Jenny Hval's GIRLS AGAINST GOD (Tr Marjam Idriss; Narr Gabrielle Baker)

No one asks me why I hate, no one uses that word, they call me grumpy, not even angry, but grumpy, six letters, something inconsequential and self-inflicted, something powerless, insignificant, something small in a small person, not something that's about society, or about them, just something that means i'm ruining things for myself, something that's in the way of my potential as an object.

The unnamed narrator of Girls Against God, Norwegian Renaissance woman Jenny Hval's second novel to be translated into English, first takes us back to 1992, when she is a chronological latecomer to the heyday of the Norwegian black metal music scene. She invites us to look with, not compassion but comprehension, at her younger self standing apart in the back of the crowd at a show, dressed in black with dyed black hair, looking on from the vantage of "The gloomiest child queen."

We don't get to spend much time in this teenagers' court, though (yes, I mean to use the plural possessive here. You think there's only one child queen at this show? There are plenty. We're just called to observe the gloomiest one. And yes, I'm being extra fussy about language and usage here. As my queen demands), before we follow our heroine into high achieving yet frustrated adulthood, with a magisterial will, a titanic ambition, a talent to match, a haughty disdain for us lesser beings, and, yes, a hate, which she still feels powerless to enact and express, still trapped in a small and frail-looking and easily sexualized body.

But underestimate this fragile looking young woman at your peril. Her advanced degrees are in the 20th and 21st century art of film and video, but her soul and her desire and her power come from friendship and sisterhood and other older and deeper and wilder arts -- and maybe even the craft usually denigrated with a prefix of "witch-."

But instead of a coven, burning candles and calling down the moon and making stinky tisanes (though there's a fair amount of all of that, too), she forms a band with two friends, Venka and Terese, and here's the part where I link to any of Jenny Hval's stunning music videos for her unique and haunting and powerful songs and song-like compositions. Except I can't choose. Partly because I'm a neophyte (if a 55-year-old woman in her twelfth goddamned year of perimenopause can still be called a neophyte in any way) in terms of Jenny Hval's art. It's all hitting me at once. I'd only barely heard of her as a name from an episode in the back catalog of one of my favorite podcasts -- and those folks generally like way heavier music than I do so I hadn't gotten around to that one yet when I saw it was about a musician who, at the time, had written her first novel*. I'll get to it one of these days maybe, I said. But so my point is, you can probably pick a place to start with Hval's other art as well as or better than I can. Go. Explore. But not yet. Because I want to talk about this amazing fucking book about a goddamned metal music witch coven and their adventures with the poor, exploited, overexposed young girl depicted in Edvard Munch's Puberty -- and, via the expressionist surrealist whateverist magic of fictional time travel, the Scream painter himself.

But so, think for a moment what it must have been like to grow up as a tiny blonde girl in 1990s Norway (specifically southern Norway, a distinction that is lost on me but that I feel after reading this book like it might not be utterly dissimilar to the United States' own South vis-a-vis the rest of Norway, in a way?), surrounded, as our Hval stand-in complains bitterly (and narrator Gabrielle Baker lets us feel every vibration of the eyerolls that accompany Hval's speeches from her character's gloomiest child queen's perspective, as well as the adult's slowly growing anger, chilling patience, and diabolical creativity as she unleashes the art of her spells, or the spells of her art, on the dominant and still very narrowly Christian culture that keeps trying to trap her and her bandmate-sisters within its narrow limits on femininity) the same pious yet aggressive, destructive and vicious attitudes that the young males among her contemporaries attacked with unreadable band logos, corpse paint, body odor, sick guitar riffs and, oh yeah, church burnings.

All that looks like childish tantrum-throwing to her. She wants to do something that matters, not to the teen boys screaming from her mix tapes of yesteryear or the prison inmates they became, nor to the greater culture that made the boys and the girls feel so trapped, but to herself and her girls. Who hate God.

"For a brief moment, the Norns have surfaced," she says, as her band and their fans turn the decaying former site of the Munch Museum in Oslo into their own installation, replete with water damage, faded spots on the wall in place of faded paintings, blood-red graffiti and badly 3D-printed plastic babies. Or at least parts of them. Does that sound a bit lame? Well, it's just the sound check.

Women’s work becomes a crucial problem within capitalism because reproduction is seen as nonwork. Reproduction as mystery isn’t new, but in capitalist rhetoric the mystery surrounding reproduction is redefined in economic terms, so that childbearing becomes not necessary but personal, a private rather than public concern, something that ‘belongs behind closed doors’, not labour performed but a ‘natural resource’ (making women generally ‘natural resources,’ too).

GaG is also a bit of a cyberpunk story, and not just because the band-coven could very easily have accomplished one of their highly effective rituals with a Flipper Zero. Though they totally could have. Except Flipper Zeros weren't really a thing yet when this novel was written. So, more than a bit cyberpunk, as the band members fuse deep web searches with chaos-magical something-or-others and joke about just using "witch ritual" as a search term and hitting "I feel lucky" and imagine "information streaming through the arteries" of their wrists. Pretending to use something like the internet back when computers were still exotic but unconnected was, our heroine realizes, her first ritual, an exercise in sending forth her will through "the cosmic internet.

I'm tempted to go on quoting from this novel, to go on enjoying the sometimes sweeping, sometimes transfixing, power of Hval's and translator Marjam Idriss' language, which so often sounds more like a Jimi Hendrix lyric than a narrative, as you've perhaps already noticed. Jimi was pretty in touch with his feminine side, I think. 

