Women and their barricades

#40days40books entry 30

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabin Alameddine follows the story of Aaliya Saleh, a 72 yeard old retired bookseller living in Beirut. She is a single, childless women living alone in her apartment. The book opens with her drunk on New Year's Eve having accidentally dyed her hair blue. Her memories span marriage, divorce, conflict, struggle, loneliness and now old age. It is compassionate, funny, brutal and deeply affirming. I have a lot of love for Aaliya. She is kindred in many ways.

A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa is a novelized account of a women who, in real life, bricked herself into her brother-in-law's apartment during Angola's successful bid for independence from Portugal. She lived there for 28 years. The novel follows many other people from that day to the present, and, like many war stories, addresses the complications of survival and success and how those are measured differently. Ludovico wrote on the walls with charcoal when she ran out of books to write in. She burned books for fuel. She trapped pigeons for food. Her success at living behind her bricked wall is  nothing short of tremendous.

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett is a novel that follows an unnamed woman living in mostly solitude around her life for several months, perhaps a year. There is very little that is concrete in this book. It is an internal monologue that veers from absurd and delightful to cringe-worthy in the space of a sentence. The woman is not much in company and deeply uncomfortable after. She lives with the constant threat of depression, a reality that is finally and troublingly manifested in toward the end of the book.

Eggshells by Caitriona Lally (not yet published, look for it in February of 2017) is about a young woman called Vivian who has moved into her dead great-aunt's house in Dublin and who sets about ordering her life according to her own terms entirely. She's decided she needs a friends called Penelope, puts up signs advertising for her and then is somewhat surprised when Penelope calls and they begin a gentle friendship. Viv walks the streets of Dublin regularly and each chapter has a line drawing of the shape of her journey.

Every woman in these books has deliberately barricaded herself from the world. Sometimes that choice is made easier by mental illness or war or the inertia of circumstance. That said, they all survive, and do so pretty well. There are no tragedies here, no grand passionate outbursts or despairing destruction.

It's something I'd like to write more about, because the type of woman who generally is seen on her own is a woman who has become somehow violent or stronger. She is Circe, plotting and planning and cursing men, rather than Penelope who ran a kingdom for 20 years in the absence of her husband. I love Penelope. She made the choice to live behind the wall of her marriage and her bedroom rather than join attempts to marry her off. She made that choice. And she did well there. Ultimately, all of these women (all of them) are brought back into the world by a community or the love of a friend.

There have to be more of these women. There just have to be. Someday I'd like to find their stories, because they are so moving.

Also I should like to more carefully define what I mean by self-barricaded so that I can have that folder in my critical analysis brain for future reading.

#40days40books list