If you have watched Crazy Rich Asians, you’ll have a very good idea of what to expect in the opening pages of Dulhaniyaa, where the protagonist Esha comes home to Mumbai from America—the extravagance, the street food, the marital promises in the air. Unlike Crazy Rich Asians though, this is a queer story, and one of the very small handful of romantic comedy novels published in English by a desi trans lesbian.
Continue reading “Review: DULHANIYAA by Talia Bhatt”Reviewing this book is interesting because it’s published posthumously, with an extensive notes from the author’s daughter about the process of bringing it to the light of the day and her relationship with her mother. At this point it seems boorish to be critical of the book in any way, which is unfortunate because the book is both quite good and quite messy. Not because the author had given up on the manuscript by the time it was ‘completed’ (many years before her terminal diagnosis), but because fundamentally the politics of it is very… let’s say a little troubled.
The Fetishist is about, as the title implies, the racial fetishization of Asian women (largely by but not limited to) white men. The prose is excellent; it is litfic’s litfic, if you would. Structurally it’s great. It’s a fun book, even, between the farcical kidnapping plot, attempted murder, things of that nature; remarkably eventful, for litfic in particular. Where the novel flounders is in its insistence that politics don’t really matter, because it’s personal; the fetishization isn’t that bad, because the guy actually does love you and he’s so genuine. Racial fetishists are bad? Not MY Nigel!
Continue reading “Review: THE FETISHIST by Katherine Min”Feed Them Silence was really interesting, more literary than SF, a deep character study, meditation on academia and the ethics of taking capitalist funding, and how to keep everything from falling apart. I’ve seen people call it a book about a researcher’s parasocial relationship with her subject (in this case a wolf) and I’d say that’s about right. The protagonist, Sean, is an older butch lesbian deep in research, desperate to escape loneliness and her disintegrating marriage by slipping into the brain of a wolf.
Fairly tragic (not in a dead wife way though), though not as devastating as Our Wives Under the Sea.
Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang was super fun–a body horror book steeped in a satire of the wellness and beauty industry: how far will you go to achieve physical perfection? The narrator, a Chinese-American piano prodigy, has to grapple with poverty and white supremacy when her workplace is slowly transforming her… and more. My only complaint is that the climax is a little… silly, in that the narrator sets the antagonists on fire through slightly cartoonish means. It doesn’t ruin the book by any means, but did give me pause.
This probably is what you’d call an upmarket book, in that it has a slightly literary voice but is in substance a genre book (horror, thriller), and thoroughly a page-turner. Content warnings for very strong body/sexual violations and body horror.
In retrospect it wasn’t that difficult. As long as I didn’t try to reconcile anything, as long as I accepted that my husband was a bad person, my children were going to grow up to be bad people, and I was the crown jewel doing my part for the legitimacy of other bad people—well, as long as I did that, it was fine and dandy. I went out with my ladies-in-waiting, sunned on yachts, and swanned around in ball gowns, a dead woman in a beautiful dress.
The Force of Such Beauty is one of those singular novels that leave you gasping. It fires up your brain; it makes you breathless with both the force of its intention and its craft (the prose is some of the best I’ve ever read). The story isn’t new, as such, but it’s perhaps interesting that most novels about modern royalty are romance. An American girl might discover she’s the progeny of the Japanese prince (this, regrettably, is an actual book), or that the man she’s dating is the future king of a small European country, and then there might be some struggle about adjusting to etiquette lessons or what have you. But these stories end happily; the American girl brings democracy to Buckingham Palace, and is applauded for her down-to-earth character, and so on.
Caroline Muller, the protagonist of this book, is based primarily on Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock, but her adversarial mother-in-law Queen Amelie is clearly based on Elizabeth II (rest in pieces, and so forth). She and the prince of the fictional Lucomo fall in love while they’re both at a hospital, and Caroline believes she goes into this with open eyes. But she’s uneducated and fairly naïve, having dedicated all her life to running, and despite warnings from her lawyer friend Zola, she quickly finds that she doesn’t know anything at all.
One upon a time, I was the fastest woman on earth. I was extraordinary: a rising mountain and the tiger who jumped over it like it was nothing. I ate when I was hungry and slept when I was tired, and in the hours between, I ran. My body was a vessel for my willpower; my body put other people to shame; my body proved what was possible.
When I think about that body, I’m homesick in the pit of my stomach. There is no word special enough to describe its singularity. It was carved from volcanic rock and brought to life with the force of a thousand goddesses. It carried me to the top of the highest wooden box and placed a golden weight around my neck, and it did all of that by the time I was twenty-one years old.
It’s a harrowing narrative as Caroline struggles within the instruments of wealth and power, with being not only constantly monitored but being reduced to an incubator. She looks back on the early days of being in love, and admits she didn’t realize at that point that her Prince Charming’s argument for authoritarianism presents ‘the symptom of a great, troubling disease’; instead she found him earnest, and she believed in what he believed. Her own parents struggled against Apartheid, and she believes that she’s fundamentally a good person, that Prince Ferdinand is a good person, that together they’ll do extraordinary and just things together.
As her mother-in-law escalates her abuse, and as her husband loses interest in her, Caroline finds herself increasingly trapped—and realizes that wealth has made her both weak and evil, that she has performed the role of the obedient trophy wife too well, and that now she wants out. There’s a horrible moment when she has an affair with her bodyguard, a relationship that’s presented as sincere and one of the final exercises of her agency, only for her to discover he’s a sex worker her husband paid to keep her from becoming too discontent.
If it were up to me, there’d have been one more chapter so the ending isn’t completely abrupt, but as it is the conclusion is incredibly brutal. The entire thing is, really, as you watch Caroline be stripped of agency and control of her own body; as you watch everyone manipulate her and treat her like a total fool. As she discovers that her Prince Charming, whom she thought wasn’t like other men, is exactly like all the other men.
It’s not a light read, the book viscerally describes the destruction that results from Caroline’s career-ending injury, her pregnancy and childbirth, her loss of self. But this unflinching look is what makes the book so special:
Zola held back her memories with a swallow. She was unwilling to allow them, even now, to take up space in her life. “I know why you wanted to live in a palace. But every time we tell ourselves that it’s better to make change from the inside instead of tearing down the building . . . it feels like such a profound failure of imagination.”
The Lesbian Review has come through again: it’s how I discovered The Perfume Thief and They Never Learn, respectively historical fiction in Nazi-occupied Paris about a butch perfumer and a modern-day college thriller where a bisexual woman serial killer is the campus vigilante.
Of these two, The Perfume Thief became an immediate favorite. Here’s how it opens:
If you’re picturing me in some ladylike frock printed with posies, lace at the collar, don’t. I’m not done up that way. I began wearing trousers long before we ladies were allowed. You’ll find me in tweed and neckties, shirtsleeves and cuff links, fedoras and porkpies.
People sometimes say, She’s still somewhat handsome, and I think they mean it as a compliment.
“Are you whoever you are when you’re dressed,” a fellow asked me many, many years ago—decades, probably—a bourbon in one hand, his other hand toying with the button of my suspenders, “or are you whoever you are when you’re naked?”
The voice is strong, the prose is fantastic. Like much historical fiction, one of its pleasures is the depth of detail; you read to be immersed. It’s written in first person present tense too, so I’m doubly enamored. There are nods to historical queer life, and some of it is of the author’s invention (e.g. the perfume used by the lesbians of Paris), and it’s very well-researched. The narrative alternates between Clementine’s youth of crime and her love affair with a trans man and her ‘present day’ swindling a Nazi officer, and while the book ultimately has a bittersweet note tending toward hopeful, it’s also unflinching. The main flaw is that the pacing is pretty slow—it takes until about 25% through the book before it gets going—but it’s more than worth it.
They Never Learn is in most respects a weaker book: prose-wise, there’s not much to write home about. There’s the occasional fun line, like
But little do they know: killing a man is so much more satisfying than fucking a man could ever be.
The narrator is a bisexual woman, but she clearly gets little emotional satisfaction out of her relationships with men, viewing them as either useless or violent. There are shades of Killing Eve, except it doesn’t beat around the bush—Scarlett’s desire for another woman is immediately front and center. I consider it a popcorn book due to the borderline bricklayer plainness of language (couldn’t she go on about the graphic details of her murders a bit more? Surely we could have a few visceral metaphors and titillating violence?), but my preferences about prose are pretty particular. It’s a pretty unique book; not many titles, after all, are about a lesbian serial killer who gets a happy ending.
A Bee Writes 
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