But so, that's one of the miracles of this book: even while the intense and implacable longing for feminine power and agency engulfs the text completely, it's never at the expense of men or boys. Even the humorless, pretentious black metal boys of yesteryear, and their more conventionally loutish counterparts who drive big junky cars through quiet Norwegian villages at top speed and volume, just to be disruptive, earn Hval's admiration, never her scorn. Even Edvard Munch, he of the Puberty painting that the band-members work passionately to separate from its subject so she can be free, gets off pretty lightly, to say nothing of the anonymous creator of a certain infamous and pornographic Japanese woodcut you'll have to read the book to find and identify. Hval engages in a fair amount of trenchant but never weaponized art criticism in these pages, too, but always with a positive goal even as she emphasizes that her greatest power is her hatred. But what she hates is never an individual or even a category of people. She hates forces, especially those that threaten her cherished values of freedom, agency, strength, expression -- these are none of them zero sum games, is the takeaway from this novel. And fuck anybody who insists otherwise.

Unless you're playing the aforementioned games against God.

The gloomiest child queen is my queen, too. She's a pretty good one. I stan.

*Girls Against God is, I think, Hval's third, though only her second to be translated into English? Or something like that? According to Wikipedia the other day? Which, do we still trust Wikipedia? My instinct says yes, but consider the demographic I copped to above.

Layla Martinez' WOODWORM (Tr Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott; Narr Raquel Beattie)

How a novelist handles tension is everything in horror and suspense. Most of what I encounter in these genres lets tension build and build and build until it's pretty near unbearable and then releases it all in an ecstatic final climax. And that's fun and satisfying and takes a certain amount of skill and a sure grasp of one's story that I can only admire. 

Other authors, though, authors like Spanish novelist and essayist Layla Martinez, construct something more intricate, full of small winding bits and catches and very, very controlled little releases. I suppose people would describe this as "edging" but it's more interesting than that in Woodworm, with its pair of narrators (a grandmother and granddaughter) and its exquisite blend of supernatural horror, generational trauma, class resentment and elements of rural soap opera.

And it's short, not even 150 pages in Sophie Hughes' and Annie McDermott's English translation, which is full of interesting alliterations and rhythms that really translate wonderfully to the audio book medium, which is how I experienced Woodworm. 

But speaking of translation, one thing that gets lost in it here is the effectiveness of the book's title; in Spanish this book is called Carcoma*, which literally means "woodworm," but the onomatopoeia of the word spoken aloud is also a sound effect the author and the audio book narrator employ magnificently to convey many of the strange noises made by the ghosts and other malevolent presences as they go about their spooky business. 

For this is a haunted house story. The animated spirits of the dead, though, are the least interesting things haunting this house, originally built by a very bad man to contain -- really to entrap -- the poor woman he married in order to found the dynasty of unfortunate women condemned to live in the house and the nasty, gossipy, judgy and destitute Spanish village surrounding it.

The founding patriarch, by the way, made a habit of entrapping women, using his personal attractiveness, Andrew Tate-style, to draw in  many of them, only to manipulate them into prostitution to make him a small fortune, which in turn is how he afforded a fine house for the one he decided to marry, only to make her the most miserable of them all.

This pimp-patriarch (pimptriarch?) is the grandfather of one of our two narrators (unnamed; nobody in this novel has a first name and only one family -- significantly not the family living in the House -- gets a surname), a woman we only come to know as "The Old Woman" who has by reputation and necessity come to serve the region as a cunning woman, dispensing simple remedies and charms and curses to her neighbors, who despise and fear her, but not enough not to dispense with her services. The Old Woman is also subject to what we can only think of as absence seizures, in which supernatural beings "take her away" for hours at a time to share secrets with her. The Old Woman believes, or at least professes to believe, that these are saints, specific ones like Saint Lucy or Saint Sebastian (heavy on the martyrs with grotesque iconography, or who died by torture, or both), and further believes that it is via her prayers to them that her ill will against people who have wronged her, her daughter or her granddaughter, is put into effect. Enemies of the household accidentally break their legs in improbable accidents, go missing, get sick and die, all through her prayers to her "saints."

Of course the reader is skeptical, not about the reality of these "saints", but that they're really saints at all, especially when her granddaughter, "The Girl" who is our other narrator, reveals that their house is also visited by angels, and that angels don't really look at all like they do in Renaissance paintings and Catholic iconography. They're more like giant praying mantises with huge compound eyes. See the novel's Portuguese cover below.

Meanwhile, The Girl has grown up without parents; her teenaged mother was murdered (by one of two paramours) shortly after The Girl was born, and the girl's wealthy and privileged (probable) father has never acknowledged her, might not even know she exists for all that one of his family's many homes is next door to that of The Girl and The Old Woman. His is the family who gets a surname, and who long ago sought to employ the Pimptriarch's family members as domestic servants - a measure the Pimptriarch's pride would not permit, but one of which his descendants, including both The Old Woman and later The Girl, in turn, avail themselves, to the disdain of all. 

The inciting incident takes place in this rich neighbor's household, when The Girl allows, whether out of neglect or of simple and resentful malice, a great calamity to befall her cruel and snobbish employers, coincidentally at about the same time as The Girl first notices that her own mother's restless and fitful remnant is one of the many shades haunting her family's ancestral prison of a home. You know, the mother who got it on with the rich boy next door and then got murdered, either by him or by the boy she was gonna marry since the rich boy was leaving her to fend for herself and the baby...

