Elaine irwin almay
But I m not sure it can successfully end there Will Self Although I didn t enjoy reading this book the writing was beautiful and I felt what the author was trying to convey I spent time inside the thoughts of a woman trapped by the 1950s expectations of how she is expected to behave She is outwardly doing everything she is supposed to do while inwardly going mad It is the internal rant of someone who feels completely trapped by her circumstance I definitely felt her pain Will Self In some ways this is a companion to WS s earlier novel How the Dead Live another story of death in life as it affects a woman not unlike his late Mother Only this time.
Nonfiction elaine joyce
Most definitely not for me The star is for me though because I finished it. Elaine leal This novel is based on diaries that Will Self s mother kept I think I d have kept them to myself The story is negligible Elaine is a bored housewife who it appears has had affairs previously in her marriage She seems to find everything dull except for her brilliant son Billy I wonder who that is She virtually throws herself at a man who flirts with everyone and cons herself into believing that he desires her too. Elaine chao However the truth is that the object of her desire Ted is just as dull as she is My problems with this book began almost immediately with the style There are myriad ellipses and phrases in italics neither of which I can fathom the reason for. Elaine luria The last time I tried to read a Will Self book I gave up and I wish I had done this time There are lots of clever literary devices Latin rarely used words etc presumably to demonstrate how very clever Will Self is I ve seen the man interviewed he s funny and witty I just wish he d applied some of that to this dull book that is merely about an affair. Nonfiction elaine joyce Thankyou to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for the advance review copy Will Self A woman who cannot or will not accept the conditions of her servitude naturally and gracefully deserves what has happened to me Entry from Elaine s diary February 1956The publisher s blurb describes Will Self s Elaine as Perhaps the first work of auto oedipal fiction as it is a heavily novelised treatment of the private diaries of Self s own mother Elaine Brief research shows that Self has a brother and was raised in London whereas the Billy in this novel is an only child raised in Ithaca New York etc this is not straight auto fiction I don t normally love when a male author writes from the female POV and particularly in a case like this where gender based power imbalance is the main focus but with access to his mother s diaries and a front row seat to her life Self has than usual insight into his character s psyche and the case could be made that perhaps he approaches his mother s story with an outsider s objectivity that has allowed him to explore her life with something like clinical detachment unavailable to other women Ultimately this is a compelling story of a 1950s American housewife thwarted in her own ambitions and suffering mental illness who isn t quite emotionally stable enough to endure the swinging parties of her husband s Ivy League faculty crowd without humiliation With elevated language intimate psychological exploration and unusual literary devices Self is an obvious master of his craft and with a mother whose story is at once both unique in its details and broadly typical of its time this is a novel that feels both revelatory and necessary Note I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms ALSO I usually put my quoteblocks in italics but here I present them as found because Self s use of italics is too integral to the novel for me to mess with Her hysteria is mounting and as Evelyn Tate s screen door snaps shut Elaine says it a third time Can it be that the acme of success for me is being able to do my job as a housekeeper Each phrase is separated by a troubled gasp but it doesn t matter how fast she babbles or deeply she breathes the panic has the better of her I m going to collapse she thinks then be swept up into the sky with my goddamn nightie up around my shoulders The last anyone will ever see of me is the first anyone did my bare behind waiting to be smacked. Elaine shields kindle books Suffering from migraines and panic attacks and unresolved childhood trauma Elaine Hancock routinely relies on her husband John to help care for both her and their nine year old son Billy but as even Elaine s former therapist noted that John and Billy s relationship was unusually close Elaine is often made to feel both chained to and surplus to their family arrangement Dreaming of being an author Elaine fills her time alone by writing stories in her secret notebooks but as she can tell that her writing is worthless and banal Elaine burns her fiction only hanging on to her diaries filled with secrets and schedules and sexual fantasies And these are sexed up times Between feeling disgust at her husband s clumsy overtures and like a second tier prize at Cornell faculty parties where folks swap spouses for slow dances and drunken necking Elaine is ripe to fall hard for the manly new Sociology professor when he and his glamorous wife both join the faculty a crush that will not end well Spanning the period of about a year with Elaine thinking back on earlier episodes from her life this novel explores all of the ways that society and Elaine s own mental fragility conspired against her fulfilment and happiness That s the plot but as for the format the most striking feature is Self s use of italics Dressed in slacks and a sweater she descends she descends dressed in slacks and a sweater in sweater and slacks dressed she descends each thought corresponds to a word or words right Mix em up and you get a wordy sorta salad like the mess in my head . Elaine stritch In a recent ish interview with The Sydney Herald Self explains