The savagery with which he set about eradicating peoples and their symbolic systems and inscribing his own within their territories cannot be explained simply on the basis of his ambivalent desire for the unknown, or for economic gain it was also, as Tzvetan Todorov suggests in The Conquest of America, an attempt to recenter himself in this expanded universe. Confronted by a reality challenging the projections of space and time that he had structured through his mythic texts, the European was suddenly no longer the privileged subject of knowledge. From the European perspective, other imaginary worlds, divine and profane, had long preoccupied the Greco-Judaic consciousness, but these had been the product of a fixed world order. The sex is explicit, but still rather tasteful.IT IS PERHAPS DIFFICULT now for the West, where the miraculous has long been banished by rationalism, to imagine the crisis of knowledge precipitated 500 years ago on both sides of the Atlantic by the Spanish conquista. But there's little here that's shocking enough to justify the secrecy, so it's hard to imagine that there will be quite the same buzz stateside. (Mar.)įorecast: Gallons of ink have been spilled overseas about this one-most of it on the question of the author's anonymity (she's gone public there-or has been outed, depending on whom one asks). This unusual but strangely compelling novel offers an intimate chronicle of change and self-discovery, of a woman who makes a final and unexpected choice. She also becomes pregnant, and the anonymous author is cannily perceptive about the vicissitudes of pregnancy and new motherhood she writes strikingly of the surprising erotic passion, emotional upheaval and anger that can flare during pregnancy. Thus she commences erotic adventures previously unimaginable.
Beginning work on her long-planned book might cheer her up-and so will an affair with lovely Gabriel, of the "cathedral-wide" chest and silky young skin. To make matters worse, he may have engaged in an affair with her best childhood friend. At first, marriage equals safety to the woman ("it's a relief, to be honest, this surrendering."), but the sex is humdrum, and Cole, her husband, is remote and fastidious-only oral sex offers a surefire way to orgasm and sometimes he'd just rather watch TV. The author of the entries, a nameless 30-something housewife, has disappeared, leaving behind what amounts to 138 "lessons," written in the second-person, for her fellow archetypal "good wives." At first, the gimmick is jarring, but as the protagonist's personality emerges and flowers, readers will be seduced by this sometimes subtle, sometimes overwrought novel set in modern-day London.
A series of diary entries charts the sinuous paths of marriage and sexual desire in this artful book, a bestseller in the U.K.
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