Рецензия на книгу

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  HairsprayQueen

  8 января 2016

  “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
  

  The books starts slowly - we are getting to know the main character, a "lifestyle" journalist. We get to know her story: a complicated relationship, breast cancer, her life back home, her career...
  I was expecting this book to be an "atwood style" piece - more or less feminist prose. And suddenly we jump from the expected to something very different. A riot, drug trade, politics and corruption. And more and more violence...
  When I was finishing the book I couldn't wait till the end. The narrative becomes really harsh, the descriptions are too realistic. Too much blood, pain and dirt.
  And the contrast is even more intensified by the Rennie's memories.
  Rennie grew up in a small town. She writes about fashion and men. She fell in love with a perfectly "normal" doctor Daniel. All of this is very "normal". Except for her cancer.
  Trying to recover from whatever she is suffering Rennie fleets to an island in Caribbean.
  And here comes the opposition. This island is like her world upside down, inside out: Lora, who sells weed, a worn out woman, hot and sunny weather, horrible food and shabby rooms. Everything here is the opposite to normality.
  Lora, obviously is the antagonist of the story, complete opposite to Rennie. Rennie doesn't like her but can't get rid of her, trapped in her own niceness. But at the same time from Rennies memories about her hometown we can see that some things are still similar here.
  Malignant
  The whole situation with the politics and the revolution just serves as a background. The main themes still are good old Atwood's favorites: men and women, power, love and sex.
  The name is "Bodily Harm" not by accident - there is lots of "harm" in the novel, but not only bodily. All kinds of it.
  The story in some way reminded me of another short story written by Joyce Carol Oates, my long time favorite, actually it reminds me of that collection of short stories "Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque ". What I feel they have in common is the theme that all the horrible things are done by humans. More specifically, by male humans. And to be even more specific by male humans to females. It could be said that this theme is as well the leitmotif of most of the Atwood's writings.

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