Again, Vernon Subutex 1

Well...I know this is begining to be the Virginie Says blog...but hey, 💘 is 💘, and it infects everything around it. Besides, you get what you pay for. 

So....

Last night I was reading Vernon Subutex I* and this stopped me cold:

"...she was howling like a thing possessed, a stream of abuse that was directed at Vernon but went far beyond the nature of their recent relationship. He had two decades of frustration and disappointment thrown in his face. He was the embodiment of every man who had ever humiliated her."

And there was my ex-wife and my last girlfriend and to a lesser degree several of the other women I have been lucky enough to have been romantically involved with.

Funny (but not ha ha funny) thing is that my last girlfriend used to use that line on me regularly. She'd do something shitty and I would call her on it, not even getting all that upset, and she'd launch into a spiel about how This Can't Be About Me, This Must Be About ____ . Because she never meant harm to me in any way. Of course not. She was the brightest, purest angel on earth, and it was just ludicrous to think that she would ever do anything wrong. (That's not what angels do.)

So once again Virginie...who has Feminist cred that no one in their left mind could question...who is Pro-Female, Pro-Sex, Pro-Diversity, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...has once again given me some deep insight into the wrong-headedness of some of the women I've been involved with. 

And I suspect that it is in part due to the fact that even though she has written essays and directed documentaries, she is essentially a novelist, and a novelist, if s/he is good, is compelled to tell the truth on as many levels as s/he possibly can. So Virginie just comes right at it. She doesn't spare men, either, so there's no way you can Stockholm Syndrome her. She calls em like she sees em, and she don't want your gonorrhea. 

By the way, reference the lines from the novel quoted above, Vernon had had a very short affair with the woman who was freaking out on him, and he hadn't actually done anything that warranted a reaction of that magnitude. 

Sometimes it just be like that.

* About halfway through now, thanks for asking. I've been a little distracted by other things for the past few days**, so I haven't been reading as much as I normally do, but I'm still very interested in this book, and am still planning on moving right on to II when I finish it. 

** One of which was reading Invitation to the Bold of Heart by Dorothee Elmiger***, which turned out not to be worth the time...and which, alas, also took a bit of the wind out of my sails. Thanks, Dorothee. 

*** Which was TOTALly Asja Bakić's fault. In one of the stories in her most excellent Mars: Stories she referenced D. Elmiger no less than five times, forcing me to seek out said Elmiger. Much to my regret.