Pure
Fiel a Verdad
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2001
- Posts
- 15,135
Nothing Natural by Jenny Diski,
reviewed in London Times, (2-08) by M Katsoulis, (excerpt)
Anyone seen this???
Pure.
=====
[begin excerpt]
Whipping yarn
A victim of Eighties radical feminism, Diski’s book of sexual fetishism, violence and domination may sit rather more comfortably on the bookshelves of the 21st century, explains Melissa Katsoulis
NOTHING NATURAL
By Jenny Diski
Virago, £6.99, 288pp
ISBN 1 860 49942 2
For a book to be banned from a shop it would surely have to be pretty bad, right?
In three years working at an independent bookshop the only ones that I remember being exiled were DIY terrorist manuals and overtly racist manifestos. So how was it that Jenny Diski’s female-centred novel of sexual discovery found its way on to the blacklist at London’s famous women’s bookshop, Sisterwrite?
Well, it was the Eighties for a start, and the wimmin at Sisterwrite didn’t look as though they shared Diski’s heroine’s predilection for being abused and beaten by a balding old perv who doesn’t call for weeks and then turns up with a whip in a plastic bag. [...]
Back then, people didn’t know what to do with Nothing Natural, a novel about a nice North London mum who gets together with a charming, if eccentric, middle-class chap called Joshua. That would be “get together” as in “meet sporadically for sado-masochistic sex sessions”, and “eccentric” as in “possible rapist”. Even now, in this reissue with a new afterword, the scenes of Rachel’s submission to Joshua are difficult to read, perhaps because much of the S&M literature available to us is told from the point of view of professional dominatrices, whose stories seem acceptable because they are true, and — let’s face it — because it is the men who are subjugated.
But Diski’s book is fiction, so its truth is of a deeper, more complex kind. Here is a writer who chooses to imagine a woman not as a strong mistress of her own fortune, but as an occasional depressive who greets her lover in shorts and a T-shirt and wants to play rape games. Sure, when Rachel is living her normal life of work and motherhood she wonders what is going on and why she wants to be caused pain. But she knows that nothing does it for her like being maltreated at the hands of this manipulative dark horse. //
[end excerpt]
reviewed in London Times, (2-08) by M Katsoulis, (excerpt)
Anyone seen this???
Pure.
=====
[begin excerpt]
Whipping yarn
A victim of Eighties radical feminism, Diski’s book of sexual fetishism, violence and domination may sit rather more comfortably on the bookshelves of the 21st century, explains Melissa Katsoulis
NOTHING NATURAL
By Jenny Diski
Virago, £6.99, 288pp
ISBN 1 860 49942 2
For a book to be banned from a shop it would surely have to be pretty bad, right?
In three years working at an independent bookshop the only ones that I remember being exiled were DIY terrorist manuals and overtly racist manifestos. So how was it that Jenny Diski’s female-centred novel of sexual discovery found its way on to the blacklist at London’s famous women’s bookshop, Sisterwrite?
Well, it was the Eighties for a start, and the wimmin at Sisterwrite didn’t look as though they shared Diski’s heroine’s predilection for being abused and beaten by a balding old perv who doesn’t call for weeks and then turns up with a whip in a plastic bag. [...]
Back then, people didn’t know what to do with Nothing Natural, a novel about a nice North London mum who gets together with a charming, if eccentric, middle-class chap called Joshua. That would be “get together” as in “meet sporadically for sado-masochistic sex sessions”, and “eccentric” as in “possible rapist”. Even now, in this reissue with a new afterword, the scenes of Rachel’s submission to Joshua are difficult to read, perhaps because much of the S&M literature available to us is told from the point of view of professional dominatrices, whose stories seem acceptable because they are true, and — let’s face it — because it is the men who are subjugated.
But Diski’s book is fiction, so its truth is of a deeper, more complex kind. Here is a writer who chooses to imagine a woman not as a strong mistress of her own fortune, but as an occasional depressive who greets her lover in shorts and a T-shirt and wants to play rape games. Sure, when Rachel is living her normal life of work and motherhood she wonders what is going on and why she wants to be caused pain. But she knows that nothing does it for her like being maltreated at the hands of this manipulative dark horse. //
[end excerpt]
Last edited:
