Zarina Zabrisky We, Monsters. Numina Press, San Rafael California, 2013 (300 pages)

Zarina Zabrisky's first novel We, Monsters is a complex and unique narrative, told from the point of view of a woman we only get to know as Mistress Rose, her working name. She is a dedicated 38 year-old wife to Luke and is the mother of three kids- Nick, Olga and Roxanne. To gather material to complete a novel about her sister, Rose takes on a job as a dominatrix in San Francisco.

Rose’s interest in the boudoir is initially purely for research purposes. She takes on the job with the understanding that there will be a bit of “bondage, spanking, that kind of stuff” but “no actual sex.” She is told that her job is not to cure her clients but to “keep ‘em coming back for more.” As Zoe, a fellow worker explains to Rose early on, “We’re their fantasy, and we tell them whatever they want to hear.”

As a young woman in the Soviet Union, Zabrisky was approached by a KGB official "to become a hard currency prostitute and spy" which she apparently declined. This scam, as Zabrisky discovered years later "was widely used to control foreigners and their activities in the Soviet Union." Zabrisky uses this incident within the novel, in particular, in the chapter 'Sinking Boats' in which she reveals to Mike the Motherfucker "the darkest secret of her life," to develop Rose's backstory.

Zabrisky wants to make it absolutely clear that her novel is a work of fiction: "I have a lot of readers imagining that my novel is a memoir. It's not- I never lived in Odessa, people described have never existed, the novel is pure fiction...The circumstances under which I have been offered a spying/ sex job were completely different. Yet I've done a lot of research and spoke to enough people to know that the scene in the novel could have happened in reality."

In the boudoir's dungeon, Madame Rose learns to satisfy the aberrant sexual fetishes of her clients. The dungeon's owner "Mommy", who is rumoured to have a Ph.D in psychology, has been in the business for over thirty-five years. She keeps a file system of cards which records each of her client's sexual preferences.  

Elf Paul thinks he is nine inches tall & likes to jerk off when Rose talks to him about how her boyfriend is going to piss into his mouth. The 70 year-old Gene imagines he is a foreign spy who enjoys being kicked and tortured by beautiful girls “in a KGB way.” Other colourful characters, although we never meet them directly, include Carl the Shit-Eater, Carolyn, a transvestite, who prefers menopausal women & Leo the Fish who is into drinking used tampons as tea bags. The main focus of the novel is not on these odd characters but rather on Rose coming to terms with the dark days of her past.

In regard to the creation of her character Rose, Zabrisky's confides, "She is ambiguous. Her childhood sexual abuse and traumas leave her split and distorted, distant and emotionally numb. I have seen these conditions in many women, especially with Eastern European background, and I feel compassionate. I wanted to bring to the world this bleak, rejected and broken underworld as it is a part of being human, to me.Whether I succeeded, is for the reader to decide. Everyone has a world inside."

The novel consists of dozens of short anecdotal chapters. The structure of the narrative alternates between Rose’s job in the dungeon, her normal family life and flashbacks to her childhood in Odessa in the Ukraine. 

We learn in Dr Michael H. Strong’s first footnote in the opening chapter 'I Will Become A Dominatrix' that Rose’s unpublished manuscript was delivered to him shortly after she disappeared from the Bay Bridge: "I have every reason to believe that Mistress Rose is indeed dead. I had never met her or heard about her until the black envelope appeared at my office desk with a note : Institute of Human Sexuality. To Dr. Strong from Mistress Rose. Publish my writing, Mike." Dr Strong decides to publish her novel because it will further his lifelong effort to propagate “the freedom of sexual expression.” 

The fictitious Dr Strong is a devote adherent of Freud and he meticulously footnotes Rose’s narrative several dozens of times through his narrow Freudian prism. By way of example, in ‘A Spy Fantasy’ the client Gene fantasies he is a Cold War spy and gets off at the girls kicking him in the back of his legs until he collapses which enable them to “look for money that he’s hidden." 