It is left ambiguous as to what, if any of the weird and frightening phenomena that characterize the House can be attributed to The Girl's mother, whose ghost (?) is condemned continually to enter the place via the front door, versus the family's many other malevolent ancestors and their helpmeets of dubious nature and provenance. Something haunts a wardrobe in the bedroom The Old Woman and The Girl share; it does its best to lure people inside it, never to be seen again. Something else produces an apparition of a pair of legs that protrudes from under The Old Woman's bed. Then there are the aforementioned "saints" and "angels" who supply The Old Woman with endless gossip and the odd bit of important and actionable intelligence. All of these manifestations are barely regarded by the living women of the House, though The Girl, in her chapters, still expresses a certain pride in her ability to resist the wardrobe's blandishments and to ignore the whispers and cracks and carcoma/caruncho sounds that wake her in the night.

Woodworm is thus an incredibly effective and multilayered** bit of modern horror fiction, full of heavy emotional impact and genuine chills -- and surprises. It would have been so easy for Martinez to give The Girl a fate similar to her grandmother's or her mother's, the same only more brutal. Hints that this might happen abound. But while The Girl is as bound to the House as any of them, her own inner strength and resourcefulness let her remain her own character with her own agency and her own ideas about how to avenge her mother's family against her (probable) father's and against the villagers who have also done more than a little to add to their misery. Martinez and The Girl have other and more interesting plans, though, that lead to an even more satisfying conclusion than I felt I had any right to expect.

If there is a flaw in this work, it is in the audio book production. Raquel Beattie, the narrator, appears to be very much a go-to for Latina/Hispanic fiction and the narration thereof, especially if it requires an appropriate accent. But this is not a work of Latin American fiction, but of Spanish, so she uses her own standard American English speech patterns -- except for a rather cartoonish lisp, the kind that Americans who want to show off their sophistication affect when pronouncing place names like Ibiza (with a theta sound for the "z"). Which lisp she imposes throughout the text on all the ordinary English words of the translation, rather than on just the Spanish nouns and names. And she gives The Girl, who is rather more of an asexual Amazon than a nymphette, a breathy and sensual voice to differentiate her from The Old Woman (whose voice is ideal for the character, tough and serious and weary and protective and, yes, resentful) that really just annoyed me. So I kept being yanked out of this utterly incredible book by the narration. This would have angered me more if I hadn't just DNF'd another audio book that I stuck with way longer than I would have in print just because the narrator gave it a better performance than the material deserved. I figured they balanced each other out. 

And I never once considered setting Woodworm aside, despite my mild irritation at the audio. I would even listen to it again sometime, though I would really rather experience it as text. But Audible got me with an incredible sale price and Woodworm had been on my TBR for quite a long time, and...

Anyway, I sure hope Martinez, who seems more inclined to non-fiction than fiction of any kind, does decide to write another novel or two or three. I'm here for them if she does!

*It's even better in the Portuguese translation: Caruncho!

**I mean, I haven't even gotten into all the echoes of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime that echo through this tale. As my beloved Langdon from the Death//Sentence podcast observed of this book, it's the most Spanish thing imaginable. Well, at least since Guillermo del Toro's fairy-insect infested Pan's Labyrinth.

Tloto Tsamaase's WOMB CITY

The reader is a full quarter of the way through Womb City before anything, in this case a chapter heading, actually mentions misogyny, but make no mistake. Womb City is a novel more deeply concerned with misogyny and misogynoir than anything else I've read and bitches, don't even mention The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's feminist nightmare dystopia persecutes its female characters with 19th century technology at best. Womb City incorporates the cyberpunk tech of Richard K. Morgan's Takashi Kovacs novels into its workings to create a surveillance state like no other, and sends us exploring it through the eyes of one of its most deeply fucked-over victims for a few eventful months in her privileged but precarious life and it goes HARD.

Nelah Bogosi-Ntsu might seem, at first glance, to have it all: part of the "body hopping" upper crust of a high tech future Botswana in which consciousness is stored on silicon and can be swapped among bodies to escape disease, experience life in a body of another sex, immigrate to another country, or just enjoy exceptional longevity, but this luxury comes at a whole terrifying range of high costs. Bodies are both disposable and precious in Nelah's world, and the technology's incorporation into the criminal justice system alone is utterly terrifying: you can be forcibly extracted from your body as punishment for even little misdemeanors. If that happens, your consciousness gets stored in a mind prison where, in most cases, it will be continuously tortured until its time is served and a body becomes available again; meanwhile, your new body has been microchipped with a dizzying array of surveillance technology so that everything the new occupant does, says, or has the barest potential to do or say in the next year, can be replayed like a movie for a supervisory board of forensic specialists to whom records are submitted for judgement.

Nelah is a 430-year old in a 29-year-old criminal's body, but since part of the embodiment process that put them there erases one's memory, and because records of a body's prior occupants' deeds are essentially sealed, Nelah has no idea why one arm is a fancy prosthetic and other parts are weirdly scarred -- or why the body's rich and important original family, with whom they're sort of expected to re-integrate by social custom, is so much weirder around them than they've been led to expect.

