Customer Reviews

The Bride Stripped Bare: A Novel (P.S.)

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

A gem, for any of you folks who haven't seen it on the Target shelves yet: Nikki Gemell's The Bride Stripped Bare.

Written in Lessons instead of chapters, the novel begins with, "Your husband doesn't know you're writing this. It's quite easy to write it under his nose. Just as easy, perhaps, as sleeping with other people. But no one will ever know who you are, or what you've done, for you've always been seen as the good wife." From there, Gemmell takes us on a journey through a woman's erotic and frightening self-discovery. The narrator moves from boring housewife to experimental secret-keeper upon the discovery of an Elizabethan manuscript that describes women's secret desires. Intrigued that another woman so far removed had felt the same urges and longings, the narrator careens through testing the limits of marriage, dragging the reader through the rabbit hole with her into a world where a bored, naive housewife quickly learns to weave lies and deceit to manipulate those around her.

Fans of poetry, you're in luck - the rich imagery and gorgeous use of language melts on your mental tongue as you read, and though many of the sentences are short, they're rich - I have to admit a tendency to blow through books and then have to go back to read for digestion. This novel, however, had me gasping with exhaustion at the end of every few chapters - it's gut wrenching, in a subversive, disquieting way. The second person voice "you" this, "you" that - the narrative voice intimately involves the reader, turns the reader into a shadowy accomplice during the length of the book. Does each of us have the capacity to blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality, and are we willing to pay the price that comes with it?

The way Gemmell captures what a woman thinks when she's got the semi-ideal life but dark yearnings makes this one a must-read for anyone interested in the workings of the mind of a woman. Note that the Amazon reviews I've seen so far have hated the book - but I do believe they came from the wrong perspective. I don't believe it is intended as a heartbreaking take of a good wife; the sex scenes were not meant to throw the book into the 'erotica' cache of reading, and it is not intended to be a novel addressing what EVERY woman wants, desires, and is willing to do - it's more about the boundaries one woman chooses to cross, and what it does to her as a person. Whether you like or dislike the narrator is almost immaterial - the journey is the thing.

Caveat - sexually explicit, unapologetically erotic, and searing honesty characterize Gemmell's work in this one. While many women will report that they have had none of the darker wanderings of the mind that characterize the novel, from conversations with close friends and my own experiences, enough of us have to make this one a very worthwhile read. Highly recommended with maximum starrage - if you're not afraid to read a novel with a provocative cover that only hints at the turmoil and emotionally disturbing text, this one is a must-read. A must re-read. A must-share-with-my-best-friend-and-a-few-men-I-know read.

Gemmell is now on my list, and I'll have to go grab her other work - The Bride Stripped Bare is beyond fantastic - it's disturbingly real. Let me know what you think of it!

I have very mixed opinions about this book. As a story, I enjoyed it: the prose is often excellent, the voice and internal life of the heroine is well done. The framework of the story is intriguing and made me eager to finish it, although the ending isn't so much an ending as a stopping.

Against that, there's a great deal of artificiality. The relentless use of the second person grates. The cardboard cut-out characters of the dull-as-dishwater husband and the impossibly perfect, hunky but virginal, paramour are unrealistic and lack life.

But that should be OK, because this is a novel in form only. Actually, it's an exposition of women's attitudes to sex and their secret feelings and desires. The real purpose of the book is to lay out and discuss these hitherto unknown areas of human life.

But it doesn't and this is where the book spectacularly fails.

The sexual revelations aren't revelatory: who doesn't know nowadays that often marriages lose their sexual passion after a time, that many women don't enjoy performing oral sex or that someone can have a secret life that is at odds with their external persona? Women masturbate and enjoy it. Gasp! Couples can experiment to enhance their sex lives. No, really!?

One of the most difficult aspects of the book is its claim to speak for all women, which is inaccurate and a little offensive. This self-important attitude is present on every page: the fact that it's dedicated to "every husband"; the continual use of the second person; the anonymity of the author (which actually seems to have more to do with marketing than any other consideration). The extreme inability to speak about sex that characterises the protagonist (and, by extension, the author) just doesn't describe most women I know. While many of the problems and concerns the book describes will I'm sure be familiar to female readers, it completely ignores the fact that this is well-trodden ground nowadays. There's been a continual conversation going on since the 60's about women's role in and marriage, their frustrations with men and society and the necessity of reshaping the lives of women to reflect their sexuality. None of this is evident in the book at all.

