 |
| A girl with flowers, ca. 1905. |
Books are crazy. In March of this year, I started reading Les Misérables. It's a long one, of course, but still, I feel a slight shame, because that thing remains unfinished. I have six hundred pages to go. It's dense and thick with themes and allegorical, freaky characters and historical allusions that often escape me. If I was French, I sometimes think, I would have that beautiful base of cultural osmosis with which to use as a knife and fork here. I like the book a lot. I enjoy Victor Hugo's passion for opining on the battles of Napoleon. But I don't necessarily always "get" it. I am an alien to 19th Century France.
Still, hopefully soon, I will finish it.
 |
| Notre-Dame de Paris, by Luc-Olivier Merson, ca. 1881. |
On the other hand, I was reminded recently of the movie 'The Lost Daughter' (I watched a hate video about Dakota Johnson which briefly mentioned it). I watched this movie a while ago and was struck by something in it, some stone of intrigue lurking inside. On rewatch, I remembered how bleak the experience was - not just because the movie concerns itself with child abandonment wrapped in a certain kind of eternal and unshakeable despair, but because the movie veers away from its core - the deep cut of thankless motherhood - quickly.
And lads, I love a womanpain movie. I love movies that explore that murky sense of being in a big emotional hole of extreme yet muted suffering because, BECAUSE, you're a woman. Oh my God. There is such a sense of connection to be found in such a movie. And it's that which drew me in - the unmistakable scent of a bleeding woman, a woman biting her lip - but the movie feels so much like watching a tube man fill with air and then deflate again. What is our protagonist, Leda, all about? She comes across as something of a simple weirdo. Played wonderfully by my own special beautiful angel Olivia Colman, yes, but still, she's a sort of distant cartoon, in the end.
So I read the book, a rapid 128 pages, and it felt electric. In it, Leda is no longer a meandering woman appearing to be have a continued, segmented breakdown, but a completely normal person doing normal things at the beach. Her stealing of the child's doll, the centre of the novel, while a sort of moment of madness, is simply a small, thoughtless act, completely matter-of-fact. She is not a lunatic, but then of course this is easier to communicate when we are, as is the beauty of first-person novels, inside her head.
What I like most about her character, then, is her frustration. This, more than anything, is the feeling that permeates her relationship with the world around her. The movie makes a number of slightly sensational or in some cases more sanitised decisions - Leda says something seductive to the old man and then immediately runs away (in the book she merely imagines doing so), Elena the beach child is always is crying (in the book she is described as having a more sinister, quiet air of total need which doesn't require tears), Leda slams a door but never hits her child (in the book she cannot quite resist a physical retaliation).
It's flattened in a number of ways, as is often the case with film adaptations, and so of course I came to the book with the image of the movie in my mind, and was astonished at some of the differences which work to make the book so effective where the film languishes.
One of the things I love is that Leda is always relating things not just to her daughters, but to her mother as well.
"My mother had rarely yielded to the games I tried to play with her body. She immediately got nervous, she didn't like being the doll. She laughed, pulled away, grew angry."
No longer are Leda's struggles with motherhood purely hers. They exude from all other mothers, and her thoughts cross perfectly from her own experiences as a mother to her experiences as the child of one. It paints a precise picture of the intricacies of the sacrifice and strain of it all, not just in Leda's suffering as an individual mother who, ultimately, might not like her children, but as a pattern that can be traced across mothers as a whole - who might all, at one time or another, come to despise their children and the constant presence of the children's need to be cared for.
"I was so desolate in those years. I could no longer study. I played without joy, my body felt inanimate, without desires."
 |
| Famous mother Marge. |
The Lost Daughter is in some ways quite difficult to stomach. It brings with it a sense of lurking anxiety. Reading it feels a bit disgusting. There is something undeniably disturbing about Leda and her keen distaste for daughters. But this is what makes it so compelling, so powerful. Leda rages at the world she finds herself in, despairs at the loss of her personhood, details the feeling of her own body no longer being hers.
"Ah, to make them invisible, to no longer hear the demands of their flesh as commands more pressing, more powerful than those which came from mine."
She lives a life that flits between that strangled anguish, that well of regret, and muted acceptance. There is nothing to be done. There are no take-backs.
"My body became a bloody liquid; suspended in it was a mushy sediment inside which grew a violent polyp, so far from anything human that it reduced me, even though it fed and grew, to rotting matter without life. Nani, with her black spittle, resembles me when I was pregnant for the second time."
It's an insane, vivid, gorgeous book of pure horror and its necessary integration into mundane reality.
It's incredible. ★★★★★.
 |
| A Girl with Two Faces, ca. 1892, by José Guadalupe Posada. |
