chance of dying just before the tsunami)?
This is the pleasure it is, yes, one of those “books that leave no one indifferent,” . And that -one could expect or should be – will be the topic of conversation for your reasoned courage (not to be confused with manhood) in a landscape which is often a too impetuous courage by to do justice without prior right to defence or further reply to the verdict . Gaitskill knows, Gaitskill did. And offers here the testimony’s perfect (best of both worlds and worst of both sides) to concerns and clarity of each and all who, these days, they only seem to recommend -when requested – signed books by women as if they were afraid that they went down your scores by being surprised with eyes wide open and hands in the mass of a copy of Lolita.
pass: Lolita is the favorite novel of Mary Gaitskill and -as is more than clear in his preface to the volume chart, Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl and then included alongside their other trials, Somebody with a Little Hammer – not only read it but also understood it very, very, very well.
my Dear and blessed be.
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