Customer Reviews

Our Lady of Babylon: A Novel

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

 

 

Rechy retells familiar stories of sensuality and intrigue, includilng those of Adam and Eve, Salome and St. John, even Jesus and Judas--through the eyes of a woman who claims to have experienced or been a witness to all those lives. By turns tragic, funny, sensual, daring, mysterious, and moving, this novel is hard to put down. Can't understand why it wasn't a bestseller. Too daring, though beautifully written?

I finished this book about a month ago and was recently perusing the reviews and have to wonder if maybe I stumbled on the wrong page?! Did I not understand the book? Did I not get it? I was all into this book, excited that these women were getting a second look! Hurray! Vindication for all those years of playing "blame the women"! Then I got to the end and felt sick! All that great story wasted on laying blame on yet another woman! I felt sick! I can only guess that he was attempting to be shocking and daring, but he only succeeded in being a disgusting misogynist who wrote a trashy novel not worth 1/3 the money I paid for it! (And I bought it at a used book store for $5.00!)

Initial flashes of cleverness and artful story-telling rocket you through the first half of the book. From then on, plot and story fizzle out like a guttering candle--and so does the reader's desire to continue on. It's almost as if Rechy is frosting a cake and discovers he doesn't have quite enough frosting for the whole; but instead of making more frosting, he chooses to make do by thinning out what he already has applied. Pity!

I think the idea behind this book is creative. I like the author's attempt to create round characters out of infamous women who have, for the most part, been remembered in history as one-dimensional. What I don't like is the way the author tries to "save" these women, cast them in a better light. Maybe some of these women were whores. But that's o.k. because "whore" hasn't always had such negative connotations. Pagan cultures had holy whores who honored the Goddess. I guess I'm getting off track here, but it just bothered me that the author seemed to be so caught up in defusing the word "whore," in proving that these women were innocents. So they had sex--so what!