Categories: uncategorized
Date: 09 October 2012 18:13:40
The Red Book by Deborah Copaken Kogan is a novel which is more complex than it first appears. It is a highly observational book but the world it observes and comments upon is not the world as we often believe it and hope it to be but rather the world as it actually often is. It is a Harvard reunion book on one level, looking at the world the main characters went to university in. This is the world which the electronic Facebook world was born of, but then moves on to the electronic version and the world that exists twenty or so years on. A main theme is relationships between friends and partners as well as between children and parents. It's a book which in some ways smashes the myths about what happens after you go to "a good uni". Another one of the main themes. It explains that yes it does initially tend to give an advantage in the labour market but beyond that it is far more complicated. Often those who succeed most in society are not those who have gone to a good university but rather those who have had the motivation to succeed at all costs. The book acknowledges the way in which same sex relationships and families are now accepted in a way in which their members could never have imagined in the 1980's. It also looks at the way both being in a paid employment and being a full time mother are equally important jobs which should be judged as equally important. Although it also shows how some people can judge full time motherhood as not fulfilling potential it highlights through the narrative how that is unfair. It was a bit of a slow book to get into, but the narrative built up and sort of exploded into something which had me grabbed and engaged. There was a point towards the end of the book when I found myself unexpectedly crying. The scene is a memorial event to remember graduates who have passed away. There are several speeches described before one of the characters gets up to give an eulogy to one of her friends who died of breast cancer. One of the preliminary remembrances was for a female to male transsexual, given by her female partner. The partner reads part of a suicide note which says: "I need you and everyone else to understand that becoming a man did not drive me to kill myself. I wanted, more than anything, to live a regular life, to be your husband, to travel with you and hold your hand and laugh at life's absurdities together , and had the surgery not gone wrong, I have no doubt I would have lived to a ripe old age by your side. But this life I've been left with - endless days and nights of constant pain, where pleasure has been completely eliminated, where I can't work or socialize or enjoy a spring day - is no life at all." The reason I caught myself sobbing after I'd read this was because it was the first time I had seen the type of life Karl and I have/ aspire to described and summed up in a normal everyday way. It also summed up to me the dangers of grafting and why Karl like many others is making some of the decisions he is in relation to surgery but in a way which was easy for me to understand. Somehow this small element in a wider novel's narrative made me feel "normal" in a way which I so rarely do when thinking about our relationship. There was through this novel an element of hope expressed that our relationship may be something which can be normal and that we may be able to have that "regular life" doing exactly the sort of thing Karl and I do, laughing "at life's absurdities together". In fact it expressed exactly why I am increasingly starting to feel a little more comfortable with life being as it is....something I know that others find a difficult to begin getting their heads around.....what is essential to our relationship is not gender and gender preferences but that ability to hold hands and laugh together. One thing I found difficult about the book was the way that so many of the characters were involved in infidelity. Yet that was an element of the book which was linked to an exploration of adultery and the complexity of it and so can perhaps be understood. Overall it is a book I would recommend as a novel to read but being aware that it does contain discussions of bereavement, adultery and the effects of debt that might be somewhat difficult if you were currently going through those things. Is it destined to be a classic in the way the Vanity Fair quote on the book jacket proclaims? The jury is still out on that. I suspect that it may spawn a play or more likely a film which will be classic if cast well.