3.5

"....but being unloved is an act of terror."

"Valerie. Marilyn. Roslyn. Ulrike. Sylvia. Dorothy. Cosmogirl. A kind of insane genius. She has lost her marbles. That means we will wipe out her memories. Electroshock, injections, straitjackets, Elmhurst."

Probably one of best books I have read in this year. I hadn heard about Valerie Solane before this book. If you are someone who is moved by anguish of likes of Marilyn Munro, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath; I will highly recommend this book - it probably should have won International Man Booker. Apparently Valerie was a writer, artist, actress, playright, feminist and a scientist who wrote S.C.U.M. manifesto, a feminist manifesto in which she describes how women must arise against men and men must kill themselves as only sensible thing to do.:

"Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y gene is an incomplete X gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples."

and who also shot a famous movie director Any Warhol attempting to kill him after later stole a play she wrote but also had much to do with a life lived in anguish:

"Why doesn’t she shoot? Why in hell’s name doesn’t she shoot? All her rights were under attack. A state of raped she-babies and raped she-animals. And why don’t they shoot? I don’t actually know, Dr Cooper. If I knew, we wouldn’t be sitting here. Half a civilization on its knees and an arms industry that turns over more every month than the third world’s combined debt to the corrupt world. And that’s not including the porn industry."

This toxic hatred of men could be sourced to repeative sexual abuse at hands of her father:

"My condition is not a medical condition. It’s more a condition of extreme clarity, of stark white operating lights illuminating all words, things, bodies and identities. Within a stroke or a shout of you, Dr Cooper, everything looks different. Your so-called diagnosis is an exact description of woman’s place in the system of mass psychosis. Schizophrenia, paranoia, depression and the potential for destructive acts. Every girl in patriarchy knows that schizophrenia, paranoia and depression are in no way a description of an individual medical condition. It is a definitive diagnosis of a social structure and a form of government based on constant insults to the brain capacity of half the population, founded on rape."
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Her hatred for men is not helped by her later depending on prostitution to raising money for education. An anguished life - with sexual abuse from her father, a volatile relationship with her mother, the death of the only girl she loved etc is written about in this amazing book. I do not wish to analyse her character something the character herself resists. And after all it will be discrediting her to call her diseased.:

"You’re no woman, Valerie. You’re a disease."

But if it was a disease, it was created by people around her - and mostly men. And even later on, she, the agonised perspective with which she sees the world created out of her own traumatic experiences and her ideas continue to be a mere source of amusement to people, including feminists - good in as far as they could be commercialised or were entertaining but never taken seriously. Of course, people won't take ideas of S.C.U.M. manifesto seriously, but it seems like she was already being treated like a book character by people around her.

The best part of the book is the narration itself with prose always managing to reflect the anguish of the protagonist.

"The blood flows so slowly through your body. You claw at your breasts, weep and cry out, fumble with the bedding. The hotel sheets are dirty, gray with age, and foul-smelling, urine and vomit and vaginal blood and tears, a golden cloud of pain floating through your mind and gut. Blinding streaks of light in the room, explosions of agony in your skin and lungs, pitching, plunging, blazing. Heat in your arms, fever, abandonment, the stench of dying. Slivers and shards of light still flickering; your hands searching for Dorothy. I hate myself but I do not want to die. I do not want to disappear. I want to go back. I long for someone’s hands, my mother’s hands, a girl’s arms. Or a voice of any kind. Anything but this eclipse of the sun.
Dorothy?
Dorothy?"

"Besides, she has a serious tendency to mistake tears for laughter. Foundation course in psychiatry and linguistics. Laughing is a substitute for weeping in the same way that words are a substitute for screams."


"Up to now the history of all societies has been the history of silence. Rebel, psychoanalyst, experimental writer, woman’s potential as dissident. Language has become increasingly a physical substance whose only function is to underline my loneliness."

The book though narrating Valerie's life retains that dream like quality with several postmodern tools employed to give the effect that you are witnessing the creation of author .... within mind of author who is creating it in some sort of dream - sentences get repeated to increase the effect, the landscape of Georgia is turned into a desert to mirror the anguish of protagonist, Vlaerie's writings are frequently quoted, the author herself says she has taken lots of liberty with facts in very begining. One such example is the conversations between narrator (the author herself) and Valerie.:

"NARRATOR: My faculty of dreams—
VALERIE: —and no sentimental young women or sham authors playing at writing a novel about me dying. You don’t have my permission to go through my material."

"NARRATOR: I don’t want to live in a world where you die. There must be other endings, other stories.
VALERIE: Death is the end of all stories. There are no happy endings."

More quotes:


VALERIE: "Remember, I’m the only sane woman here"

"Hope was never a thing with feathers."
CLAUDIA RANKINE (an epigraph)



"Her words flutter like wrapping paper in the wind."


"The Olympia Press, founded in Paris in 1953 (on a shoestring) by Maurice Girodias, allegedly to pervert American tourists into a pornographic way of life, published The Story of O in 1954, Lolita and The Ginger Man in 1955, all of de Sade’s novels and most of Henry Miller’s best works, Candy in 1958, The Naked Lunch and Durrell’s Black Book in 1959 – not to speak of dozens of other interesting authors, masterpieces and diversions."


"Don’t interrupt me . . . Sex . . . Sex is a refuge for the mindless. The more mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in masculine culture. In short, the nicer she is, the more sexual. The nicest women in our society are raving sex maniacs . . . Do you follow?"