PJ Harvey's Rid of Me: A Story (33 1/3) (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: blue shoes

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

'Songs are there for the people, to be used by people, in any way they want to use them.' (Polly Jean Harvey, 1993) This book takes Polly Jean at her word. Kate Schatz puts together a collection of stories that is weird, dark, and seductive in its portrayals of women, kidnapping, love, sex, isolation and power. Each story begins and ends with the first and last line of each song, and many of the remaining song lyrics will appear throughout each piece. Rid of Me lends itself easily and readily to a literary interpretation. Musically, apt comparisons have been made to everything from Beefheart and Patti Smith to vintage Delta Blues and Celtic punk. But lyrically and emotionally, Rid of Me deserves other comparisons: there is the gothic horror of Shirley Jackson and Poe, the confessional pain of Plath, the carnality of NiN, and the sardonic wit of Dorothy Parker. Harvey employs specific literary devices: repetition and allusion as well as recurring tropes, themes and images (size/measurements, bleeding, desire, body parts, skin) and a penchant for myth and archetypes (fire, hair, hands, Mary, the moon, queens, kings). Schatz does the same. The 33 1/3 series is acclaimed for experimenting with different ways of writing about music. This book will bolster that reputation further.

From the Back Cover

"Tie yourself to me," she whispered, without turning around, as I snuck up from behind. My boots scraping slightly in the dirt, sweat running into my eye, the salt stinging me, my heart thudding, my dry mouth hanging open, tasting the electricity between us. "No on else." She said it again: "Tie yourself to me." It was no longer a whisper: the words were sure, though slightly slurred....I stared down at the shining top of her black silk head and wanted to howl with joy. She had come.

Rid of Me: A Story is, in the author's words, "not about the album, but because of it." The story concerns Kathleen and Mary, two women who end up in a strange, abandoned cabin in the dark forest that borders their depressed valley town. Through fourteen short chapters that mirror the songs on the album, Kathleen and Mary negotiate their freedom, their pasts, their survival, and each other. The result is a twisted, gripping fairy tale of kidnapping, dreams, murder, sex, revenge, and love.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Continuum (August 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826427782
• ISBN-13: 978-0826427786
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 4.7 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #82,009 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This item is part of The Thirty Three and a Third Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down...(and rise again!), July 22, 2007

By	Judith M. Lutzenberger (the sunshine state) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Kate Schatz has delivered a carefully crafted, mesmerizing tale of entrapment, flight and freedom that left this reader eager to read whatever she'll be writing next. As someone totally unfamiliar with the music of PJ Harvey, I read this story for its own sake and was not disappointed. Its two heroines, Mary and Kathleen, were each manipulated and confined by the men in their lives, one powerful in his own right, one completely powerless yet equally controlling. Their separate escapes and bizarre and frightening union made this reader question conventional notions of mental illness, crime and the redemptive powers of love.

After reading this book, I listened to PJ Harvey's "Rid of Me," CD for the first time, paging through each chapter during its related song. It was as if Mary and Kathleen were baring their souls and sharing their spirits! Thank you, Kate Schatz, for taking me where I would never venture on my own. It was a thrilling ride!

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stands on its own... doesn't replicate the album, June 26, 2007

By	Feminist Review blog "various writers" (worldwide) - See all my reviews

Rid of Me is the latest addition to Continuum International's 33 1/3 series, which takes seminal albums of the last 40 years and allows writers of various bents to write about, around, through and over the music that informs the books. Rid of Me takes its cue from PJ Harvey's album of the same title and appropriately veers away from its surface toward an unusual and fictive adventure into the irreverently dark psychology(ies) that made the album popular in the first place.

There is a tendency in reviewing an interdisciplinary project like this, to weigh the "derivative" text (Schatz's Rid of Me) against the original work (Harvey's Rid of Me), but it's been awhile since I was really into the album (even back then it wasn't one of my mainstays). Not to mention that to evaluate the book in this way would too readily presuppose that it is necessary to have some insider knowledge of the album in order to appreciate Schatz's book (which is, frankly, not true), and it also tends to overvalue the original album instead of considering the generative potential of the intermingling of creative forms.

Certainly, for the knowing reader, the lyrics are weaved into Schatz's text, but what is more interesting is the way that the story disembarks from the album through a detour into the troubled backstories of two "characters" (Mary and Kathleen) mentioned on the album. In Schatz's story, having struggled in a patriarchal world that disavows their subjectivity, both Mary and Kathleen are escapees bound together in their troubled pasts as much as in their desire to leave the world that traumatized them behind. As their histories and scarred psychologies are revealed to us through dream, hallucination, flashback and narration, I became increasingly unsure of the boundaries between reality and hallucination, between utopia and dystopia. I suspect this suspension of disbelief, evoked by the text, is meant to mimic in the reader the tenuous link between self and world that both Mary and Kathleen experienced in their lives, and continue to struggle with even in their escape. The implication is that one cannot really leave trauma behind, but can only watch it burn and "go on," and, in this sense, the story is as much about female love and reconciliation as it is about the violence and struggle of being a woman in a patriarchal world.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a really beautiful work, February 25, 2008

By	Brooke Bocast - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I haven't listened to the PJ Harvey album that inspired this book, but it isn't necessary - the story stands alone. Schatz's storytelling is vivid, layered, and intense. This novel is a love story, an adventure, and a magical realist fantasy. A really beautiful work.