This quote is followed by a footnote which reads: “The money is the equivalent of feces, and Gene’s deviation is rooted in a possible arrest at the stage of toilet training. Sex is purchased, similar to the bargain of his early childhood: “You go to potty and Mommy will love you. You don’t go potty, Mommy won’t love you!” Feces are the first “gifts” or “savings,” the first creative expression of oneself, the first power act that a child can give or withhold.”

The footnotes were edited by Zabrisky’s life-long friend, the psychoanalyst Dr Katherine Zubritsky, who also wrote the Introduction to the novel which can be found on the Amazon link below. It is significant that Zubritsky infers that Dr Strong is a “half mad Doctor”, as a satirical caricature of a modern Freudian. So in commenting on Rose's Dissociative Identity Disorder and various other mental and deviant ailments is she sending herself up or simply bringing to our attention the flaws and limitations of Freudian theory?

The footnotes certainly add to our understanding the various characters’ motivations but only from a limited perspective. The notes, for the most part, are intrusive and often overly rationalise human behaviour in an inflexible, predetermined & sometimes laughable way. If Dr Strong is essentially a figure of fun why belabour the point so seriously?

Overall, none of the quirky behaviour as described in the novel horrifies, disgusts, arouses or surprises a mature, informed reader. Yet as the climax of the narrative accelerates towards us, the walls to Rose's wavering identity come tumbling down. Through the flurry of footnotes which accompany the accretion of plot details- including the recount of Rose's lucid nightmares & the readers' broadening knowledge of her unresolved childhood issues in her discussions with Mike- the veil to the underlying 'truth' is lifted- & we get to better understand who Rose actually is, & vicariously, also ourselves. We are left numb but paradoxically exhilarated. 

Internet Resources:

Read the Introduction, Dr Strong’s Afterword and the first 14 pages of the novel on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/We-Monsters-Zarina-Zabrisky/dp/0984260048

Check out Zabrisky's website for information on her books and readings: http://www.zarinazabrisky.com/

Follow more of Zabrisky’s writings in the Red Room here:http://redroom.com/member/zarina-zabrisky/writing

Read a review at Curbside Splendor: http://www.curbsidesplendor.com/curbside/readings/review-we-monsters

BOOK REVIEW: Richard Brautigan In Watermelon Sugar. London, Picador Books, 1970 (142 pages). Originally published 1968.

My recent interest in Cold War literature has drawn me back to Brautigan’s highly inventive novella In Watermelon Sugar, first written in 1964. It is his third prose book and further established Brautigan’s reputation amongst young readers who were challenging traditional ways of thinking at the height of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. When he started writing the book, Brautigan was living in the small coastal Californian village of Bolinas. He used the communal, back-to-nature values of Bolinas as the basis of his post-apocalyptic town of iDEATH.

This is an experimental, early stab at post-modernism. The nameless narrator directly addresses his audience and meta-fictionally lets them know he is writing this book.

At the beginning of the novella the community has fragmented into two distinct camps. There are about 375 people who live in the town of iDEATH. The folks are gentle and live a simple subsistent existence with watermelon being their staple crop. Watermelon sugar is used in the production of practically everything- including clothes, houses and bridges. The people live in shacks and share meals together. They speak in naïve, matter-of-fact sentences. They live a kind of idyllic but empty existence. Fed up with life at iDEATH the rebel iNBOIL and about twenty followers leave the village and set up camp in the Forgotten Works, a gigantic dump which holds the debris of the past world. They distil whiskey and get drunk and do evil things. When sober they sometimes dig up relics and books from the dump and sell them to the villagers.

Nothing is known about the outside world. Presumably society as we know it has been destroyed through nuclear war and pockets of people have leant how to survive. The book that the narrator is working on is only the twenty-fourth in 171 years and the first in thirty-five years. Similarly, not much is known about the past, apart from the idea that talking tigers used to roam the area and ate no name's parents before being wiped out by humans.