The treatment of sex is very Cosmo and the fact that you can find a much more frank discussion of female sexuality on TV in the form of Sex And The City indicates that the book falls way short of its intentions. Surely literature should be more challenging and subversive than mainstream TV? I thought this may have been something to do with age, that the book is aimed at older women than my peers but knowing that Nikki Gemmell is only 36 makes this extremely perplexing.

As I say, as a story about a woman and her particular marriage and her particular responses, this is a good book. And if it had been published in the 60's, 70's or even 80's then I can see how it could have been shocking and revelatory. But evn though many of the problems and concerns it treats with are real for many women, this book fails to encompass the real complexity of these issues in the modern world. It isn't frank enough. It tells you little you don't already know. It presents black and white, unsatisfying caricatures of the men involved, which mean that the issues aren't explored in sufficient depth and detail. Overall the book falls abysmally short of the sort of impact it's trying to have and which it rather smugly assumes it does have.

When I saw this book on the shelf of my local bookstore, I actually almost blushed. "Erotic" was the key descriptor in almost every review sited on the cover...and I am not normally a fan of erotica literature. But the story sounded just too seductive to pass up. It focuses on a newlywed woman who feels discontented with her new life. Her husband is very plain and business-like, the opposite of her. Despite their happy companionship, they are rarely intimate and she yearns for something more. After meeting a handsome stranger in a local cafe one day, her entire world changes. She comes alive, gets in touch with her sexuality - and the reader anxiously follows her awakening. It's exciting, graphic, and heartbreaking all at once. Her life is not an easy one, but what woman's is? I would highly recommend this book to anyone who's ever been in love, been in lust, or has dreamt about being in either sometime in their life.

If you're American, you may have a little trouble finding it. Thus far, the publisher has only distributed it in London and Sydney. But The Bride Stripped Bare by Nikki Gemmel (published anonymously by 4th Estate in 2003) is surprisingly worth the hunt.

The story jetes off the premise that the anonymous diarist's mother found the text after her daughter and grandson disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leaving only their car at the top of a cliff. Their bodies were never found. From there follows the inner secrets of the ostensibly perfect housewife - from her Marrakech honeymoon to her illicit Sevillian affair and her descent into a sexual awakening at the hands of strangers.

The book closes with an open letter from Gemmel explaining that she intended the book to be published without any connection to her due to "personal reasons". She quickly adds that the story is not autobiographical and berates the media for sniffing her out and "forcing" her to put her name to it. One would think the paparazzi had taken great interest in slapping her face on the cover of every tabloid. Given that without this tangential letter most readers would not associate the book with Gemmel, a cynic would wonder if this was all a marketing stunt.

Gemmel takes some fabulous stylistic risks - most notably in writing the entire diary in the second person. The effect is, at worst, a psychological distance created between the reader and the anonymous narrator that reflects the narrator's own internal separation from herself. She doesn't know who she is and, despite reading the most intimate thoughts in her head, neither do we. At best, when the ideas hit home, when they reflect something in the reader's own life or with which she can identify, the second person style gives the eerie sensation that the diarist is reading her interloper's mind. Not only is the anonymous bride stripped bare, but her reader as well.

Each chapter - dubbed "lessons" in the text - begins with a pithy quote from Household Science: Readings in Necessary Knowledge for Women by the Reverend JP Faunthorpe or A Woman's Words to Women on the Care of Their Health in England and India by Mary Scharlieb. These little dictums for women's lives include "making
a comfortable bed is a very important part of household work" and "girls can never be too thoughtful". As might be expected, the content of each quote loosely corresponds to the content of the ensuing chapter with a gruesome, if cliched, irony.

In fact, very little about this book is NOT cliche and, surprisingly, it works in spite of this. It tells a story that certainly wouldn't shock the reading public unless it had been published a good sixty years ago. When Lady Chatterley's Lover was first published by DH Lawrence in 1928, a woman's sexual secrets were uniquely titillating, but Gemmel's playing to a much more jaded readership these days. Even every possible feminist angle on the story has been done to death - unfulfilled housewife....trying to find herself...has a sexual awakening... *yawn*

The reader is left with many unanswered questions, not the least of which is why this anonymous woman chooses infidelity in a seedy sexual underground. Her husband holds no particular allure for her, but is, by her own account, attentive and kind. If he doesn't understand her, there's little indication that he's a cad. She suspects him of having an affair and he doesn't want her to work outside the home, but seems no more controlling or callous than the average person - which may have been Gemmel's point. Perhaps the narrator is simply bored. She has found the husband and baby to which so many women aspire and now she is looking down the long descent into dailiness and apathy and is looking for something to once again quicken her sense of vitality.

