User Profile

Voyage in the dark is the fairly autobiographical account of how Anna, a 19 year old white girl from the Caribbean, navigates her life in England. As a woman of modest means, the choices at her disposal are limited. Since she doesn’t want to spend her whole life working some soul-destroying job while living in near-misery, she can either offer herself to wealthier men in exchange for favours and money, or she can marry, entering a similar deal but with only one man.

Or maybe even that is not entirely a choice, because by the time we encounter her she’s already not really marriage material, at least not for men who can afford the luxuries to which she aspires: fun nights out, nice clothes, a beautiful and warm apartment. So, when she meets Walter, who is gentlemanly and affectionate towards her, but clearly has no serious intentions, she is in. She doesn’t really fall in love with him, but does become enamored with his attentions and the time they spent together so that, when he gets bored, she unravels and, we would now say, engages in self-destructive behaviors, fueled by a depression that remains unnamed. Throughout her voyage in the dark, Anna remembers moments of her life in the Caribbean, where it wasn’t so cold, colours were blighter and her family had power. Anna longs to be back and longs to be black; she idealizes and exoticizes the hell out of the nanny who took care of her as a child, but fully realizes that there was no love there, and that she does not really belonged there any more that she does in England.

Anna (Jean?) is no heroine: she’s damaged, unlikable and self-sabotages at every corner. She is fiercely independent, but cannot help pining after men, for both the romance and money they can offer. She can see through the hypocrisy of British society, its classism and racism, its moralism – but is fundamentally preoccupied by how they affect herself, has no bandwidth to look beyond that. How very honest and believable. How tragic.

Beautiful writing, sparing and precise, with a lot of meaning conveyed through details: the patterns of the wall paper, the prints hanging from the wall, or the shoes people wear. Take this passage: The cinema smelt of poor people, and on the screen ladies and gentlemen in evening dress walked about with strained smiles. 'There! ' Ethel said, nudging. 'D' you see that girl - the one with the band round her hair? That' s the one I know; that' s my friend. Do you see? My God, isn' t she terrible? My God, what a scream! ' 'Oh, shut up, ' somebody said. 'Shut up yourself, ' Ethel said. I opened my eyes. On the screen a pretty girl was pointing a revolver at a group of guests. They backed away with their arms held high above their heads and expressions of terror on their faces. The pretty girl's lips moved. The fat hostess unclasped a necklace of huge pearls and fell, fainting, into the arms of a footman. The pretty girl, holding the revolver so that the audience could see that two of her fingers were missing, walked backwards towards the door. Her lips moved again. You could see what she was saying. 'Keep'em up . . . . ' When the police appeared everybody clapped. When Three-Fingered Kate was caught everybody clapped louder still. 'Damned fools, ' I said. 'Aren' t they damned fools? Don't you hate them? They always clap in the wrong places and laugh in the wrong places.'

A basic man - not a particularly bad one, but the bar is low - is clearly struggling, as we soon start to suspect, because of a recent break-up. He is miserable, and resentful. As more details about his late relationship emerge, it becomes clear he was kind of an asshole, and, although on some level he knows is and is ready to acknowledge it, he doesn't see much of a problem with that either. As this synopsis makes clear, not much happen in the book. Nor is there a lot of perceptive introspection, because our protagonist is not able of that. Yet, I found it surprisingly not-boring: a convincing sketch of masculine mediocrity.

Let’s get the spoilers out of the way first (LAST WARNING, STOP READING!): It is the 1960s, in the Netherlands. Isabel grew up in a large country house in Overijssel, living a reclusive, calm, and quite miserable life. Over the years, she has seen her brothers move out, and her mother die, and feels utterly alone. She is unfriendly, bitter and obsessed by the fear others may be stealing from her. Against her will, she ends up hosting Eva, the new girlfriend of her brother Louis. Eva appears to Isabel as working-class, loud, tacky and fake. Things start to disappear from the house: first a spoon, then a cup, then a plate. The two barely talk to one another, and when they do Isabel is ferocious. Time goes on, however and, when you put two women alone in an isolate, cold country house for long enough, they will find ways to warm up each other, at first through guilt-ridden kisses in dark hallways, eventually with steaming hot sex. The twist is revealed in the third part of the book, when we get to read, through Isabel’s eyes, Eva’s diary. We learn that the house used to belong to Eva’s family, who lost it during the war when they had to go into hiding on account of being Jewish. They also lost the legal rights to the house, since they stopped paying the mortgage. Eva’s appearance in Louis and Isabel’s lives is an elaborate plan to get back what it’s hers. So far, so intriguing. In the last chapter, Eva and Isabel make up and EVA MOVES IN WITH ISABEL AS HER LOVER WITH THE PROMISE THAT SHE WILL BE GIVEN THE HOUSE WHEN ISABEL INHERITS IT, WHICH IS AS PROBLEMATIC AS STARTING POINT FOR A RELATIONSHIP AS THERE EVER WAS. This book has two enormous strengths: (1) it’s fun to read, thanks to a well-paced plot, a writing style that is elegant enough without being pretentious, and a lot of really hot lesbian sex scenes (2) it explores an important topic, e.g. collective responsibility, guilt and victimhood, in a way that is thought-provoking but not excessively preachy. This book also has a pretty big flaw, i.e. a disappointing ending that to my eyes undermines both endeavors, since if seems implausible in relation to the preceding story line, and also risks presenting love as a solution to historical injustice. The book came out in 2024 and, as far as I hear, the author has basically refused to talk about Palestine, and seems to be resisting the pressure">pagesofjulia.com/2024/02/16/maximum-shelf-author-interview-yael-van-der-wouden/) to do so on the grounds that it has little to do with a Jewish-Dutch identity (maybe? That’s how I understand it). The argument is complicated by the fact that she was born in Israel and the story of Eva is not too dissimilar to that of many Palestinians, at least with respect to the experience of losing a home to strangers.

