Beautiful Ape Girl Baby by Heather Fowler

A rollicking ride of a magical realist, coming-of-age story that explores sex and gender in ways that will have you laughing out loud. Be prepared to travel light with a somewhat murderous female protagonist en route across the country - where it's so hard to be a strong, violent, little ape girl - looking in all the wrong places for forever kinds of love.

Goodreads description

It takes a lot of courage from a writer to start a novel with the protagonist brutally murdering another character and it takes great skill to then develop the protagonist so that the reader is soon rooting for her, but that is just what Heather Fowler does in Beautiful Ape Girl Baby. Beautiful (that's her name and certainly not an adjective) is a wonderful creation, who reminds me of Jeannette Winterson's Dog Woman in Sexing the Cherry, another bawdy and unapologetic murderess with whom the reader empathizes. Like Dog Woman, Beautiful is a complex character with many redeeming qualities - generosity, compassion, loyalty to her friends.

Beautiful grows up isolated from the real world on her father's estate, where elaborate fantasies are created to make her believe she is both normal and beautiful. Statues of hirsute ape men and girls surround her pool. She is told the "friends" her father pays to keep her company are in awe of her beauty. But when Beautiful takes a road trip to a) find a lover and b) meet her idol, whose radio show - Strong as an Animal Woman - has inspired her, Beautiful finds that everything she believed and understood has been based on falsehoods. As readers we know that Beautiful's naivety places her in danger and the very things that at times protect her - her physical strength and the pile of cash she carries around - add to that danger. In addition to Beautiful there are some wonderful supporting characters. In particular the two men in Beautiful's road trip - her driver Thomas and the lover Fedora Man - are great creations.

This is a marvellous book. It is laugh-out-loud funny at times, with a number of targets for satire (such as self-help gurus and therapy generally) and traditional sexual/gender politics constantly being overturned. It also, as is the case with the best comedy, has an underlying sadness. As in Thelma and Louise we cheer Beautiful on, but she is heading for a cliff.


I received this book free from the author in return for a fair review

Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur

Shortly after the 1989 publication of Women Without Men in her native Iran, Shahrnush Parsipur was arrested and jailed for her frank and defiant portrayal of women’s sexuality. Now banned in Iran, this small masterpiece was eventually translated into several languages and introduces U.S. readers to the work of a brilliant Persian writer. With a tone that is stark, and bold, Women Without Men creates an evocative allegory of life for contemporary Iranian women. In the interwoven -destinies of five women, simple situations—such as walking down a road or leaving the house—become, in the tumult of post-WW II Iran, horrific and defiant as women escape the narrow confines of family and society—only to face daunting new challenges.

Goodreads description

What the description above does not say is just how beautiful this novella is. Women Without Men does tackle the issues facing Iranian women, but it does so in a magical and poetic way. Magic realism is used to make bearable and visible the oppression these women face and to give voice to their dreams. 

I am not surprised this book so shocked the Iranian establishment. We see behind the veil into the lives, hopes and disappointments of the five woman. One is murdered by her brother for dishonouring the family, although all she did was to leave the family home for a few days. She rises from the dead, able to read the thoughts of those around her. Another, in her desire and need to be loved by a man, acts as an accomplice to the murderer only to be betrayed by him. One turns into a tree in order to protect her virginity while expressing her sexual desire. Another, a prostitute, leaves the brothel when she starts seeing men as having no heads. The fifth is a beautiful wife, who kills her controlling husband by accident, and buys the garden that becomes the refuge for the other women and herself. 

Women's sexuality, its suppression and indeed the denial of its existence by the patriarchal Iranian society is at the heart of the book. Parsipur shows that this denial is destructive of the relationship between men and women. Men are shown to suffer by their failure to see the truth about women. For example, the murderer marries a girl who is outwardly everything a good Iranian girl should be: very beautiful, soft and quiet, modest, shy, diligent, hard-working, dignified, chaste, and neat. She wears a chador, always looks down when she is in the street and blushes constantly. But he has been deceived.  

Interestingly there is a sixth occupant of the garden - a man known only as the Good Gardener. His behaviour is shown in contrast to that of other men. He is a nurturer and lover of women. He enables the tree to bear fruit and marries the former prostitute and fathers a child by her, but the child is not a baby but a lily. The garden he creates changes the women in  different ways; not all are magically transformed, two simply are able to reconsider and reset their relationship with men. A key point is that none of the women, including the tree, stay in the garden once it has worked its magic. The long-term answer is not for women to live separate from the man's world. 

I recommend this book to you. It may be short but it holds far more than many books four times its length.

The Salt Roads by Nano Hopkinson

Hopkinson’s time-traveling, genre-spanning novel weaves a common thread of spiritualism and hope through three intertwined stories of women possessed by Ezili, the goddess of love, as she inspires, inhabits, and guides them through trying personal and historical moments. Jeanne Duval is a talented entertainer suffering from the ravages of a sexually transmitted disease; Mer is a slave and talented doctor who bears witness as Saint Domingue throws off the yoke of colonial rule in the early nineteenth century; and Meritet is a woman of the night who finds religion her own way. Though the three are separated by many miles and centuries, a powerful bond draws them together.
Epic, wrenching, and passionate, The Salt Roads is laced with graceful, lyrical prose. Hopkinson has crafted a one-of-a-kind novel that spans hundreds of years and multiple countries to tell a mystical, heartrending story of self-worth, respect, and salvation.

Goodreads description

When I decided to apply for a review copy of The Salt Roads I was a bit worried that it would not be magic realism. Nalo Hopkinson is usually listed as a writer of speculative fiction, but she also appears in the online lists of magic-realist writers. Having read this novel I can say that those lists are right. I found the book easy and most enjoyable to read.

