Book review: By Blood
Feb. 17th, 2013 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schemingreaderI don't even know what to say about Ellen Ullman's By Blood. I'd never heard of Ullman until I was catching up on Five Star Friday where she appeared as a header writer. (The blogger there likes to say that each week is "brought to you by" a different writer, usually someone famous and dead, but not always.)
I thought I would read the latest book first, just so that I could be part of the squee, and By Blood came out in 2012. The book is set in San Francisco in the early 1970s, the era of the Zodiac killer and the Patty Hearst trial. The POV character is an unreliable, first-person narrator, and the protagonist is the young woman on whose psychoanalysis he eavesdrops.
The young woman is an adoptee. She is also a lesbian and a "quant," an economist who specializes in mathematical analysis of money. She had a cold family life growing up and always felt excluded or not completely accepted by her frigid, WASPy mother, and has trouble forming close relationships in adulthood.
The protagonist, who worked for years on treating an unspecified hereditary mental illness ("nervous condition"?) romanticizes adoption, because he wishes he could escape what he perceives as his inborn traits. His compulsion to eavesdrop on her sessions leads him to want to help her find her birth mother, who "surrendered" her for adoption from a DP camp after WWII.
Then she meets the birth mother. We hear it all through her sessions with the therapist.
The book was an incredible, layered work. It was clear that the echoes of Kafka were intentional--the POV character hears his compulsions as a flock of crows! Though I think people are reminded of Kafka by the creepiness of the building where the POV character spies on the protagonist. I think the echoes of both Nabokov's Lolita and The Magic Mountain were equally intentional--the exotic and unattainable female love object who reminds the narrator of a boy he had a crush on at school. I'm sure if I think longer I will find more of these allusions and echoes.
I think my ambivalence comes from the way the narrator engages with the legacy of the children of Holocaust survivors. I grew up with many people whose parents were survivors. Here, we have children of survivors, children of Nazis, and children of American anti-Semites, all grappling with their destiny. The POV character is in the in-between generation--a person who is not part of the clash between the genocidal racists and their victims, but only observed it, from far away. He exoticizes women who are like the protagonist. He is, in some way, in love with the exotic, able to observe it, fearful of crushing it.
Anyway, the book is brilliant and disturbing and I'm not sure whether you should read it. You decide.
I thought I would read the latest book first, just so that I could be part of the squee, and By Blood came out in 2012. The book is set in San Francisco in the early 1970s, the era of the Zodiac killer and the Patty Hearst trial. The POV character is an unreliable, first-person narrator, and the protagonist is the young woman on whose psychoanalysis he eavesdrops.
The young woman is an adoptee. She is also a lesbian and a "quant," an economist who specializes in mathematical analysis of money. She had a cold family life growing up and always felt excluded or not completely accepted by her frigid, WASPy mother, and has trouble forming close relationships in adulthood.
The protagonist, who worked for years on treating an unspecified hereditary mental illness ("nervous condition"?) romanticizes adoption, because he wishes he could escape what he perceives as his inborn traits. His compulsion to eavesdrop on her sessions leads him to want to help her find her birth mother, who "surrendered" her for adoption from a DP camp after WWII.
Then she meets the birth mother. We hear it all through her sessions with the therapist.
The book was an incredible, layered work. It was clear that the echoes of Kafka were intentional--the POV character hears his compulsions as a flock of crows! Though I think people are reminded of Kafka by the creepiness of the building where the POV character spies on the protagonist. I think the echoes of both Nabokov's Lolita and The Magic Mountain were equally intentional--the exotic and unattainable female love object who reminds the narrator of a boy he had a crush on at school. I'm sure if I think longer I will find more of these allusions and echoes.
I think my ambivalence comes from the way the narrator engages with the legacy of the children of Holocaust survivors. I grew up with many people whose parents were survivors. Here, we have children of survivors, children of Nazis, and children of American anti-Semites, all grappling with their destiny. The POV character is in the in-between generation--a person who is not part of the clash between the genocidal racists and their victims, but only observed it, from far away. He exoticizes women who are like the protagonist. He is, in some way, in love with the exotic, able to observe it, fearful of crushing it.
Anyway, the book is brilliant and disturbing and I'm not sure whether you should read it. You decide.
