A review by sookieskipper
The Butcher's Wife and Other Stories by Li Ang, Howard Goldblatt

4.0

...he simply didn't care.

After a while it stops being fiction and becomes personal with its unintentional narration of a woman's life in Taiwan. In societies that have carefully built, sheltered and nurtured atrocities like marital rape, this story will be a known one. A woman - a daughter, a wife and a mother is put into a cage and is used when her husband's hits his pleasure point or he is bored. It isn't always in the nature of the man to be cruel but it does becomes a nature when cruelty is accepted and even encouraged. The wife finds no help in other women who don't condone her screams. She is a loving mother who whispers comforting words to her children in a voice hoarse after screaming so long, as blood runs between her legs and tears stains her face.

We forget that morals evolve, change, adapt, soften or harden. The old societies are harder to change since the present is clung to past as an old lover and never lets it go. Be it Sati system or feet binding, a society has to come a long way to recognize what is cruel and what is tradition. While fighting for archaic tradition, the disgruntlement doesn't always come from a strong patriarchal archetype; its an entire generation - both women and men who clung to the distant past and force it on the next generation. The secondary characters - the aunties in the community who are both old and middle aged are all representatives of the very generations that refuses to condone the violent acts of men on them and other women. The Butcher's wife does what she believes its best and gets labelled "mad".

The society reels in the aftermath of Butcher's death in the hands of his wife. The question - Could she be defending herself never makes it to top ten list of questions why she could have killed her husband. She uses her husband's butcher knife to kill him in a ironic sense of justice. No, not justice. Self preservation. The perverseness of the marriage and the hypocrisy that surrounds "purity" of women drives the characters in this novella.

Its stories like these that makes you hug your mother, your sister, your daughter, your girlfriend a little closer and mourn for those who cannot find a gentle touch.