For whatever reason, the tension builds over the question of whether and how long the narrator can keep her secret life a secret. This book is so readable because it functions almost as a psychological deconstruction of its central character and leaves us asking how well we know the people close to us. For that matter, how well do we know ourselves?

Like a lot of the other reviewers, I was pretty intrigued by the hype surrounding this book and thought it held a lot of potential. While it was certaintly an easy enough read (I actually read it in one sitting in one of those random arm chairs in Barnes and Noble, and I'm glad I didn't break down and buy it), and skirted around some interesting, provocative, and important themes and issues, it just fell short somehow in the end and failed to raise the questions it so desperately screamed to present. I'm not by any means an easily offended person and can handle graphic content, but in this case, the explicit scenes were not convincing enough to carry any real heft and came across as trying too hard rather than offering anything truly original or thought provoking. The course of the story felt kind of stale and predictable, despite all the attempts to shock, and I agree with other reviewers that the mystery surrounding the dissapearance of the bride seemed kinda pointless. And honestly, by the time I reached the end, I didn't really care what her final fate was. It wasn't that I didn't like the character, it was just, the story hadn't grabbed me enough to really make me interested in what happened to her. I also found the titlar character to be more a series of cliches than a three dimensional person (like all the characters in the book), and although she had some promising observations here and there and there was some decent writing sprinkled throughout the nowhere bound story, The Bride never really came alive in such a way as to make her real or, frankly, interesting. Overall, I was dissapointed by how much the mark was missed.....I couldn't shake the feeling that there was a worthwhile story in there somewhere. Oh, yeah, there is, and it's been told before in far more effective manner (Fear of Flying, The Awakening, Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterly's Lover, and the list goes on and on)

A fascinating, thought provoking and raw book that takes a look at one woman yet i think probably represents many women in the modern world.
This is a quasi-diary of a woman who questions herself and her sexuality, wondering why it is that for her sex is more about pleasing her partner than gaining any physical pleasure herself, and if she can change this. She embarks on an affair that changes her life profoundly, not only in that it opens her up to thinking about sexual pleasure in a new way, but thinking about life and how she is living it.
This book reminded me a lot of Josephine Hart's 'Damage'. Like that book 'The Bride Stripped Bare' is an exercise in dry, stripped prose used to describe something full and sensual. Also like 'Damage' i found that this is one of the few pieces of erotica in the English language that actually works because it is well written and explores the motivations of the characters, rather than just getting into the physicality of the act. When the author finally comes to write about the central characters sex with her lover, it is all the more powerful and arousing for knowing how this fits into her life and mental landscape.
And like any great book, it leaves you asking questions of yourself after you have finished reading.

