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sillyduckie's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcohol, Blood, Sexual assault, Sexism, Misogyny, Alcoholism, Sexual violence, Gun violence, Rape, Sexual content, Sexual harassment, Toxic relationship, Xenophobia, Confinement, Death, Grief, Kidnapping, Emotional abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Physical abuse, Suicide, Stalking, Fire/Fire injury, Infertility, Toxic friendship, and Violence
unavezmas's review against another edition
medium-paced
2.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexism, Rape, and Misogyny
marinaschulz's review against another edition
*Trigger Warning*
I wasn't able to finish "This Perfect Day", even though I'd been eagerly awaiting it's arrival in my mailbox for weeks. I am - was - a huge Ira Levin fan and have been marathoning his books for the past couple of weeks. They are short, easy to read, and Levin always seemed like an author who understood the female psyche. He seemed to get that our gender's biggest fears are not being taken seriously due to our sex, or to be seen as objects. That point exactly, the fact that he understood us was exactly what made books like "Rosemary's Baby" and "Stepford Wives" so chilling.
Fast forward to "This Perfect Day", written smack bang in between those two, aforementioned, masterpieces. I was excited to hear that it was a straight-up sci-fi, dystopian novel, and it seemed like a product of its times, as the book was written in 1969 and corresponded with the height of the space age zeitgeist. However, even though the novel had a strong start it goes downhill from there.
The first chapter puts you right into the new society, with little children speaking in secret about "the old ways" and hidden communities, and promptly being subdued. But the twist is that the kids are subdued in such a calm, loving way, that they actually thank the authorities (who are brainwashed too) for keeping them from having "subversive thoughts". The subdoing is done via drugs provided and dosed out by the central computer of the government, called the Unicomp.
Honestly, that beginning is good stuff. But then, within a few chapters, you start to realize how much is lifted directly off Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. And while one can argue that "drugged out utopia/dystopia" has become enough of a trope in and off itself that authors are "allowed" to work with this premise and give it its own spin, all Levin does here is work the exact same ideas, but with a little less zeerust. As an example, the embryo cultivation in Brave New World is substituted by the UniComp in This Perfect Day stating whether or not a couple is allowed to marry and subsequently procreate.
I managed a few more chapters in This Perfect Day before getting an eerie feeling throughout. Turns out, this wasn't just a ripoff of Brave New World, but it was also lifting content directly from Fahrenheit 451, a book which I happen to despise, as I find it not only sexist, but also improbable as a dystopia. But, suddenly, there she was! This Perfect Day's own "Clarice"! A love-interest character who is a young manic pixie dream girl, oh-so-different from the other girls, pretty, and who loves reading even though everyone else thinks it's useless. In this book, she is called "Lilac".
Chip, our main character, claims to "love" Lilac. At the same time, Chip is dating two other women, one of which is the person who first integrates him into the rebel group. Even though that lady is perfectly nice, and actually falls for Chip romantically, his internal monologue reveals that he is just using her for sex and for standing in the group, which I find icky.
So why does Chip "love" Lilac? Partly because she is in love and seeing someone else, which obviously makes her an even hotter conquest. And partly because, due to a biological abnormality, Lilac is the only female in the novel who still develops breasts, which is seen by This Perfect Day's society as a deformity. Considering how often he mentions them (and that as far as I understood, nobody knows in this society the biological reasons women had breasts), it feels fetish-y, not romantic.
Ah, how poorly women and relationships are portrayed in this novel! There's the fact that when Chip plots an escape, he only bothers to save Lilac, who always rejected him and was in a commited relationship with someone else, with no thought about even checking up on his former rebel friends or girlfriend, whom he never technically broke up with. And of course, we mustn't forget that throwaway line about how women only engage in lesbian sex if they can't get dick.
But worst of all there's how, at one point in the novel, Chip forcibly kidnaps Lilac. In theory, this could be technically justified in-universe, since she has been drugged into submission by the UniComp, and her regular, un-drugged personality, would defenitly want her to detox. However, what Chip does to get her to snap out of it is beyond morally reprehensible. After a big fight in which drugged-Lilac essentially tried to escape and fight, rather than maybe tying her up until regular-Lilac comes back, Chip thinks and does the following:
Having her under him, having her subdued, with her legs held apart, suddenly excited him. He though of tearing off her coveralls and "raping" her. (...) And maybe that would stop [her from thinking about the man she loved before], and her hating him. .
Yup, Chip, the main character with whom we are meant to sympathize, literally acknowledges that what he will do is in fact rape her. And the description that follows is graphic, and not to get in too much detail, but all you need to know is that Lilac protests. A lot.
Not only is this beyond morally reprehensible for the character, but its also a terrible way to go about writing a book, considering how Levin puts the word “rape” within quotes as if he considers that its not rape… if you know you can rape someone into loving you? I really don’t understand this, and it could have been a decent book without this horrible, horrible scene. Not to mention that of course, Lilac forgives Chip, and the brainwashing vanishes because "good sex". I really have no words how this disgusts me, and how its not okay in any media, in any time, let alone less than 50 years ago.
So yes, this is where I stopped reading, and I don't intend to continue since this book reduces my faith in humanity and in an author I loved up to yesterday. The plot basically just hot-glues together the basic elements of Brave New World including the offshore communities of people living in the old society and the use of drugs to subdue the mainland populatiom and Fahrenheit 451, including the Deus-ex-machina of the importance of literature and books , the later of which was a ridiculously predictable plot point in context. I honestly think that exploring the idea of extreme conformity in a drugged-out-peaced-out dystopia could have been so cool, but honestly, there was so little of that compared to blatant sexism and plagarism that I just can't recommend this book.
