47. Whore by Nelly Arcan

I have been reading so much that my on-deck shelf is actually starting to need to get refilled!  I have gone through and organized all my various book search lists and may even now purchase some new books!  In the meantime, I also started going through my wife's collection, which is quite interesting.  She has many female genre authors that I don't know so there is a lot of potential there.  For now, I jumped on Whore because I remembered when Nelly Arcand died it was quite a sensation here in Quebec.  It is also a far departure from British YA fantasy, which I need right now.  I do feel a major shame in reading this book, to the point that I kept it hidden at work.  Not because of the title, but because I am reading the english translation.  It's really not that long and is a true Montreal and Quebec book so I should have buckled down and read the original version.  In the end, I am glad I did not because I never would have finished it.  There is a lot of repetition in the language and endless sentences (seriously, each section is 1-5 pages long and is a single run on sentence).

It is ostensibly the semi-fictional story of a young woman from rural Quebec and a very Catholic upbringing who moves to Montreal to study while working as a prostitute.  It's really more like a long, poetic screed about sex and being a woman and family all from the mind of a very damaged person, but damaged in a weirdly rational way once you get stuck in to her mindset.

I have mixed, complex feelings about this book.  On the one hand, it feels like a ton of self-generated, pretentious pain.  For the first part of the book, I felt a lot like Terry and Dean at the beginning of FUBAR when they are watching the director's deeply personal short film.  I have learned now that it is thanks to my privilege as a white male, but I have trouble sympathizing and even caring about the main character in this book whose major issue was that her dad was no longer sexually attracted to her mother when she was a child.  Everything is extreme.  All women are either sexual daughters minutes away from turning old and becoming sexless, bloated mothers.  All men are cocks just wanting to come all over everything all the time.  There is some truth to this worldview and her insanity is richly complex and revealing, but it is also wildly reductivist and feels angry for no reason I can really put my finger on.  She comes off as one of the hot chicks in high school that we are supposed to feel sorry for because she is attractive and put her on the same level of dysfunction as children who come from abusive backgrounds.  Also, deep down, though this book was scandalous and shocking in its use of raw taboos, the morality underlying the shock is deeply conventional and judeo-christian.  The fundamental notion of this book is that there is something broken about being a sex worker. 

On the other hand, it does hold a certain savage light to modern gender relations and makes one think.  It's also quite funny in parts. Men who come see her in the day are always just coming from or going to chair meetings.  I am not quite capturing it as well as her language but she mocks everything important in our bourgeois world and I enjoyed that.

So not my style and I don't really buy the justification for the mania, but an interesting, thought-provoking book that moves forward quite aggressively in a way I enjoyed.  And I should add that while I say I didn't buy the justification, I cannot deny that whatever the source of her worldview, it did seem to be authentic.