This is an ambitious book, weaving together three distinct stories set at different historical times and continents. At the centre of each story is a strong female protagonist - Mer in 18th century Haiti, Jeanne Duval in 19th century Paris and Meritet in 4th century Egypt. Of these Jeanne Duval was a real historical personality - the mistress and muse of the poet Baudelaire. Mer's story features Makandal, the leader of a slave rebellion in Haiti. Meritet is humourously portrayed by Hopkinson as the historical source of the hagiography of St Mary of Egypt. The three stories are bound together by the Ginen goddess Lasiren or Ezili, whose first-person voice appears in short poetic chapters between the stories and who moves between the world of the spirits and the historical worlds of the three women. 

Edouard Manet, portrait of Jeanne Duval (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As is often the case when the are three stories in one book, I found myself having difficulties as the novel shifted from one story to another and from one protagonist to another. This was not helped by the fact that the stories are not distributed evenly throughout the book. We start with Mer, whose story was the one I was most taken with. Meritet does not appear until much later in the book. In fact all three characters could have merited a book to themselves. 

There are several themes in the book - the most obvious being the black experience throughout history and the racism those of African heritage experienced and continue to experience. Slavery and its horrors feature in the story of Mer and to a lesser extent in that of Meritet. This brings obvious comparisons with Beloved by Toni Morrison and inevitably The Salt Roads suffers in comparison. In addition the novel also invites comparisons with Alejo Carpentier's early magic-realist novel  The Kingdom of This World which also features the Haitian slave rebellion. 

In fact all the way through this book I kept being reminded of other novels. The idea of the old gods of Africa coming with the slaves to the new world is used by Neil Gaiman in American Gods and Anansi Boys. Hopkinson's book does not explore the concept as deeply as Gaiman's, because she is also exploring other themes.

A major theme in the novel is the feminist one. Women are defined by their sexual use by men, especially white men. On the Haiti slave plantations we see the female slaves' only chance of advancement and the possible survival of their children is to provide sexual services to a white man, even a poor one. Likewise Jeanne Duval's survival is in the pleasuring of Charles Baudelaire. Meritet was sold by her parents to a brothelkeeper. When Lasiren takes over the mind of the slave plantation owner's white fiancee, we see that she too is bound by the same imperative - she is marrying him for financial security rather than affection. Only Mer's power is not based in the provision of sexual services, but as that very female archetype of wisewoman. But then she is also considered old. 

If you don't like explicit sexual scenes, don't read this book, as they feature from the very start. Both Jeanne and Mer find sexual pleasure in lesbian relationships, and their lesbian experience is contrasted with the lack of pleasure given by men. Female sexuality can be liberating.  Lasiren is a goddess of fertility and female sexuality, so that when she takes over Jeanne's dance it becomes strongly sexual and powerful. 

There is so much to write about in this book. I am sure that it is the subject of many an academic essay and I cannot cover it all.  I don't think Salt Roads delivers fully on all it aspires to do, but it is still a remarkable achievement. As my granny used to say "It is better to aim at the stars and hit the moon, than not to aim at all."

I received this book free from the publishers via Netgalley in return for a fair review

The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

Growing up in Edwardian south London, Alice Rowlands longs for romance and excitement, for a release from a life that is dreary, restrictive and lonely. Her father, a vet, is harsh and domineering; his new girlfriend brash and lascivious. Alice seeks refuge in memories and fantasies, in her rapturous longing for Nicholas, a handsome young sailor, and in the blossoming of what she perceives as her occult powers. A series of strange events unfolds that leads her, dressed in bridal white, to a scene of ecstatic triumph and disaster among the crowds on Clapham Common. The Vet's Daughter is a uniquely vivid, witty and touching story of love and mystery.

Goodreads description

I hadn't planned to read (and review) The Vet's Daughter this week, but I found it in a bookshop and started reading it in the cafe. I was so impressed by this book and the author's ability that I had to continue reading to the end. 

The first thing that impressed me was the faultless use of first-person narrative in the book. This is a tremendously difficult thing to do at the best of times, but to do this when the narrator is a naive young woman is extremely hard, and yet Comyns never allows Alice to know more or have more spirit than is appropriate. We readers glimpse what lies beneath and watch with horror as we see, as Alice can not, what certain developments might signify.  Not everything is explained, but that is because not everything is shown to Alice. 

The book was published in the Virago Modern Classics series and is a devastating study of the appalling and powerless position of women in Britain at the turn of the 20th century. Sadly it could be the tale of many women in many parts of the world now. Both Alice and her mother are trapped in their dreary home with Alice's tyrannical father. Alice's description of her mother early in the book is haunting:  

Her bones were small and her shoulders sloped; her teeth were not straight either; so if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her.  

This fascinating book was first published in 1959 (before the arrival of magic realism in  British mainstream fiction). We are now used to the likes of Alice Hoffman using magic realism in modern contexts, but that was not the case then. The book was therefore ahead of its time. At the same time it looks back at the golden age of English 19th century literature. There is something Gothic about the book and the portrayal of the monstrous father. Many of the other characters verge on the grotesque in a way that reminded me of those of Dickens. 

One would like Alice to escape and gain happiness. And for a time the levitational powers that are the magic realist element in the book do give Alice an opportunity to control something in her life. But in the end they become a tool for her father to gain money. This may be a modern fairytale, but it doesn't come with a happy ending. If you want to identify with the central character you will have problems. This is feminist magic realism, but the magic does not empower and the realism accurately portrays Alice as a young woman of her time.