I wasn't able to finish "This Perfect Day", even though I'd been eagerly awaiting it's arrival in my mailbox for weeks. I am - was - a huge Ira Levin fan and have been marathoning his books for the past couple of weeks. They are short, easy to read, and Levin always seemed like an author who understood the female psyche. He seemed to get that our gender's biggest fears are not being taken seriously due to our sex, or to be seen as objects. That point exactly, the fact that he understood us was exactly what made books like "Rosemary's Baby" and "Stepford Wives" so chilling.
Fast forward to "This Perfect Day", written smack bang in between those two, aforementioned, masterpieces. I was excited to hear that it was a straight-up sci-fi, dystopian novel, and it seemed like a product of its times, as the book was written in 1969 and corresponded with the height of the space age zeitgeist. However, even though the novel had a strong start it goes downhill from there.
The first chapter puts you right into the new society, with little children speaking in secret about "the old ways" and hidden communities, and promptly being subdued. But the twist is that the kids are subdued in such a calm, loving way, that they actually thank the authorities (who are brainwashed too) for keeping them from having "subversive thoughts". The subdoing is done via drugs provided and dosed out by the central computer of the government, called the Unicomp.
Honestly, that beginning is good stuff. But then, within a few chapters, you start to realize how much is lifted directly off Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. And while one can argue that "drugged out utopia/dystopia" has become enough of a trope in and off itself that authors are "allowed" to work with this premise and give it its own spin, all Levin does here is work the exact same ideas, but with a little less zeerust. As an example, the embryo cultivation in Brave New World is substituted by the UniComp in This Perfect Day stating whether or not a couple is allowed to marry and subsequently procreate.
I managed a few more chapters in This Perfect Day before getting an eerie feeling throughout. Turns out, this wasn't just a ripoff of Brave New World, but it was also lifting content directly from Fahrenheit 451, a book which I happen to despise, as I find it not only sexist, but also improbable as a dystopia. But, suddenly, there she was! This Perfect Day's own "Clarice"! A love-interest character who is a young manic pixie dream girl, oh-so-different from the other girls, pretty, and who loves reading even though everyone else thinks it's useless. In this book, she is called "Lilac".
Chip, our main character, claims to "love" Lilac. At the same time, Chip is dating two other women, one of which is the person who first integrates him into the rebel group. Even though that lady is perfectly nice, and actually falls for Chip romantically, his internal monologue reveals that he is just using her for sex and for standing in the group, which I find icky.
So why does Chip "love" Lilac? Partly because she is in love and seeing someone else, which obviously makes her an even hotter conquest. And partly because, due to a biological abnormality, Lilac is the only female in the novel who still develops breasts, which is seen by This Perfect Day's society as a deformity. Considering how often he mentions them (and that as far as I understood, nobody knows in this society the biological reasons women had breasts), it feels fetish-y, not romantic.
Ah, how poorly women and relationships are portrayed in this novel! There's the fact that when Chip plots an escape, he only bothers to save Lilac, who always rejected him and was in a commited relationship with someone else, with no thought about even checking up on his former rebel friends or girlfriend, whom he never technically broke up with. And of course, we mustn't forget that throwaway line about how women only engage in lesbian sex if they can't get dick.
But worst of all there's how, at one point in the novel, Chip forcibly kidnaps Lilac. In theory, this could be technically justified in-universe, since she has been drugged into submission by the UniComp, and her regular, un-drugged personality, would defenitly want her to detox. However, what Chip does to get her to snap out of it is beyond morally reprehensible. After a big fight in which drugged-Lilac essentially tried to escape and fight, rather than maybe tying her up until regular-Lilac comes back, Chip thinks and does the following:
Having her under him, having her subdued, with her legs held apart, suddenly excited him. He though of tearing off her coveralls and "raping" her. (...) And maybe that would stop [her from thinking about the man she loved before], and her hating him. .
Yup, Chip, the main character with whom we are meant to sympathize, literally acknowledges that what he will do is in fact rape her. And the description that follows is graphic, and not to get in too much detail, but all you need to know is that Lilac protests. A lot.
Not only is this beyond morally reprehensible for the character, but its also a terrible way to go about writing a book, considering how Levin puts the word “rape” within quotes as if he considers that its not rape… if you know you can rape someone into loving you? I really don’t understand this, and it could have been a decent book without this horrible, horrible scene. Not to mention that of course, Lilac forgives Chip, and the brainwashing vanishes because "good sex". I really have no words how this disgusts me, and how its not okay in any media, in any time, let alone less than 50 years ago.
So yes, this is where I stopped reading, and I don't intend to continue since this book reduces my faith in humanity and in an author I loved up to yesterday. The plot basically just hot-glues together the basic elements of Brave New World including the offshore communities of people living in the old society and the use of drugs to subdue the mainland populatiom and Fahrenheit 451, including the Deus-ex-machina of the importance of literature and books , the later of which was a ridiculously predictable plot point in context. I honestly think that exploring the idea of extreme conformity in a drugged-out-peaced-out dystopia could have been so cool, but honestly, there was so little of that compared to blatant sexism and plagarism that I just can't recommend this book.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape and Sexual assault
Moderate: Misogyny
Minor: Lesbophobia
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