Customer Reviews

Two Serious Ladies

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
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With shrewd wit, candour and a touch of the bizarre, Two Serious Ladies follows the demise into debauchery of two very dissimilar yet equally stodgy women, who aquire a fondness for eccentric personages. Christina Goering - rich, saintly spinster - turns high class call girl, whilst Frieda Copperfield - caught in a respectable, though staid marriage - abandons her husband for Pacifica, a Panamanian prostitute. The restless, autonomous, asexual female seeking self determination independent from men is a poignant theme which Jane Bowles explores with remarkable cleverness, hilarity and ruthless originality.Two Serious Ladies is a marvellous example of Jane Bowles' extraordinary talent as a writer of contemporary fiction - often obscured by her small literary output and the talent of her husband, writer Paul Bowles ... unfortuately so.

This is fiction for persons who can accept of their fiction the same things they expect of life: slipping, sliding, blind-turning, colliding, parting, bewilderment, and a great deal of sly humor. Life does not dole out sane rational narratives. The eternal mystery is why people expect fiction to do so. Does fiction for them represent a means of imposing form on life?

Two serious ladies is a very strange book. The first time I read it I didn't quite undestand it but it caught me instantly. Jane Bowle's style is amazing. Circles and circles of rare relationships, quear people, exotic and everyday's ambients, perfect sentences, subtle humour forms this authentic masterpiece.
Once read, it will stay in your mind. Why do these women behave as they do?, what is Bowles triying to tell us? It's all crypt. You can read it and read it all over again and again and your conclusions will change.
Bowle's other writing (a play and short fiction)has the same quality: refreshing, new, modern. Nothing you will read will present you such an original brain. After all our tradition is that of sinners

"Two Serious Ladies" was recommended in the Francine Prose book "Reading Like a Writer." It's disturbing in that the flat and freakish characters are highly privileged and extremely neurotic (or, as they prefer to think of themselves, "nervous"), their lives happening on parallel tracks, unable to connect meaningfully even with their closest family and friends.

Anais Nin wrote in Volume 5 of her Diary about the time "... (when) Jane brought out her first book [Two Serious Ladies]. I remember I was so distressed by the tightness, the involuted quality, the constricted, coiling inward (not into an infinite interior but a tight one) that I wrote her a careful, gentle, warm letter warning her of the danger of constriction for a writer, and she took it as a condemnation (a wrong interpretation). She asserted it was that letter which arrested her writing. Knowing how tenderly I handle writers, I knew my letter could not have been harmful. The difficulties were in herself." I must agree with Anais.

This book reminded me of the movie "Breaking the Waves" with Emily Watson, with repressed characters who punish or deny themselves and call it spirituality and sensitivity. The author also refuses to show all of the characters' actions within the story, perhaps to mirror the characters' withholding natures, but one expects more from the author. The book has some rewards, but I was happy to be done with it.