Although In Watermelon Sugar was written in 1964 and touches on some Cold War ideas and values, there are no explicit philosophical, religious, or political references to make it a significant Cold War text. It clearly establishes, for example, iDEATH as alternative hippy-like community which has close connections to the land but little else. The novella is more the product of Brautigan’s far-out  imagination. The village’s twenty or so giant vegetable statues, the underwater tombs, and the different coloured watermelons make for trippy reading but don’t say much about the times. At the dining table one night the rebel iNBOIL aptly points out to his brother Charley: ‘This place stinks. This isn’t iDEATH at all. This is just a figment of your imagination.’

I’m not sure what the conflict between the villagers and iNBOIL and his gang is meant to represent, if anything. iNBOIL is just a pisshead with no communist attributes or sympathies. The ending is very bizarre with iNBOIL and his mob cutting off their thumbs, ears and noses and bleeding to death. Perhaps it foreshadows Brautigan’s own descent into alcoholism and his eventual suicide at 49. Hemingway-like, he placed a .44 magnum shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. His suicide note simply read, ‘Messy isn’t it?’ 

This novella is far from messy. It is carefully crafted and represents an important transitional text between the beats and the hippies.

The best site on Richard Brautigan is easily Brautigan.net where you will find extensive critical material on his writing. Find it here: www.brautigan.net/watermelon.html

BOOK REVIEW/ BEST QUOTES: Charles Bukowski WOMEN (1978)

BOOK REVIEW: Charles Bukowski WOMEN. Wild & Wooley, Sydney, 1979. 291 pages.

This is Bukowski’s third novel and explicitly recounts Henry Chinaski’s life as a poet, a drunkard and lover. It is written in Bukowski’s characteristic terse, matter-of-fact style and is considered largely autobiographical despite the blurb at the front of the book which cautions that 'this novel is a work of fiction and no character is intended to portray any person or combination of persons living or dead.’

Chinaski is over fifty and has published about twenty-five books and makes enough money to pay his rent in East Hollywood. He eats well and can afford good wine but is still struggling for wider literary fame. He flies around the continent giving usually ineffective, drunken readings of his poetry and in between he hops into bed with his young female readers.

If you are familiar with Bukowski’s writing, you will enjoy this book. The numerous interchangeable groupies Chinaski befriends becomes rather repetitive but never predictable. Any idiot can get drunk, fuck & write free verse but it takes a special talent like Bukowski to write about it credibly and with great humour & spirit. Bukowski is a disgraceful role model for any aspiring writer but he writes with extraordinary candor and conviction.

The incidents which Chinaski recounts are fascinating in themselves, but what lifts his words above the page, what makes this book great- is how he is able to distil in a few sentences, in between his alcoholic beverages, wanks and bonks his unique take on life.

Here is an overview of some of Chinaski’s best lines in Women. I’ll call this section ’The Beast with Three Legs’ after Chinask’s fictitious book of short stories of the same name he imagines in this novel. It is an apt metaphor to describe the animal in Bukowski.

WARNING: Some of the following quotes include adult references. Recommended for 18 years + only. 

‘The Beast With Three Legs’

On Women

Chinaski has undertaken a lot of 'research' for this book. He originally craved whores but since he has gained attention for his writing, he has developed a soft spot for more sensitive and caring woman. Against his will, he is ruled by his 'third leg':

‘I had to taste women in order to really know them, to get inside them. I could invent men in my mind because I was one, but women, for me, were almost impossible to fictionalize without first knowing them.’

‘Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price.’

‘Her dress was up around her thighs, showing that flank, that leg wrapped in nylon… I got horny. The goddamned strumpet, I’d give her a hundred strokes, I’d give her 7-and-one-half inches of throbbing purple!’

On Relationships

Chinaski is not interested in long-term relationships which involve personal commitment and responsibility. He views love cynically and sees relationships largely in terms of lust:

‘Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped.’

‘Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest…the most one could hope for in a human relationship, I decided, was one year.’

On Love

‘I accepted them for what they were, and love came hard and very seldom. When it did it was usually for the wrong reasons…Then usually there was trouble.’

‘It’s like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.’

On Sex

Bukowski is highly inventive and varied in his many descriptions of fucking. He often describes intercourse as ‘murder’ or ‘murdering’ his partner. It is seen as a violent, animal activity as sometimes attempting to break a women in two:

‘The thought of sex as something forbidden excited me beyond reason. It was like one animal knifing another into submission. When I came I felt it was in the face of everything decent, white sperm dripping down over the heads and souls of my dead parents. If I had been born a woman I would certainly have been a prostitute.’

