Customer Reviews

Nun of This and Nun of That: Making Vows (Book Two)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This first of two books by Dr. Hilaire Tavenner is a very REALISTIC story about convent life in the sixties. I did not belong to Tavenner's religious community, but I belonged for 20 years to one that is uncannily similar. From the specific ways that we young women were taught to eat fruit, to the way that sisters mysteriously "disappeared" from the community without explanation, to the interactions (or lack thereof) between individual sisters, to the idealism at initial entrance into the community -- it's all so real that I felt that I was back there again. I also recommend the sequel, Book 2.

Since I myself have experience of convent life, I certainly could recognise a certain note of authenticity in the scenes presented (though I found the dominant 'Sister's struggle' presented, about a continuing lesbian relationship, to be untypical.) Yet the writing is very poor, and there is a strong deficiency in the development of characterisation. The book lacks any depth.

Occasionally, for the space of perhaps one or two sentences, there seems to be a promise of insight - but this is not fulfilled. A brief mention of how a Sister can be manipulated by another through flattery, or of Mary's being the first tabernacle (effectively the first priest), or other matters that seem to promise insight go no further. In a few cases, I wondered if the author was (unsuccessfully) trying to be witty - such as when she speaks of a group of young women as having no sexual desires.

Some of the sequences are melodramatic - two suicides, another Sister's considering suicide (however briefly), the tiresome, continued action of Mary Alice creeping into Roseanne's bed. The writing is of very poor quality, without style, 'class,' wit, or insight. The sentences are bland - it seems more like a hastily written journal than a book.

I found both volumes of Nun of This and Nun of That to be very interesting depictions of convent life in the 60's, and considered them to be well-written and engaging. To those of us who attended Catholic schools during our impressionable years during that time period, the image of the nun was full of mystique, glamour and idealization without any true understanding of what occurred in the formation of these young women behind the closed doors of their motherhouses. It's one thing to surrender one's will to an enlightened teacher who can effectively guide a seeker with compassion and wisdom; it's totally another thing to relinquish one's sense of personal judgment and inner truth to someone who still has her own unresolved personality, ego-based issues and inner 'demons', all in the hopes of 'fitting in' so that one's yearning for God can be fulfilled. In her books, Dr. Tavenner effectively illustrates what happened when young, impressionable girls in the 1960's were subjected to the domination of ill-equipped directoresses whose judgments were colored by their own lack of stable inner attainment. While it would have been interesting to read about the author's own insights into the experiences described, the books are written as 'fictionalized' memoir without a single point of view, and are therefore not truly an appropriate platform for her personal descriptions of how she understood and integrated what had happened to her and of how her earlier experiences have impacted her life perspectives today. It is left to the reader to form one's own judgment of the described events and to contemplate the ways in which, regardless of circumstances, each one of us has experienced similar moments in our lives when we've given away our personal sense of integrity and power in the belief that we could become something greater than who we already are.
I hope that Dr. Tavenner will continue writing about community life as it has changed through the 70's, 80's and 90's, and that life in community has evolved sufficiently enough to create a viable alternative lifestyle for sincere, caring women who long to experience God in their own unique way.