feminist utopia

Book review:

El país de las mujeres

Gioconda Belli

(2010)

In a small Mesoamerican country called Faguas, a volcanic eruption has enriched the air with an antidote to testosterone, turning its macho men into kind and docile human beings who don’t put up too much resistance when the feminist Partido de la Izquierda Erótica (PIE) sweeps to an election victory and its charismatic leader, famous for having exposed prominent sex traffickers in her TV show, becomes president with an all-female government promising to “clean up” the country.

In a time when much of the more imaginative writing goes in the dystopian direction and the state of the real world may also be headed that way, it is unusual and refreshing to find an unashamedly positive utopian novel. Especially for me with a political background that has quite a few connections to the author’s, the general idealism feels like home and the protagonists the PIE committee are very sympathetic characters.

I’m not entirely sure if the novel would work for anybody who doesn’t experience this huge political feel-good factor. The postmodern structure which mixes different kinds of testimonies and documents is at first a bit confusing until you’ve worked out who’s who. Until about the middle of the book it appeared gratuitously random to me and I would have appreciated a frame, maybe set in the distant future, such as the work of a future historian who explores these developments. Belli has used distant times to great effect in The scroll of seduction as well as in The inhabited woman, and it might have improved this effort as well.

As it stands, this is an interesting book and a heart-warming story for those who still have a heat-conducting heart, but maybe not quite as spectacularly brilliant as the two earlier novels mentioned above. Depressingly, there doesn’t seem to be an English translation at all, although it has been translated into German (Die Republik der Frauen), Dutch (Het land van de vrouwen) and Portuguese (O País Das Mulheres) among other languages.

a naked paradox

Book review:

Die Nackten und die Tobenden

Ernst Horst

Blessing Verlag 2013

This summer was perfect for being out and about with nothing but a sun hat, and the perfect book to enjoy with that would be one about the weird and wonderful cultural history of nudism in (western) Germany, from its beginnings until ca. 1970.

At the heart of this book is an appreciation of the many nudism magazines which blossomed in the 1950s and 1960s, partly thanks to buyers who weren’t necessarily nudists - although both the magazines and the nudists’ associations sometimes connected to them would strenuously deny any kind of erotic subtext to their publications filled with pictures of beautiful naked people (the cover of the book shows a typical cover photo from one of those magazines). This commercially successful double life ended when the unstoppable rise of openly erotic magazines like Playboy (which launched a German edition in the early 70s) deprived them of a large part of their audience.

This paradox is to me the most intriguing aspect of organised and card-carrying nudism to this day, but it was even more pronounced in the prohibitive climate of the 1950s. Nudists were fighting for the right to be different, to indulge in the minority interest of running around in their “Lichtkleid” (i.e. only dressed in light), confronting a catholic/conservative society that saw nothing but sin in nudity. At the same time, however, they were just as keen to be seen as normal people who had no links to anything unspeakable like sex, promiscuity, or homosexuality. Rather than fighting for a more open-minded society, they chose to campaign only for their lifestyle to be accepted as normal, while everybody else who fell outside the norms could go to hell. Ironically, there was no such battle in the GDR, as nudism was one of the liberties tolerated by the regime.

Ernst Horst previously published a book about Erika Fuchs, the highly influential translator of Disney comics, which I still have to read. Here he adopts the pose of an amateur anthropologist somewhat restricted by the scope of what magazines he can find on flea markets and what information he can search on the web. I wouldn’t mind that so much, except that he talks a little bit too much about writing the book, instead of actually covering the subject matter. Apart from that gripe, however, this is a cultural history well worth reading, regardless of whether you’re sporting tan lines or not.

castillos de cartón

This is a lovely movie about three students trying to find their way in art, love/sex, and life in general, and I reckon it shows about equal parts of these three areas. You wouldn’t be able to tell from the cover of the UK DVD, which focuses on one of these and obviously tries to sell the film as porn, which it clearly isn’t. This is underlined by the very unsubtle English title, "3some". I think the original title, Castillos de cartón, is to be understood along the lines of “castles in the air”. The script is based on a novel by Almudena Grandes with the same title (see book review below).

The three characters are set apart from mainstream society not just by their creative urges but also by their unusual 2+1 love life, which they don’t dare to spell out to their parents. This isolation increases the pressure on each of them to find fulfilment within that triangle. To me, this was the most important aspect, and it was acted very convincingly. The art could have been used even more – I love the triangular arrangement where they draw portraits of each other, but their art isn’t really used to show how they see each other.

