I am ambivalent about a book

[luzula]

I am currently reading Tanith Lee’s The Gods Are Thirsty (1996), which is about the French Revolution--I wanted a counterpoint to all the French royalists in Broster’s books. I've read a fair amount of her books before, but it was years ago, before I started writing myself. But wow, her style is instantly recognizable. Often with historical books I think about whether the style is modern or not, but her style is so much her own that she just transcends that. The main character is Camille Desmoulins, and the book occasionally slips into first person narration for him, but otherwise it's an omniscient POV that dips into people's heads, vividly paints the setting, or even does occasional authorial asides--though stylistically still far from the old-fashioned sort of omniscient POV. I wish more modern books would do omniscient POV! Lee often writes dark fantasy, which gives this a dark fantasy flavor as well in my mind, though as yet it is entirely realistic and as far as I can tell follows history closely.

...and then there is the aspect which makes me ambivalent. This is the most male-gazey book I've read in a long time, where women are relevant as objects of love and/or lust. For example, in one scene, two men go to an alluring beautiful prostitute together, and in a deeply horny male POV scene they fuck her one after the other, where she apparently comes both times and one of the men comments that she is like clockwork. Obviously it is realistic for 18th century men to buy sex from women! But, like...what does she think about her night's work? And for that matter, what does she think about the revolution? Who knows. There is a brief glimpse of women being active in the march on Versailles, but that's like two sentences. Where is Olympe de Gouges? Where are the salonnières and working-class women who were involved in the revolution? To be sure, maybe that will come, since I've only read a fourth of the book so far, but that's still 125 dense pages. Hmm.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

It's very funny to me that I can think of at least three novels and one movie that looked at Camille Desmoulins and went "ah yes! a protagonist!" and yet every nonfiction book I've read on the French Revolution was like "...and he was there too, I guess?"

I haven't read this one, but it's been on my list. Pity about the male-gaze-iness, though :/

[luzula]

I went and looked at his portrait on Wikipedia and was like '...that's him?' Does not exactly look like the romantic protagonist Lee paints him as. *g*

I mean, there's a lot to like about the book too--this is why I'm ambivalent...

[regshoe]

Modern omniscient POV with a distinctive style sounds interesting! But I think I would be rather more than ambivalent about the other stuff, so I will give this one a miss...

[dhampyresa]

Where is Olympe de Gouges?

Justice for Olympe 2023!

[selenak]

Have you read “A Place of Greater Safety” by Hilary Mantel? Camille Desmoulins is one of the three main characters - the other two being Robespierre and Danton - , but it has a lot of female povs as well. (Gabrielle Danton, Lucille Desmoulins and Annette Duplessis, mainly.) Alas still no Olympe de Gouges, and Mantel has her own gender issues - the depictions of Manon Roland (who also gets to be a pov, and in rl arguably had more impact at the time than poor Olympe) and Eleonore Duplay are pretty hostile in a way that just feels different to me for the way unsympathetic male characters are treated), but having read both novels - i.e. the Tanith Lee and the Mantel one - and their takes on the revolutionaries, I still think Mantel’s is the more convincing and captivating work. (Both, though, are good antidotes to royalist povs. *g*) Oh, and I will admit Mantel’s deeply slashy take on Desmoulins/Danton is also part of what I like about her book.

[luzula]

I did like other aspects of the book, so the ambivalence was for the book as a whole! But yes, the sex stuff got into my head in an unpleasant way, which it might not have if the book had not been well written.

[luzula]

Hee, indeed! Err, but actually I don't know that much about her--she was just the first name that popped into my mind when I was thinking of women during the French Revolution...

[luzula]

Late reply, sorry. No, I have not, though of course I've heard of it! Thanks for the rec, and the caveats about the gender issues there as well. I went and looked in your journal and read your recent review of it (or of the audio version, at least). It is so puzzling to me to imply that women's political engagement stems from sexual frustration, of all things!