that although he is a Professor of Modern Thought at Brunel University in west London he has stopped teaching literature because I cannot find students that are capable of understanding what literary influence is They simply haven t read enough and don t have the required fine grain of understanding So at the risk of demonstrating my own failings I ll share that whenever I saw these paragraphs that contain italics I assumed they were references to other sources I recognised some references to Steinbeck and Shakespeare The Odyssey is gestured to beyond the setting of Ithaca Paradise Lost beyond it being the focus of Elaine s husband s academic career I felt clever when I recognised Venus in Furs But I didn t recognise most of the italicised bits and while some phrases like bitter as the cud prove to be from poems a better read person might know Wilson Owen s Dulce et Decorum Est phrases like red and scummy patches in a stainless steel kidney dish and a chill cold blast of sunlight don t have any google results Are they simply all phrases from Elaine s diaries the wordy sorta salad that made a mess in her head Whether they were the results of her own reading and study or original phrasing that s what I decided to go with and it did serve to make Elaine an even intriguing character Having studied under the poet Ted Roethke discussed writing with Nabokov and Bellow at faculty events and serving an invaluable role as transcriptionist and editor for her husband s academic writing throughout her marriage Elaine is understandably frustrated to be entirely judged even by herself by her competence as a housekeeper. Pdf liner Yes she d been unhappy upset often as well But in those far off days of a fortnight ago with her complaisant old man her girlish crush on his colleague and her catty best friend Elaine had been a goddamn poster girl for the Modern American Woman posed in her kitchen skirts stiff as crinolines smile plasticized a penis in one hand a spatula in the other. Pdf explained This is the kind of novel one can imagine being taught all those literary references tracked down by students relentless than I in pursuit of their sources and the type of novel that s submitted for awards But unlike some novels that bore or soar right over my head for the sake of being different Self has crafted Elaine to be unique in form while totally relatable in substance I felt I got to know his character Elaine whether or not she is very faithful to the known facts of his actual mother and hers is a story that I am glad to have been told Will Self Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Press for the ARC Will Self s Elaine is a colossal and forceful misstep a textbook example of authorial self indulgence that seems to loathe both its subject and its audience It s one of the rare pieces of writing where I can t find anything good to say about it In this auto oedipal fiction okay gag Self draws from his mother s private diaries to craft a story about sexual frustration in the life of a 1950s housewife It s definitely a worthy subject for a novel but its execution is egregious Any book written by a man from a woman s perspective should cause the reader to pause but this spirals immediately into bad taste showcasing a protagonist that only avoids being a manic pixie dream girl by aging out of it Self replaces that trope s fixation on effortless cool with an insistence that women actually can be pretty deep Elaine argues for female complexity with such fervor that it becomes reductionist the author seemingly needs the titular character to earn readers respect rather than just assuming she deserves it This gets even grosser when one considers that at least some of the novel s thoughts originate from the author s mother yet he feels entitled to mediate them through his own lens and for his own purposes Further the prose is insufferable Elaine is one of the most grating overwrought things I ve read in a while and I say that as someone who loves writing that flirts with the poetic I love elevated language I love academic opaqueness I love when I need to look up a word The problem is that Self wields his lexicon like a blunt instrument forcibly bludgeoning the reader in almost every line As an example consider this early sentence Despite the tubular dress and the lampshade coiffure young Genevieve appeared simultaneously gamine nubile and intelligent Aside from the fact that the word nubile should be placed on the literary equivalent of a no fly list this sentence also reflects how Self s writing style never finds a rhythm that balances its dense peaks with approachable valleys It s always turned to 11 and often incomprehensible in its desperation to sound bookish the print equivalent of a podcast bro By the end of Elaine I just wasn t sure of who was meant to read the book other than its author and I think that s a problem Good writing may start for oneself no phantasmagoria is needed getting through the day is than enough. Literature Fiction elaine's As in his memoir Self the main character s thoughts and memories offset in italics fly across the page like a pinball handy given Elaine is a seething mass of neuroses about to go critical at virtually any point. Elaine may I don t think Self is given enough credit for writing convincingly about women especially when seen from within Not many male authors do with the exception of the late Brian Moore Self is another. EPub elaine stritch I admit I prefer the relative discipline of this work to the other novels which suffer from too much self indulgence and too little concern for the reader His short stories interestingly rarely suffer from the same problem where WS can play out a conceit to its logical conclusion and then quit while he s still ahead Will Self
| Elaine AUTHOR Will Self By Will Self |
| 080216353X |
| 9780802163530 |
| English |
| 304 |
| Hardcover |
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