The Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Fabulist Memoir

But enough about me and more about the book. Read it. It's probably the greatest thing I've read all year. If I ever get the chance to teach Gilgamesh again, I'm teaching parts of this book alongside it. There's just so much to say about this book, I can't do it all. The feminist re-telling of Gilgamesh, the story of Ishtar/Inanna. (Once, at work, a co-worker said to me "You're a goddess." I had done some small thing for her. I said, without even thinking, "I will be Ishtar.") What makes it feminist is that it deals with more than actions, and silence, it imagines emotion, suffering, companionship, hints at an intimacy that goes beyond the buddy-film model. And the descent of Inanna into the underworld is magnificent. The fable world of show more the forest, from which the familiar appears, is so hopeful it hurts. It is the world we all wish we could find. But made strange with longing and reality and memory, it becomes a scary unintelligible place. Synopology, the fake cult, is a brilliant stand-in for Scientology (which is just how I read it, but definitely not the only reading). The typewritten pages of epistolary diary-entry/instruction is absolutely the perfect mode for the kind of reflection that doesn't lead to remorse or revelation, which is the only kind of reflection that matters. The kind of reflection that leads to acceptance, with or without understanding.

[Read the whole review: http://alluringlyshort.com/2013/01/08/the-vicious-red-relic-love-by-anna-joy-spr.... ] show less