This all sounds like spoilers, but I'm merely describing the milieu in which the novel's intricate potboiler of a plot takes place -- Tsamaase owes a lot more to the aforementioned Richard K. Morgan and a host of other sci-fi thriller writers than she does to Margaret Atwood.

Also unlike Atwood, Tsamaase is deeply, deeply intersectional, and this novel is more concerned with class and privilege and how the ultimate surveillance state -- I mean, move over, Big Brother -- affects every life; when our hero and her motley and complicated web of connections transform from a comfortable but confined citizens to rebels, they're acting not merely on behalf of women of reproductive age but everybody. And there's more.

The Botswana of Womb City is inextricable from the Botswana of the distant past, its cultural heritage and especially its particular mythology, its creation fables, its spiritual life, its haunting shared memory -- all things about which I have been ignorant. Reading Womb City has been a hell of a way to learn about it!

Rachel Yoder's NIGHTBITCH

Her sense that society, adulthood, marriage, motherhood, all these things, were somehow masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there- this idea had begun to weigh on her. Of course, it had crossed her mind before, but after her son arrived it took on a new shape, and unwieldy heft, and then even more after she quit her job, as her body struggled to regain its equilibrium. And once she was stripped of all she had been, of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones, an anti-feminist conspiracy seemed not only plausible but nearly inevitable.

Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch is that relative rarity, a novel about which I have precise memories of how I first heard about it. Caitlin Luce Baker, a bookseller who, like me, occasionally crashes the fantastic Two Month Review Podcast, plugged it at the end of this episode.*

I thought it sounded intriguing as hell, but just having blown two months' book budget on other things, I requested that my public library acquire Nightbitch, which seemed like a request that was likely to be granted because the book was making a splash. 

That was two years ago, though! And, well, this site bears witness to how I've spent that time, reading other stuff. I'd all but forgotten about this book when seemingly out of the blue my library announced it had just bought it in June of 2023 and I was first in line to read it. So, yowza! 

It was only when I went browsing for cover images for this here blog post that I finally figured out that the library's belated decision to grant my request wasn't out of the blue at all; Nightbitch is soon to be a major motion picture starring a perfectly cast Amy Adams.

Nightbitch lays out its premise right away. Its heroine, whom we only ever know as "the mother," in lowercase, is a former artist and career woman who is now a full-time stay-at-home mother. We see her constantly reminding herself that this is only because her husband's job pays him more than her "dream job" in the arts was ever going to pay her, a thought-terminating cliche that she employs whenever she catches herself resenting her being trapped in traditional gender roles, thus conveniently sparing her husband the tedious job of doing the reminding and being the bad guy thereby, (which, get ready for the husband). As the story opens she has begun manifesting symptoms that would lead a less rational woman (married to a less reasonable man) to believe she was slowly transforming into a dog, specifically a female dog. As in unexplained and unexpected patches of coarse and bristly hair suddenly appearing on the scruff of her neck, a suggestion of her canine teeth seeming, to her at least, to have gotten longer and sharper, and the odd homicidal urge, or at least an urge to unspecified violence. And the symptoms are worse at night, hence the title. Boom. 

I suppose I should note here that I am not a mother, never wished to be one, am perfectly happy being part of the village, as it were. And this book is a perfect showcase of what I've always imagined, with horror, my life would be like if I had ever had the misfortune to become one. The mother, whose son is two years old and whose husband is constantly away on business trips, is trapped pacing in the smallest possible space which she must share 24/7/365 with a tiny tyrant wearing her out with his demands, his anxieties, and his complete innocence and ignorance of all the terrible accidents waiting to befall him. Even when she leaves the house, he is with her; strangers focus on his adorability and regard her as his adjunct at best; the only people remotely interested in what she might have to say are other mommies, but only if she says something mommy-related. And she is constantly, surreally exhausted.

Until all of this starts happening to her, the teeth, the hair, the oh my goodness is that a tail growing at the base of her spine? Supernumary nipples? What?????

And by the way, yes, I totally think this book is in dialogue with Ira Levin's 1970s suburban horror classic, The Stepford Wives; both books are, after all, portraits of how a woman's transformation into a technology for keeping a man's house and raising his child** can make her feel like she is losing, or has lost, her humanity.

I would submit that as an explanation for the book's first half, anyway.

As for its second... the best I can come up with, and I do mean best, is that Rachel Yoder turned a feminist lament into a healthy, inspiring and daring feminist inversion of Chuck Pahlaniuk's Fight Club. And truly it is an inversion of that famous/infamous novel (and I'm already looking forward to treating myself to a double feature of the David Fincher film adaptation with Marielle Heller's of Nightbitch); we are completely privy to its strange protagonist's secrets and back-story, but unlike Tyler Durden and his Project Mayhem Space Monkeys, Nightbitch (the name the mother comes up for herself once she stops fighting and learns to love her fate) embraces its world and celebrates its weirdness and makes of it a positive thing, for isn't Nightbitch's experience -- motherhood and child-rearing -- in some fashion the most human story there is? Except maybe in the details?

She tipped her head back and filled the sky with a howl as big as her entire life, and, with that, was hell-bent on getting home, weeping now as her adrenaline surged and her muscles overflowed with blood and she crashed through the night.

A less brave author might have chosen to compound the horror by furnishing the mother with a typical suburban husband, happily benefiting from her dehumanization even if he's not consciously collaborating in it, insisting she "get help" when she begins embracing her strange transformation and starts looking to involve others in her discoveries. Yoder has dared to make of the mother's husband something much more interesting than merely the villain of an expected feminist parable, just as she keeps the mother/Nightbitch courageously and freely exploring what this all might mean and how far it's supposed to go. Then, too, the next logical villain would be the apparent frenemy figure of Jen the Big Blonde, a woman the mother knows from various kid-focused events at the library and the playground: the Big Blonde, after all, is never less than perfectly groomed and organized, always ready with toxic positivity and platitudes, making raising twin toddler girls look effortless and blissful, but again, Yoder isn't interested in making a villain of anybody but the incohate but near omnipotent forces of society that get women to connive in their own belittlement, that installs in most of us at a very young age a fierce internal critic that not only says we'll never be good enough but that we have no right to complain about anything or to feel badly about circumstances or to want to improve them, that it's wrong to ask for assistance when things get overwhelming. That it would be totally out of line for the mother to ask her husband to take on some more active parenting duties when he's actually home on weekends like putting their little boy to bed to give the mother a break from the nightly ordeal; that the perfect Big Blonde is anything but competition.

I still think motherhood would never have been the right choice for me, for so many reasons, but I've always at least intellectually understood why so many think I'm nuts for feeling this way. I've had many a discussion with my own mother, whose career as a pioneering female journalist at a time when that was still a bizarre novelty (she was actually the managing editor of a newspaper a little bit before Katherine Graham was, but it was a little podunk paper in a city barely worthy of the name in Wyoming, not the Washington Post) never got completely shelved but went into slow motion and stayed small when she and my dad started a family. To me it's always looked like she gave up all her dreams for the dubious pleasure of having me (though she did luck out with child #2, who is a genuine superstar), but she's always insisted she has no regrets and it was all worth it and like Nightbitch after her proclaims there is no greater love. I'll never know it, but I got a terrific vicarious experience of it from this novel and for that Rachel Yoder is to be celebrated for ever.

*The episode in question was devoted to a discussion of Virginie Despentes Vernon Subutex trilogy, a discussion to which Your Humble Blogger contributed in another episode.

**And yes, I've borrowed this insight from Sarah "You're Wrong About" Marshall, who shared it in an episode of her podcast devoted to the Levin novel and its film adaptations, which she viewed through two lenses: one of the popularity of Miltown and later tranquilizers, and of Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother, which I own but still haven't read because it only exists as my reading nemesis, a trade paperback. But I think I'm finally going to have to read it soon now that I've got Nightbitch under my belt.

Nathalia Holt's WISE GALS: THE SPIES WHO BUILT THE CIA AND CHANGED THE FUTURE OF ESPIONAGE

There is a whole category of books that I can't help but categorize as "stuff I need to read to make up for the fact that my U.S. History teacher in high school was very Not Good" to which Nathalia Holt's excellent and illuminating Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage most surely belongs. Which means that every other page left me wanting to scream out that I should have known about something already but at least I know now, no thanks to you, Mr. [REDACTED]!

In the case of Wise Gals, the biggest revelation (besides the incredible stories of the titular gals) was that a World War II battle had taken place on American soil, just six months after Pearl Harbor, except kind of six months plus one year after Pearl Harbor because it took the U.S. a long time to land troops to engage the Japanese who had invaded and taken the Aleutian island of Attu, part of the then territory and now state of Alaska.

So of course I'm going to have to read all about that pretty soon because Wikipedia won't do when you're... me. I've already located a book about it in my local public library!

Also, Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA for a hot ten minutes or so in the early 1960s! "In my experience," she said later, "the agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable."

Ok, Boomer.

Anyway, Wise Gals is a fantastic book about the lives and unsung careers of yet another group of amazing women -- one of whom, Jane Burrell, was the first CIA agent ever to die in the field -- who quietly changed the world despite all the garbage that patriarchy kept shoving at them. In this case, the women were instrumental and fundamental to the development of the United States' intelligence services during World War II and the early stages of the Cold War. Like the ladies of Hidden Figures and Holt's own Rise of the Rocket Girls (which I haven't read yet but now very much want to), these women's names should be as well known as their male counterparts but aren't. At least not yet. 

The women whose stories are encompassed in this book were not only there at the founding of the CIA; Holt directly ties their work to the agency's development from a "male, pale and Yale" network of pseudo-aristocratic amateur spies to the sophisticated, data-hoovering, technologically advanced power it is today.

By the way, look how much cooler the UK cover for this book is. The US edition uses a generic model they've given a vaguely 40s hairstyle and some dark lipstick and then cut off the top of her head. In the UK they got to see four of the actual women's faces. I had a terrible time on the internet trying to identify who is in which photo, but I'm  sure that they are four of these five: Jane Burrell, Adelaide Hawkins,  Elizabeth Sudmeier, Eloise Page, and Dr. Mary Hutchinson. My point is that it wasn't a single unknown woman who did all of the amazing deeds described herein; they were actual, individual human beings with families and interests and personalities and skill sets uniquely theirs. Do better, US publishers.

But I mean, wow, these were some extraordinary people. Burrell, for instance, had to work side by side with ex-Nazis (supposedly, but not always completely, "turned" towards the end of World War II) to expose post-war Nazi plots like giant art thieving and currency counterfeiting schemes, to say nothing of war criminals' escape from justice by disappearing into new identities in new countries. Often her collaborators turned out to be every bit as bad as the people they helped her expose, meaning she spent years in serious danger. What finally got her, though -- she was the first CIA officer killed in the field -- was a plane crash in Europe, cutting short a promising but already distinguished career.

Adelaide Hawkins, not content with a distinguished service record from the war in part because she was supporting and raising three children (she divorced her deadbeat husband right after the war), became one of the first members of the Central Intelligence Agency immediately on its founding and, among other achievements, headed up the team that developed the microdot camera -- an iconic bit of spy kit if there ever was one.  

Meanwhile, Eloise Page was, as another OG CIA operative, a leading voice in the campaign to get the rest of the U.S. government to understand that an innocuous seeming calcium processing plant in East Germany was making material for a Soviet nuclear weapons program that was much farther along than technical advisors (who hadn't factored in short cuts like spying in assessing how long before the USSR had The Bomb) were telling it. When she and her colleagues were largely ignored, she helped organize a mission to sabotage the calcium plant -- but by the time the US and British bosses had agreed to put it in motion it was too late.

And history might have been very different if General Douglas MacArthur had paid attention to the hard work of Dr. Mary Hutchison and her colleagues at the CIA's Tokyo station in 1950. She'd only warned everybody authorized to read her stuff that North Korea was getting ready to invade South Korea -- long before some 200,000 Chinese troops massed at the border to lend Kim Il-Sung a hand. Page followed up this feat of sounding the alarms and being ignored by warning her superiors months ahead of time that the Soviets were very close to launching Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. You know, the one that took us completely by "surprise."

Some of us were more surprised than others. The Looming Tower*, anyone?

Then there's Elizabeth Sudmeier, who brought our country the first credible intelligence about the world's first mass-produced supersonic aircraft the infamous Soviet MiG-19 fighter plane, which she got via gossip at the Baghdad dressmaker's shop among the well-placed hijab-wearing ladies she had carefully cultivated there. Nobody else in the Near East division could have accomplished this because nobody else was a patient, friendly and engaging young woman -- who genuinely enjoyed spending time there and appreciated the hand-tailored wardrobe her activity allowed her slowly to build. She stayed behind in Baghdad after a fundamentalist coup killed off Iraq's royal family and sent the rest of the CIA's personnel on various frantic escape routes and managed to maintain most of the U.S.'s spy network there until it was (sort of) safe for everyone else to come back.  And we won't even talk about her role in the Gary Powers/U-2 affair because you're going to read this book. Right?

Sudmeier's experiences having to leave Iraq after a mole in Washington D.C. blew her cover got me thinking, of course, about Valerie Plame. I wondered about Plame's time as a woman in the CIA in the 1990s and beyond -- and then I learned she has not only written (with a ghost writer) the expected memoir, but also a couple of spy novels! Gonna have to have a look at those one of these days. 

Egads, there is still so much I don't know. Which is why I keep on reading...

*And, as Holt takes pains to point out in the summing up of this book, the Wise Gals walked across Europe and the Near and Far East in Ferragamo pumps so the ladies of Alec Station who kept tabs on Osama bin Laden et al could analyze truckloads of data in more sensible shoes, as it were.

Colette's CHÉRI & THE END OF CHÉRI (Tr Rachel Careau, Narr Gabrielle de Cuir)

A sort of anti-love love story in two phases, Colette's Chéri and the End of Chéri takes very seriously an affair of the heart that was never allowed actually to reach those hearts involved. 

It would be easy to dislike young Fred "Chéri" Peloux, a "beauty who has everything and is only the more wretched for it, " raised in cold opulence by the servants of his courtesan mother, spoiled, impatient and demanding -- but Colette is too incisive a dissector of character to let us off that easily. As his lover, the much older "ghoul who only wants fresh flesh" (as she'll rather exultantly describe herself later in the book), Lea, falls in love with him despite herself but would never admit it, we wind up kind of admiring his monstrous qualities, or at least forgiving them; Lea is herself a courtesan, a life-long colleague and frenemy of Chéri's mother, and watched him grow up and never took him seriously as a possible love interest until she found herself kissing him. She has known all his flaws from the start, may be a little bit at fault for some of them, and so intimately understands why he is the way he is, and shares that understanding with us. 

We first encounter this pair five or six years into their relationship, with Chéri all but demanding a long pearl necklace that is something of a trademark of hers. He argues somewhat successfully that it looks better on him but grudgingly leaves it with her when she finally chases him out to go see his mother, Madame Peloux, whom they call the Harpy. Lea, left in peace, models the necklace for herself in a mirror and sees all the ravages time is taking on her beauty and finds that the necklace that used to set off her best features now makes them look shabby. Much later her now-married-but-not-to-her lover will encounter a woman his own age wearing a similar necklace of imitation pearls and finally realize that Lea has meant more to him than an Oedipal-ish crush but it's already far too late. 

But now that he's worn the real thing, fake pearls will never do. 

Lea is highly marginalized for all that she's had a celebrated career, because unlike her rival/friends, Madame Peloux and Marie Laure, she never had children. While she enjoyed wealth and comfort in relative solitude, her the other two made plans to marry their children to one another and settle them with a considerable fortune. Thus Chéri has always been destined to marry Marie Laure's lovely daughter, Edmée, only 19 to his 25 (and Lea's 49). It is thus implied, but never explicitly stated, that Madame Peloux drafted Lea simply to break the boy in and teach him how to be a decent lover for Edmée. Very much a frenemy move, if I've ever seen one.

At any rate, for all that both Chéri and Edmée are born out of wedlock children of courtesans, they and their futures count in a way that Lea does not; they are above her in the estimation of their little wannabe-bourgeois society's values. At least as expressed and embodied by her erstwhile colleagues in a community that is exceptionally interdependent because envied and despised by the greater world; if you have no solidarity, you have neither security nor hope. And the years when Lea wielded enough personal power (via her lovers) to provide her own security and hope are fast leaving her behind; Lea has to go along with her colleagues' treatment of her, whether she even realizes it or not.

But meanwhile, oops, no one ever bothered to let the kids get to know each other or in any way facilitate a relationship between them once their mothers have decided. And like I said, no one ever spelled out what Lea's expected role was supposed to be, to her or to Chéri. 

So anyway, before long Lea, six months or so later, receives belated gossip that Chéri left his wife and is living in a Paris hotel, prompting Lea's maid Rose to observe that "the divorce will be happier than the marriage" and that everyone was "so gloomy" at the wedding. Before Lea can even agree, Chéri is, in fact, at her door once again and it looks like they might resume their prior idyll. But will they?

I mean, would a story like this be famous if it had a happy ending?

All of this takes place in the first novel, Chéri, set in France's Belle Epoque right before World War I. Six years after its publication, Colette took up these characters again for The End of Chéri and allowed an identical span of time to elapse. When we meet Chéri again, he is a war veteran, now returned to civilian life and, while unscathed compared to most Great War veterans of literature, still very much at odds with that life. He is still well off thanks to his mother's machinations but that just frees him of the need to earn a living; it doesn't tell him what to do with his life.

Meanwhile his wife and his mother have discovered charity work and between them seem to be running every aspect of a hospital from Chéri's well-appointed home; Edmée is even under consideration for high civic honors for her work. She and Madame Peloux are sure Chéri will eventually come around and start playing the role they've cast him in as the gracious host at their events and the masculine figurehead for their efforts, but he'd rather hide out in his bedroom when Edmée has committee members over for a working luncheon.

What's a still-beautiful boy to do but go look up old girlfriends, since his marriage, which Colette encapsulates in an early scene with him strutting around in front of his wife in just his underwear "more as a rival than as a lover" because he considers himself the more beautiful of the pair,  is still a wreck?

Ah, but six years has merely taken him deeper into his prime at age 31; Lea is now in her mid-50s in 1926 Paris, when Bright Young Things are running amuck and beauty is more important than ever. Those pearls become her even less well than they did in the first book. She has not only committed the sin of aging, but she has also gained weight -- and won't let him deny, in front of one of her friends when he shows up again uninvited at her home, that they were lovers once. She forces him to look at her as she is now, dumpy and grey haired in her "sexless dignity" and think "I used to hit that."

And worse, Lea finds this funny. And calls him out over the vanity and self-centeredness this exposes even as he still, in his head, is making it all about him; she must have come to this from grief over losing him. When she reveals that she's all but reading these thoughts and laughs aloud, it is, as they say, *chef's kiss.* Oh no, she's had a life of her own all along! It is here and now that he decides how the novel will end, if not on the details.

Was anything in his life real? Bitterly he wanders Paris, watches his wife and mother succeed, passes time with old friends whom he still considers beneath him; at novel's end we discover we were right to dislike him, but he has one last claim on our compassion because Colette was a damned genius. Ah, me.

Now I guess I'm going to have to take a look at the 2009 Stephen Frears film with Michelle Pfeiffer as Lea and Kathy Bates as Madame Peloux. I mean, the casting alone...!

Virginie Despentes' BYE BYE BLONDIE (Tr Siân Reynolds)

"Every time I find a guy I really like, I drive him nuts and he chucks me out... You know the effect I have on guys: at first they love it that I'm in such a bad place, they always want to help. But if you overdo it, it's bad for the furniture."

Is there a Virginie Despentes Cinematic Universe out there in the ether? Or is it just a thing that happens in realistic literary fiction that a reader can 100% imagine an author's other characters showing up in the backgrounds of that author's other books. 

I can totally imagine Gloria*, the boozy, angry, messed up heroine of Bye Bye Blondie, who named herself for a song Patti Smith made ubiquitous, turning up at one of Vernon Subutex' al fresco Convergences, is what I'm saying.

She'd probably be the only one Bleach's Beats didn't work on, and thus constantly getting yelled at for slam dancing, though. 

Bye Bye Blondie is, of course, an earlier work than the trilogy that captured my crusty old heart a while back, but its heroine would fit right in with the huge cast of characters that populate the Vernon Subutex novels. She's the right age, for a start, and has the right sensibilities and the right proximity to, but inability to share in, success.** She's tough but loves deeply, abrasive but sentimental, drunk out of her mind a lot of the time and really kind of violent; when she first encounters her old boyfriend, Eric, she leaves the encounter wondering why she didn't punch him in the jaw. And it goes without saying that she has fantastic taste in music. She is, in short, exactly as the great Molly Crabapple drew her on simulated notebook paper for the American cover art, here. "Her life has few good points, except that she's used to it."

I really shouldn't like her, but I sure do. Though I wouldn't want her in my actual life, of course. I've got my own shit to deal with. And my medical bills are already insane. 

