Susanna J. Sturgis   Martha's Vineyard writer and editor
writer editor born-again horse girl

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My Masochism Tango

September 19, 2005

When I finally write "The Soundtrack of My Life," Tom Lehrer will have to come near the beginning: I was lustily singing "Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice / Unless you get a good percentage of her price" (from "Be Prepared") several years before I knew what it meant, and my politics were being shaped -- "warped" might be a better word -- by That Was the Year That Was before I encountered Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, or even Bob Dylan. I can sing most of the lyrics to Lehrer songs I haven't heard in years, so it's not surprising that when I need a snappy phrase, it's often the Lehrer repertoire that provides it.

All this by way of explanation: This isn't about Lehrer, or music, or wild Spanish dancing, but it is about the literary avatar of masochism that I can't get over.

Book reviewing.

I just e-mailed off my review of Fledgling, Octavia Butler's first novel in seven years (read it), and Elizabeth Kostova's much-ballyhooed debut, The Historian (pass). It's not bad, it's under the length limit (barely), and it was on time (more or less: I had a one-week extension from last Monday, and I didn't finish till three this afternoon). The bitch is that it's occupied most of my mind and a lot of my time for the last four effing days, and that doesn't include time spent reading the books, and rereading Butler's Parable of the Sower, of which Fledgling, I think, is a collateral descendant.

I also feel guilty that I couldn't reread more Butler, especially Dawn, the first of the Xenogenesis trilogy. I would feel guiltier if I couldn't blame it on the Kostova, which took for-fucking-ever to get through.

Book reviewing is hard. I'm good at it, but is that enough reason to keep dancing to the Masochism Tango? Nah. Why I review books:

  • to call attention to good ones
  • to figure out what I think about a book
  • to have a dialogue with a book
  • to set a book in context -- maybe of its author's earlier work, or of a particular genre
  • to tell the author something interesting about her work
  • to see my name in print

With this particular review, the context and the dialogue were probably the most important things, and it isn't my name I especially want to see in print, it's the URL for my website, which I'd like to start getting out into the feminist world I used to hang out in -- what's left of it anyway. Deep down I hope that all the reviews I've done of other people's books are creating karmic credit for The Mud of the Place and whatever comes next. I don't believe it, but it sure would be nice.

 

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