Actress Adriana Ugarte also appears in Lo contrario al amor (which was shown at the London Spanish Film Festival this year (but I missed it) and in the earlier film El juego del ahorcado. Will have to check those out ...

Can't bear to reproduce the UK cover, so here's the spanish one, which I will at some point print off to replace the one I have now:

amazon UK - they sell the horrid UK edition a lot cheaper, though.

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PS (23.11.2012): review of the book:

Discovering the book after having seen the movie isn’t an ideal situation, but as we live on an island that seems to be a million miles away from continental Europe, I wouldn’t have heard of the book otherwise. It hasn’t even been translated into English.

This is a slim novel under 200 pages, but it still has some intriguing layers of complexity. On top of the plot of the movie, the love triangle set in the 1980s, it has a noughties level as well. It starts with one of the protagonists calling the second to deliver the news of the suicide of the third. On that premise, which understandably makes the protagonists think of the past, the story is related in flashbacks.

There are also some formal subtleties which I quite enjoyed. For instance, the text has four parts, titled el arte, el sexo, el amor, and la muerte (the fourth, death, was dropped in the film, but the rest agrees with my three-part description above). Each of the parts starts with a statement concerning the number 3, reflecting, of course the status of their relationship:

3 is an odd number;
3 is a peculiar number; (not sure if that’s what she meant with “aparte”)
3 is an even number;
3 isn’t a number after all.

And there are other elements like these hidden in the text, echoes, reflections, repetitions, contradictions, which I rather like, and which I’m sure will keep students in Spain busy for a while.

I think Grandes succeeds in making the artistic mind accessible. I’m a great fan of everything that at least tries to explore how creativity works and what makes artists tick, and this was an interesting addition to the relevant works I knew. Sadly, Grandes doesn’t describe in detail what the art of the most successful of the three artists looks like (or did I accidentally skip a page?). In the movie, his breakthrough moment is when he covers a huge canvas entirely with red paint, but I found no reference to that in the book.

What I did find, however, is the song from which the title is derived. It is Para ti, by Fernando Márquez, and it dates from 1995, so its use in the story is only mildly anachronistic.

The relevant lines, which are quoted in the book, are:

Para ti, nos buscamos el paraíso,
nos cocinamos melodías con su charme,
nos olvidamos de los críticos seniles,
nos encerramos en castillos de cartón.

Anyhow. A lovely little novel. Available in Spanish and in German, but not yet in English, so if anyone wants to push for a translation …

public enemy

Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biographie
Jutta Ditfurth
Ullstein 2007

Ulrike Marie Meinhof, who would have turned 75 today, was West Germany’s public enemy No. 1 from a fateful day in May 1970 through to her death in a purpose-built high-security prison six years later, and indeed well beyond the grave. Together with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, she was seen as the co-founder of the organisation that was to develop into the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), built on the mistaken belief that it could trigger a revolution by starting urban guerrilla warfare against a state they saw as increasingly oppressive. The group killed a total of 34 people, and its own casualties, combined with the random ones killed by police forces going over the top, were on a similar scale. What it eventually achieved was exactly the opposite of what it set out to do – it made the state more oppressive. Many democratic rights and civil liberties were cut and undermined by the social democrat / liberal democrat governments of the 70s striving to be seen as tough in their fight against terrorism.

With all the panic and witch-hunting that marked these “years of terror”, few people realised that the biographies of the failed revolutionaries were completely at odds with the public image spread by government and media. The RAF was probably the only political organisation of its time that was dominated and led by women. Among the male recruits, there were adventurers who got a kick out of the idea of playing war with real guns (the name Andreas Baader springs to mind). Most of the members, however, and the women especially, came to the movement from social engagements, either working with marginal groups of society, or, in the later stages, motivated by the ill treatment of the first generation of RAF prisoners.

Ulrike Meinhof also had a track record of helping the weakest and most marginalised groups of society (e.g. teenagers in care homes), but beyond that she also was one of the country’s most talented political journalists. As a columnist for left-wing magazine Konkret, she was the most eloquent critic of German politics in the 1960s, from the remilitarisation through to the “Notstandsgesetze”.

How somebody of that intellectual standing, who commands a significant audience, can turn their back on society and take up arms in a struggle that was doomed from the start is a very important question that justifies a major biography. While there have been shorter volumes on Meinhof (e.g. by Peter Brückner, Mario Krebs), Jutta Ditfurth’s magnum opus is much more ambitious in scope.

Herself a lifelong dissident, the daughter of science writer Hoimar von Ditfurth dropped the aristocratic “von” from her name and became a founding member of Germany’s Green Party, which she left after a few years as it drifted away from the radical idealism of its founders. With hindsight, it makes perfect sense that Ditfurth should have been drawn to this subject.

And what a success she made of it. It shows on every page that, while she doesn’t agree with the violent path that Meinhof took, Ditfurth does understand perfectly well what made her tick, and how she felt that society had taken a wrong turn. She uses the pivotal liberation of Andreas Baader in 1970, after which Meinhof had to live undercover, as an opening scene, she tells the life essentially in chronological order, from the background of her parents, who both died young and left Ulrike in the care of her mother’s friend, the academic Renate Riemeck, through to the prison years and the controversial death, which the authorities hastily labelled a suicide. Conspiracy theories implying that she was murdered in her cell at Stuttgart-Stammheim have never quite been quelled, and Ditfurth returns an open verdict on this prickly question.

The family and political networks that shaped her life before 1970 come alive on these pages and make make the ensuing tragedy all the more dramatic. There are gaps in the post-1970 knowledge, which is inevitable because of the clandestine nature of the RAF operations, which have never been unravelled in court. (Typically, all members caught were convicted on the basis of being members of a terrorist organisation by the very same judges that had previously rejected any guilt to be associated with membership of Nazi organisations, one of the many bitter ironies in this story.)

Jutta Ditfurth has delivered the definitive account of the life of somebody who could have been one of post-war Germany’s most admired intellectuals and instead turned into its most-hated (which, of course, requires a great deal of courage from the author, as some of that residual hatred will surely be reflected in her direction). The poet Erich Fried called Meinhof the most important German woman since Rosa Luxemburg. The way both women perished should concern us all.

Every picture tells a story

review of Luna cornata by Elvira Valgañón

Sobrelamesa Ediciones 2007

I discovered this charming little book in an Oxfam shop. It is about two people dreaming up stories inspired by old photos they get from an antiquarian bookshop in Dublin. These days, as the traditional, chemical process of making photos via negatives is disappearing rapidly, it is especially poignant to immerse oneself in the time when monochrome photos were at the cutting edge of technology, and having your family portraits taken at the local photographer’s studio was an obligatory status symbol.

Making up life stories for the people portrayed in such photos opens a window into the social history of Dublin in the early 20th century, and, via migration, also to other parts of Europe. A certain distance is provided by the fact that the storytellers are foreigners in Dublin (she a photographer from Spain, he a visiting professor), looking at the Irish way of life with a degree of naïve admiration.

After reading this book, I noticed that there are in fact lots of old family portraits for sale on our local antiques market. Isn’t it a shame that these have become dissociated from the stories that led to their creation and those that may have followed it? Making up stories is fun, and in this case makes for an inspiring read. Did the author really buy these photos in Dublin, or did she invent them, I wonder.

However, it would be even better if such photos could be re-attached to their real-life stories. For every old photo ending up in a car boot sale, there may be a genealogist who has the matching story and who would be overjoyed to find the photos to go with it. (see for instance, the story of our Winderlich photos)

But I’m digressing. Nice little book. Wonder what the author did next.

the artist inside

Michelangelo famously stated that his statues were already present in the marble a priori, and the hand of the sculptor did nothing but to liberate them. Although the author doesn’t mention it directly, this may well have been the inspiration behind “El cristo feo” by Alicia Yanez Cossio (Quito, 1929). All the main figures in this novel, namely a statue and three living persons, get re-sculpted in different ways.

This is the story of the poor maid Ordalisa who works for a zombie-esque elderly couple. She has inherited an excruciatingly ugly crucifix from her mother, which one day starts talking to her. It (or Christ, or whoever is talking, it might just be within her head!) has a refreshingly unorthodox take on christian values, reminiscent of the 1970s cult hit “Mr God this is Anna”. Thus, even if the story is superficially about a crucifix, it’s never preachy.

Instructed by the Voice (who is and isn’t inside the crucifix, as s/he is and isn’t everywhere), Ordalisa starts chiselling out a beautiful (and movable) christ from inside the ugly crucifix. In doing this, she also liberates the artist within herself, and a living person within one of her employers (although the other gets resculpted in a less commendable way).

Told laconically with a minimal cast and setting, this enchanting story would work just as well as a chamber piece for a small theatre. Michelangelo would have loved it, as will anybody who has a bit of an artist hidden somewhere underneath their marble surface.

PS the only one of her books that found some attention in the English speaking world seems to be the pot-bellied virgin, which is reviewed here:

http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2006/bookreviews.asp