The Bitch, Pilar Quintana

0 stars

First Sentence: “I found her there this morning, paws up,” said Doña Elodia pointing to the spot on the beach where trash brought in or churned up by the sea collected: branches, plastic bags, bottles.

Thoughts: Oh my God. Y’all. Y’ALL. It is still June and already I have three candidates for Worst of the Year on my review spreadsheet. I have a feeling this one is going to win because any other book is going to have to suck harder than a supermassive black hole to beat this UTTER DRECK.

First of all, as the cover indicates, the titular bitch is (in theory) a female dog. And, yes, the dog does die. Horribly. That is why I flung this waste of paper across the room when I finished. When I think of all the rolls of toilet paper that could have been instead of this book….

In fact, the whole thing begins with a dead dog. Cheerful! The paws-up pooch in the first sentence left a litter of puppies behind. Doña Elodia gives one of the puppies, the only female, to Damaris, who takes it home and hand-feeds it until it gets big enough for solid food. Damaris loves the dog immediately, seeing it as the surrogate for the child she has not and will not have. She keeps claiming that she’s forty and “dried up” but I would suspect the fact she and her husband a) have not had sex in years and b) do not have access to modern fertility treatments and c) her husband is resistant to what fertility treatments are available due to his excess machismo would be the reason, but what do I know. I’m just some arrogant American living in a country where women are rapidly losing their reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.

I want to note that Damaris carries the puppy, Chirli, around in her bra. Now I am not a flat-chested woman, but I have a hard time figuring out how I would carry a whole-ass puppy around in my bra. It’s kind of full already. There’s no room for dogs in there. Seriously. I just looked inside my shirt and even with a sports bra there’s no place to put a puppy. Not without painful scratches in a place I don’t really want to be scratched.

But then Damaris is the kind of person who pays for things with bra money so that tells you all you need to know about her as a person right there.

Damaris loves the puppy at first. Her husband, Rogelio, isn’t quite as entranced, but he puts up with it. Then Chirli runs away to the jungle. She doesn’t come back for a little over a month. During that time, Damaris and Rogelio rekindle their relationship, but it ends when he yells at her for dropping a mug. Y’all, I think I found the real reason why they don’t have kids.

When Chirli comes back, she’s pregnant. Rogelio has to point this out to Damaris who immediately hates the dog. This is supposed to be some kind of statement on the dog as representative of Damaris and all she can’t be, but it falls flat. I Google Translated some of the Spanish reviews of the book on Goodreads, and it appears it’s as obscure in the original language as it is in English.

The puppies are born and Chirli immediately eats one. The rest of them she barely tolerates. Ah, I see the Chirli-Damaris connection now. Damaris sets about finding homes for the puppies. One woman, Ximena, wants a female puppy. She wanted one from the original litter Chirli came from, but Damaris got it first. There was one female in the litter, so Damaris sets it aside for Ximena. After a week Ximena hasn’t shown up, so Damaris gives the puppy to a tourist. Ximena shows up wanting her bitch so Damaris gives her Chirli, the dog she loved SO MUCH up until the point she got pregnant.

Ximena takes Chirli back to her drug den house. Chirli runs away. Damaris takes her back. Chirli runs away again. Damaris ties a rope around her neck and straight up strangles her. Then she sees Ximena coming up to the house. Damaris goes into a crisis, wondering if she should jump off a cliff or run away into the jungle to be eaten by whatever large predator is passing by. Sadly, she does not. I spent the last three pages wanting her to die and she didn’t and I wish she had. That’s why I threw the book across the room.

I’m leaving out a whole subplot about the people who owned the estate Damaris and Rogelio lived on and Damaris’ relatives who didn’t like her because she’s a horrible person and a little boy who was swept away by a wave when Damaris was little because they were all pointless and had no bearing on anything. Seriously, folks, this book is effing awful and no one should ever read it. If you have even the slightest positive feeling towards Canis lupus familiaris, do not touch this book with your hands, eyes, or any other sense-transmitting organs.

Second Place, Rachel Cusk

0 stars

First Sentence: I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris, and about how after that meeting the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things rose up and disgorged itself over every part of life.

Thoughts: This was overwritten pretentious crap. The end.

Oh, you want more? You do know you’re asking me to go on a full-on rant here. That’s what you want? Okay, you asked for it.

See that first sentence up there? Forget it because the whole meeting the devil on a train in Paris goes absolutely nowhere. In fact, the first five or so pages could be neatly cut away from the book and no one would notice the difference because the only thing that happens that does have anything to do with the rest of the story is where the narrator gets off the train and goes to an art gallery where she first encounters L’s paintings. She likes his work and strikes up a correspondence with him.

Who is the narrator? M. Not the Peter Lorre M from the vastly superior movie, alas. In fact, why don’t you go watch that movie instead of reading this book. It’s a better way to spend your time.

Why are these people referred to only by their initial letter? The other characters have names. They’re Justine, Kurt, Tony, and Brett. (I don’t count Jeffers because he’s only a name in M’s endless monologues.) Apparently M and L are references to the work this book was based on, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s book about the time T.H. Lawrence spent at her place in Taos, New Mexico.

This goes a long way towards explaining the pretentiousness. I hate hate HATE T.H. Lawrence with the fire of a thousand imploding supernovas. I only managed to get through all of Lady Chatterley’s Lover because a) I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and b) I was much younger then and had more patience for crap because it was considered Literary. I still don’t know what all the fuss was about because it was a boring paean to the penis. I’ve tried reading some of his other books but I gave up on all of them because of the overbearing pomposity. I really don’t know who I hate more, Lawrence or Henry Miller. That is a difficult question that will require much thought and meditation. Not any of their books, though because NIE WIEDER. I have much better things to waste my time on, like finishing this rant.

All the things I hate most about Lawrence’s works are on full display here: the pointless pontificating; everything, even the most minor detail, being a Big Deal of Great Import; the nasty unlikable characters; the misogyny. Oh, the misogyny. The description wants you to think this is some sort of feminist novel but believe me it is not. In fact, the description itself should have warned me of what was to come.

…a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally in the intersecting spaces of our internal and external worlds.

That’s a lot of words wasted to say absolutely nothing. These are the kinds of things you say when you’re high. Or if you’re a pseudo-intellectual trying to make people think you’re smarter than everyone else in the room. I know English has the largest vocabulary of any language, but let’s not waste words like this. Plain language is best for easy communication.

And in plain language I tell you: this book suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.