‘Then I gave up trying to please her and simply fucked her, ripping viciously. It was like murder. I didn’t care: my cock had gone crazy. All that hair, her young and beautiful face. It was like raping the Virgin Mary.’

‘I gave her a long slamming gallop full of unexpected variables and inventiveness before I finally shot into her.’

On Drinking

It’s amazing Bukowski lived to 72 considering the excessive drinking he did throughout his life.

Be interesting to carefully examine his original drafts and how Martin edited them:

‘I hated it when the beer wouldn’t stay down.’

‘If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.’

‘I’m just an alcoholic who became a writer so that I would be able to stay in bed until noon.’

On Old Age

Bukowski was a dirty old man until the end:

‘I decided to live to be 80. Think of being 80 and fucking an 18 year old girl. If there was any way to cheat the game of death, that was it.’

‘I was old and I was ugly. Maybe that’s why it felt so good to stick it into young girls. I was King Kong and they were lithe and tender. Was I trying to screw my way past death?

On Education

‘In a sense, as much as I disliked it, education helped when you were looking at a menu or for a job, especially when you were looking at a menu.’

On Life

‘People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing…backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking…People had to find things to do while waiting to die.’

Chinaski on Chinaski

Like Bukowski, he paints himself as a loner who has no god or politics. After mauling dozens of mostly young, naïve women Chinaski surprisingly sees himself for what he is: a ‘selfish, spoilt fucker’ and cries pathetically to himself near the end of the novel. This sudden change is not adequately prepared for and does not ring true:

‘I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn’t want conversations, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches.’

‘I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness, a kind of non-being, and I accepted it.’

‘I ate meat. I had no god. I liked to fuck. Nature didn’t interest me. I never voted. I liked wars. Outer space bored me. Baseball bored me. History bored me. Zoos bored me.’

‘I was simply letting things happen without thinking about them. I wasn’t considering anything but my own selfish, cheap pleasure. I was like a spoiled high school kid. I was worse than any whore; a whore took your money and nothing more. I tinkered with lives and souls as if they were my playthings. How could I call myself a man? How could I write poems? What did I consist of? I was a bush-league de Sade, without the intellect.’

‘I had imagined myself special because I had come out of the factories at the age of 50 and become a poet. Hot shit. So I pissed on everybody just like those bosses and managers had pissed on me when I was helpless. It came to the same thing. I was a drunken spoiled rotten fucker with a very minor fame.’

On Writing

Chinaski portrays himself as someone who is compelled to write. He hates other writers and attends book readings only because they help pay the bills:

‘There’s no way I can stop writing, it’s a form of insanity.’

“Art takes discipline. Any asshole can chase a shirt.’

‘I write fiction. Fiction is an improvement on life.’

On Writers

‘The worst thing for a writer to know is another writer, and worst than that, to know a number of other writers.’

‘You could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. Anyway, writers were to be avoided.’

‘I was best to stay away from other writers and just do your work, or just not do your work.’

On Poetry Readings

'Readings diminished me. They were soul-sucks…Readings got you a piece of ass sometimes.’

‘Drunk as they were they could immediately detect any false gesture, any false word. You could never underestimate an audience.’

‘I hated readings, but they helped with the rent and maybe they helped sell books.’

Bukowski makes writing look easy but it is obviously a skill which he has honed from writing thousands of short stories & poems. This book is long but it doesn't really have the feel of a novel. It is rather a series of short anecdotes loosely tied by the woman Chinaski is 'researching'. Chinaski never forces himself on any woman but still comes across as a brutal opportunist. He really doesn't have the empathy for the working poor he strongly expressed in Factotum and only when it is far too late does he show any regret or compassion for his actions.

Wild & Wooley had a license from Black Sparrow Press to publish Women in Australia in 1979. Only 750 copies were printed. A book in good condition will now fetch $150 and upwards.