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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
[Spoiler Alert] I've had a really hard time thinking about how to rate this book. I loved it, and I loved the structure and intimacy of alternating letters between friends finding each other again. I loved Sophia and Yarostan's honesty with each other and their ability to look critically and challenge their perceptions and ideal abstractions of the past. The conversations culled from their retrospective storytelling seemed so relevant still, and I had flashbacks to numerous talks and people I've known who have been interested in other forms of life.
There is an interesting parallel investigation into the morality taught by the state as well as the family, and the framework of the family uses incest as a focus point. At times the relationships that try to undo the morality imposed by the family seem consensual, and this parallelism works well, but there is one particular scene that still bothers me in which Yarostan's wife, adolescent daughter, and best friend take him up a mountain to "play games." The scene turns sexual and his young daughter proceeds to try to coerce him into having sex while his wife and best friend hold him down. This serves as a mechanism for Yarostan to do some introspective work and realize the ways in which he lives hypocritically while condemning those who refuse to engage with their desires honestly. Ultimately he decides that his wife and daughter are right, and that he has been lying to himself about his desire for his daughter.
While I don't think it's the intent of the author that everything that happens to the characters is a personal statement about "how to live as a revolutionary," this scene struck me sourly for several reasons; the biggest is that I hate the idea that other people need to dogmatically teach us lessons about our hidden desires, particularly when it comes to any kind of sexual liberation. I MAY be taking that moment too seriously, but I haven't heard from anyone who could make sense of it. It bothered me as someone who is interested in liberatory praxis as well as someone who is the child of an incest survivor; it was hard to delineate what was actually going on for the sake of the story from the psychology of many child predators.
Despite the complicated feelings I had regarding that storyline, I have still been recommending the book to friends, and I was still sad when it ended. Much of the book reads as poetry. Even though it's an epic read at 800+ pages, I will probably read it again...just several years down the road.
There is an interesting parallel investigation into the morality taught by the state as well as the family, and the framework of the family uses incest as a focus point. At times the relationships that try to undo the morality imposed by the family seem consensual, and this parallelism works well, but there is one particular scene that still bothers me in which Yarostan's wife, adolescent daughter, and best friend take him up a mountain to "play games." The scene turns sexual and his young daughter proceeds to try to coerce him into having sex while his wife and best friend hold him down. This serves as a mechanism for Yarostan to do some introspective work and realize the ways in which he lives hypocritically while condemning those who refuse to engage with their desires honestly. Ultimately he decides that his wife and daughter are right, and that he has been lying to himself about his desire for his daughter.
While I don't think it's the intent of the author that everything that happens to the characters is a personal statement about "how to live as a revolutionary," this scene struck me sourly for several reasons; the biggest is that I hate the idea that other people need to dogmatically teach us lessons about our hidden desires, particularly when it comes to any kind of sexual liberation. I MAY be taking that moment too seriously, but I haven't heard from anyone who could make sense of it. It bothered me as someone who is interested in liberatory praxis as well as someone who is the child of an incest survivor; it was hard to delineate what was actually going on for the sake of the story from the psychology of many child predators.
Despite the complicated feelings I had regarding that storyline, I have still been recommending the book to friends, and I was still sad when it ended. Much of the book reads as poetry. Even though it's an epic read at 800+ pages, I will probably read it again...just several years down the road.