Been hearing about this controversial bestseller for a long time, and it was only fitting that my husband, who had no idea what this book was about, bought this for me on our civil wedding day. There is something taboo and "hush-hush" about a novel done anonymously and this alone gives any literary work an instant 'oomph' to it.
"For my husband. For every husband" is the dedication of this book.
Take your super ordinary, super plain and content wife. The woman you would never give a second glance to as she walks down an aisle at the supermarket; the woman who has completely disappeared into being the "little wife". This book, told in the second person point of view (You being the protagonist), is about the awakening (sexual, mainly) of the ordinary wife in her mid 30's. She is the proper clean wife, and when her marriage hits a bump (husband and her bestfriend betrays her), she decides to start living her life selfishly, why not.
Selfishly meant putting her own indulgences ahead, writing an erotic novel under her husband's nose and succumbing to dark thoughts that she never thought she'd be capable of. She forms an affair, a student-teacher relationship with that of a Spanish-English virgin. And for once, she is the ringleader of the bed.
Her young lover soon becomes obsessed with her, and she puts the trysts to a stop.
Her relationship with her husband revs up again, with the help of her newfound sexuality and soon they conceive a child, and she tries to live her life on the normal mode again, content on having, for now, the stint with her young lover, as the most sensational chapter in her life.
A very simple plot, but boldy, very honestly and admiringly told. One should take all the time in the world to read this book, because, apart from the feminist plot, the story is written very beautifully. The protagonist was unamed purposely, so that every woman can distinguish herself and relate to the story. I originally thought that the author, Nikki Gemmel, wanted the book to be written anonymously only to gain the mystique factor. The book has an exclusive interview with the author and she explained very well, that she Had to finish the novel knowing her name will not come up, because anonymity will release her from inhibitions and reluctance of writing a novel that may be described as vulgar and literary pornography. She dared to describe, in graceful detail, what I believe, every woman has thought of, but had no audacity to declare out loud--to her husband, friend, etc.
After reading this book, it has sunk into me that no matter how liberated and opinionated women are of today, we are still not in the man-woman equal stage. A novel such as this is becomes controversial because 'bad impure thoughts' from a woman (girlfriend, mother, wife, grandmother), are still considered to be shocking. A man who thinks of sex 24 hours a day is considered human but once a woman confesses to that, its not exactly a sin, but it comes off as "unusual, but yeah, these things happen". It will still take us several more years before man and woman will be totally equal.
Anyway, to sum up the book, a statement from Good Reading cannot say it any better: "Husbands will be left feeling distinctly nervous" (if any husband reads this at all).

The layout if very odd, it took some getting used to. By the third "lesson" I figured I was done. It wasn't making any sense and I just didn't have the time or energy to plod through it. I picked it up again about a week later and read it all the way through in one night.

I said that I still haven't decided it I like it and that is true. It is very well written and quite a moving story. I just don't know if I personally wanted to be "moved" in quite that way. It can be very graphic at times, much more graphic than any other standard erotic romance novel. I understand how it was necessary and pertinent to the storytelling and thus was not offended by it, but I guess it made me think about things that I just don't think about. I imagine (based on the Q&A in the appendix of the paperback version) that that was the author's goal. Well done.

This is a book that's destined to become a classic of feminine fiction alongside Marguerite Duras' "The Lover" and Elizabeth Smart's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept."

Why? All of them share a love of language, a rigorous respect for the truth, and clear-eyed view of the complexities of womanhood and love. They're all intensely passionate and "The Bride Stripped Bare" is a thriller as well, which keeps the reader (this reader at least) guessing until the last page. And beyond it!

I was seduced by the beauty of the writing, the book's wit and eroticism, and it's amazing honesty. It's one of those reads where every line counts. I also loved the texts it alludes to, a boldly sexual sixteenth century handbook for women and some Victorian manuals for housewives. You can tell the author's had a lot of fun writing this. Get me to the London Library!

The Bride Stripped Bare is a facinating read that's hard to categorise...is it fiction or non-fiction, declaration, crie-de-couer, instruction manual?? I don't really know. A bit of everything I think and all the richer for it. It's a unique genre in female writing, unlike anything I've read before...a haunting classic.

...who identifies with this book.

ONE: I love my husband the way the writer loves her husband. In the first chapters, defining her love she wrote "It glows like a candle rather than glitters" and "He stills your agitation in the way a visit to Choral Evansong does, or a long swim after work."

It was amazing to read love defined in such a way - I felt I'd never read anything like it. I whispered the words to my husband in his sleep. (I don't know what Choral Evansong is though; I can only imagine it is a spa.)

TWO: I'm devoted to my friends the way she was devoted to Theo. When they aren't with me, I can imagine them there - in shops or restaurants; theaters or street festivals. They know me better than I'd even admit to them.

THREE: Her relationship with her mother echoes mine with my sister. I swear I've had the same fight a dozen times with her and no matter how hard we both try, we always end up in that cul-de-sac. Repeating phrases that once drew tears and accusing the other of not loving enough.

FOUR: She has the desire to write but is lost where to start or what to write about.

Now to the rest of the story I'm not sure what to write. She had lost in love. Her mate cheated with her best friend. It seemed (plausibly so) as though she needed to regain the sexuality lost by the betrayal through a journey of gratification, rediscovery and indulgence.

I found myself blushing throughout the text, having never read erotica before - though I found it neither vulgar nor submissive. It held its merit as literature by placing human boundaries within the exploits of the uninhibited.