Anyway, Gloria is also, as the action gets going, in exactly the same situation as Vernon is at the beginning of his odyssey, though for different reasons. Vernon was long-term sponging off a friend who'd just died; Gloria made herself homeless one angry fit at a time, until she and her boyfriend, Lucas had their final fight and she, well, she kicked herself out more than Lucas kicking her out, but either way it is her violent craziness and her refusal to address it that have left her couch surfing in Nancy.

Enter Eric, who broke her heart years and years ago, now a big time TV presenter with TV looks and TV clothes and a TV chauffer stopping his car in the rain when he arrives on location in Nancy -- and spots Gloria stumbling down the street, not long after she finally stormed out of her latest ex-boyfriend Lucas' apartment for good. Eric is unaccountably delighted to see her and urges her to meet up with him for a drink later that night, when he's done with work. Mostly just to get rid of him, she kind of half-assedly agrees and even tells him about her preferred dive bar where everybody knows her nom de guerre (as in "Gloria" [G-L-O-R-I-A] is not the name her parents gave her), towards which he was preventing her from heading by keeping her standing with him in the rain. I might wish I'd punched him, too.

Auspicious beginning for a grand romance, no?

In different ways, both of them would eventually realize what a very poor preparation punk rock had been for later life. Too much fun, too much utopianism. Getting back into reality wouldn't be a pleasant experience. 

Of course, this isn't the beginning, exactly. No. Gloria and Eric originally met when Gloria was just 15 years old (and he was around that age, too, presumably) when they were both involuntarily committed, she by her parents, he by the authorities who picked him up as a vagrant while his parents were off on unspecified exotic travels, to a mental institution, there to be locked up against their will for many weeks with a motley assortment of ugly, gross old people (aged 30 - 50. You know, ancient, decrepit, how are they still alive?) with real problems except they seem mostly to boil down to refusals to grow up, according to Gloria? Gazing askance at them all at the mature age of 15? Anyway, Erik is young like her, and while kind of camp and effeminate, good looking enough to sleep with, except she doesn't get around to that until later in life. No, his parents come for him a good month and change before Gloria's come for her, and they exchanged letters! On paper with envelopes and stamps! Remember those? Plus he sent his "Blondie" cassettes to listen to on the walkman he left her after hers got confiscated (she was listening to Motörhead too loudly, according to another inmate) in which he smuggled small amounts of marijuana, because of course he did, this was young love in the 1980s, baby!

My mom is probably reading this and raising her eyebrows right now, but dude, we lived in the middle of nowhere and the cops actually did their jobs back then. Nobody was going to go to all the effort it took to get drugs into the Upper North Platte River Valley of Wyoming and then share them with someone as uncool as the book nerd speech kid cop's daughter. They just called me Narc and shoved me back into my locker. I was perfectly safe. As long as the janitor was still around to let me out, but that wasn't anybody's worry but mine was it? Ptoo!

But oh, didn't I wish I could hang out with people like Gloria back then. I would have been her pen pal while she was in the hospital and everything. I would have sent her all the Cure tapes I could find. Sigh.

Adult Gloria is a rather less appealing friendship prospect, though, as she let her heartbreak over Eric stop her from developing much beyond her angry little punkette phase. At 35 or so she is on public assistance, a confirmed day drinker, not quite as pretty as she was as a teen and lets her most violent impulses run unchecked. If she's not a danger to others, she's a danger to herself if there's no one around to beat up. She's had a string of terrible love affairs that always end badly and violently, and her best friend is an older heroin junkie named Michel who just laughs at her when she loses her temper. 

Into this paradisical existence comes Eric, who does indeed show up at her bar and, even though she left it hours before, sticks around in the hopes that she'll come back, meanwhile charming the socks off of all her crummy bummy drinking buddies who are falling all over themselves at the chance to be in the same room as a real live TV star. Their opinion of Gloria is changed forever when they learn that Eric considers her the One That Got Away and also the Love Of His Life!

Eventually, of course, the two reunite and whether it's true love or just neither of them has the strength of will to avoid making the same mistake twice, they get a kind of second chance. But this time, if things go wrong, they can't blame parents or prejudice or anything but their own deeply flawed characters. A kind of romance does indeed develop, but Gloria is still Gloria. If it succeeds, it will be in spite of rather than because of this fact, looks like.

Me, I think if I ran into 35 year old Gloria, I'd squeak and run. But I'd probably still love her from afar. Very afar. So afar. Just like I know I'd never be cool enough to hang with her author, who, also a filmmaker, made a film of Bye Bye Blondie recast as a lesbian love story that I'm gonna have to hunt down sometime. But I know there's no way I'd survive an encounter with Blondie. Bye!

*Who is almost exactly my age, and I'll probably never get used to that, having been raised, first,  on the classic literary Dead White Male canon and second, on the 20th century Boomer Narcissist canon. It's like I barely have room in my head for a woman who's anything like me. I have to shove Rabbit and Garp and David Copperfield and Jean Valjean aside to make room for a literary figure who, while both way cooler and way more fucked up than I am, has shared my actual progress through the world so closely. And I'm still a privileged American white woman! It must be so much weirder, but also even more refreshing, for actual demographic minorities to encounter their own Glorias.

**She even has dealings with an unnamed producer type who could very well be a younger Larry Dope from Vernon Subutex, and at one point she and Eric wash up outside a record store in Paris that could easily be Revolver before Vernon was old enough to buy it and run it into the ground.