In the first pages of the book, the narrator's husband states very authoritatively, in the way straight white man with cultural capital do, that in this world there are two kind of people, drivers and parkers. He's at a party, and everyone around him, especially his wife, take this very seriously, in the way people do when straight white man with cultural capital say something with conviction; in fact, one could is the rest of the book as her vain quest to be a driver.

A few pages later, she recalls a conversation with her best friend, where they were describing to each other how they have sex with their partners. They are both in long-term relations and struggle to fit sex into their domestic lives. But while the narrator deals with it by being in her head and playing raunchy scenarios, her friend Jodi gets into a sweaty bodily tangle with her life, and grinds. They both have a moment of envy for one another, and the narrator concludes that people can be divided into kind of people with respect to sex, those who are mind-rooted, and those who are body-rooted. One could see the rest of the book as the narrator semi-successful quest to have more body-rooted sex.

There is a lot of sex in this book, and a lot of thinking about sex. It is romantic sex, weird sex, rebound sex, eye-opening sex, routine sex, but never boring, described with a lot of curiosity, and respect for the other person and for the many ways sex can enrich one's life. There are also a lot of implausible and quirky situations, but, contrary to other works of July, they always feel very honest, like Miranda was saying: OK, we know this is not exactly what happened to me, but we both understand the basic impulse that I'm trying to get at. And there is also a lot humour.

On some level, this is also a book about a wealthy white artsy New Yorker with a fulfilling job and a loving family, who feels trapped and reclaim her rights to be happy. She's conscious of the injustices inherent to the nuclear family model that she inhabits, but never thinks beyond that, never reads the news. Lucky her at this time. But also: damn her. She is also quite snobbish (e.g. see her characterisation of Davey's girlfriend); when she falls madly in love with a provincial hunk, she can only rationalise it by writing an American-dream ending for him, as a successful dancer in New York.

The final book in Baltasar's exploration of motherhood is as deranged as the previous two, which is to say: pretty deranged. The protagonist-narrator is a lesbian who lives in Barcelon and works in some sort of research project involving old people in homes. She loves to plot a good plan, and has an unconvential sense of morality, two qualities she puts to use when she decides to get pregnant. The second part of the book sees her moving to the country side, where she lives a grotesque, extreme version of pastoral life, shedding all comfort and extra and embracing self-reliance and brute nature. She fights for survival, and, sometimes, kills (for example, a loads of kittens). Her neighbour, a shepard, helps her getting to ropes with things, and fullfil her desire for a baby, but not the way you (or she) anticipated.

The book's narrator is Arturo, a boy growing up in almost complete solitude in Procida, near Neaples. His mum died whilst giving birth, and he was raised by a local farmer who fed him goat milk. He imagines himself a hero, a knight, a soldier or a pirate, and spends his day swimming, walking around the island with his only friend, a dog named Immacolatella, and reading adventure books. That, and waiting for the return of his father Wihlem, who visits unpredictably, and whom the boys adores. In the eyes of Arturo, Wihlem embodies the qualities of a real man: he is brave, handsome (blond, even!), virile and free-spirited. When Arturo is fourteen, Wihlem brings home a new wife, a Neapolitan girl of sixteen, and Arturo's world changes...

Arturo is a very unlikeable protagonist: misogynistic, arrogant, often crueld. He's also very human, and as such a touch endearing. So that, while the book's atmosphere is almost fantastic - sometimes similar to a fairy tale, sometimes of a classical myths - the realism in Arturo's portrayal is incredibly convincing, almost painful.