Reviews

Plutôt bien fait il est grand et maigre et je viens de lire une ligne au début où elle me suggère je lui lèche l'épaule pour goûter l'océan Atlantique. Boh ! Mais pourquoi la couverture de la version traduite est-elle tellement plus esthétique ?

alexandrahorner's review

Go to review page

4.0

Lush, rich and beautiful. I am head-over-heels obsessed with Cixous.

gracija's review

Go to review page

emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

jimmylorunning's review

Go to review page

3.0

Seeing all these 5-stars for a Cixous book makes me so happy... and yet sad that I can't do the same. But I have to be honest here. This was not up to par with the rest of her books that I've read.

Like her other novels, this is a blend of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, myth, and literature. But here Cixous tackles the topic of love, the problem of loving and being loved, and it's probably the most purely personal book I've read by her. Thus a lot less of the literature than usual. She transcribes the experience of her relationship with Promethea into her notebooks, and that's sort of how it feels to read it... like reading someone's unedited journal. And along with that journal-esque style come the high points: soaring prose as good as anything I've read by her. Often passages that reach their height in a breathless obsessive energy of rhythmic release.

As far as war is concerned I am truly a woman: I do not want to win, if I were victorious I would be the one defeated, I only want to make my desire to encircle you triumph, my desire to fly over you, to flood you, to observe you from way up high and then through a microscope, I want to know you by means of every science and every art, but I want you to keep yourself intact, you my still-brutal and imposing civilization, I want you purely Infidel if my origins are in the Faith. If I am a Jew, be an Arab and let me love you, let us love each other with our two different innocences

Unfortunately, the passages that don't reach such heights often fall to cliche. The impossible of this book is to set down Promethea as she is, but Cixous knows as well as us that this act of writing changes what's written. And that the thing she wants most to capture is the uncapturable quality in her lover that does not translate to literature. It fascinates because it is impossible. She even admits this in the early pages of the book, which I enjoyed more as it was more about the writing process and the ideas behind the book. But if the goal was to capture the impossibility of the task, she was able to at least illustrate it in the rest of her experiment-book.

When it doesn't work, it falls back down to earth in cliche after cliche:

Under my very nose it is all so beautiful. It makes me want to sing. With words? Yes. Sometimes I think a moment is so beautiful. I want to toss it handfuls of delicious words so gluttony will keep it there.

Does it help that this was in the context of a turtle POV? Not completely. Context matters to a degree and can rescue cliches from their tired moorings, as the translator tries to convince us in the introduction. But only to a degree. And maybe it's the translation's fault, because I found the cliches insurmountable no matter how many contextual leaps were made. Mostly, it's because the book is completely in the deep end of emotions. There is no specific reality for the reader to grab onto. The emotion cannot attach itself to anything concrete, so I was left aswim in a sea of generalities and vagueness.

I think Cixous can and has done much better in her other books, although glimpses of her genius show through in this book as well.

emiliepichot's review

Go to review page

challenging emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? N/A
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

More...