Readalong Week 3: My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson

This week is the final week of the My Hundred Lovers readalong which was being hosted by Bree at All the Books I Can Read.

This is a book that I probably would not have picked out by myself to read but I am glad that I read it. I enjoyed it so much that I already have my next Susan Johnson book waiting to be picked up at the library.

Whilst the author may have set out to deliberately shock and surprise people with some of the things that she talked about in this book, ultimately I found myself having to think, which isn't always a bad thing.

There were whole sections in this book that I could quote as the writing was just bursting with life. There were also sections that had me cringing in my seat and having to read again because I wasn't sure that I had really just read what I thought I read! As I mentioned in last week's post I had to take to dog-earring the page as I didn't have enough book marks with me to keep on marking the passages that I found beautiful or moving or compelling in some way. This book definitely has the distinction of being the most dog-earred book in my library!

As a central character, Deb was compelling and confusing to the reader, searching and confused as a character but ultimately I was surprised at how well I was able to relate to many of the emotions that she allowed to play out through her actions and reactions during the book..

The book is written in short, sometimes very short, chapters that chop and change from each of Deborah's love and they aren't necessarily chronologically ordered. Some are lovers in the amorous sense of the word but other chapters talk about the feeling of the sun on your skin, or crisp, clean sheets on a bed, gelati on a hot day and so much more.

One of the questions that Bree asked in her wrap up post was:

Do you feel you were given a whole picture of Deborah, her life and her lovers? Or do you feel there were things missing, things you would’ve liked elaborated?

I don't think we were necessarily given the whole picture of Deborah because that would imply more of the day to day life than most of us would have wanted to read. What we were given were glimpses into the life of a woman, from her own perspective, about the things that were important to her. I think she was honest with us about many of the incidents in her life and the impacts (for example, how she met Celestine, who became her lover, in a doctor's clinic where she was being tested for AIDS), or at least as honest as she could be.

Many of the relationships were, however, very filtered. For example, we knew that right from childhood there was a lot of jealousy in regards to Deborah's relationship with her sister, and that continued right to the end, and deservedly so, but there was just one chapter where the two sisters shared a tender moment and I think the same can be said of her father - just the one tender moment for her to grasp onto. There were a few details about her son but not a lot. I particularly loved the chapter titled Breast where she talked about looking down on her newborn son as he breastfed. I remember that feeling of wonderment so clearly which is kind of hard to believe as I look at my 13 year old son who is now taller than I am.

I was glad that by the end of the book, Deborah appeared to have found a place where she could be content. Ultimately, I suspect that is what we all want.

This is a book that I can see myself perhaps rereading and savouring again in a few years time!

Thanks to Bree for hosting the readalong and to Allen and Unwin for the providing a copy of the book for the readalong.

Rating 4.5/5

Synopsis

A woman, on the eve of her fiftieth birthday, reflects on one hundred moments from a lifetime's sensual adventures. After the love, hatred and despair are done with, the great and trivial acts of her bodily life reveal an imperfect, yet whole self.

By turns humorous, sharp, haunting and wise, this is an original and exhilarating novel from one of Australia's premier writers.

Lyrical and exquisite, My Hundred Lovers captures the sheer wonder of life, desire and love

This book counts for both the Aussie Author Challenge and for the Australian Women Writer's Challenge.

Readalong Week 2: My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson

I'm late....again!

Actually, I decided to not post this second post earlier because I already posted a quote from the book on Saturday as part of my Weekend Cooking post and so I didn't want to post again so close together.

Please note that there may be some spoilers following.

I found so many aspects of this second section book so interesting without necessarily liking our main character, Deborah, any more than I did previously.

To me, Deborah is a woman with many flaws. She is looking for her sense of worthiness in any way she can whether it be men, or other experiences. She doesn't recognise the difference between sex and love and I think that is a pattern of behaviour that many people would recognise.

As readers, we are only given just enough information about certain aspects of Deborah's life but then a LOT of information about other aspects. For example, we don't know very much about Deborah's relationship with her husband and yet we are 'treated' to chapters like the three man day and a couple of the sexual experiences that had me squirming uncomfortably thinking too much information!

In her discussion post this week, Bree has touched on a number of the important issues including why a woman would stay with a man like the shadow lover despite how unhappy she was, about the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy, various relationships and more.

A couple of things that I wanted to touch on was the addictive personality of Deborah. At one stage, she talks about staying away from heroin because "she adored the way heroin made her feel, and how far from fear it carried her. But she was worried that she loved it too much, and never used it again." I totally related to this sentiment. My father is a recovering alcoholic and so I have always been aware of the power of addiction and the way it destroys the lives of both the addicted person and their family. When I was young and silly, I was absolutely aware of the danger of trying drugs just in case I really liked it. I am fine with having a drink but anything more than that would still scare me a little bit. I was very surprised when I had a conversation with my father about exactly that sentiment and he was actually quite mortified that that was my thought process. I am not precisely sure why to this day! Besides, it turns out that my addiction of choice is food and I am not really achieving much in dealing with that issue.

Without going to the extremes that Deborah does, I can definitely relate to her in so many ways. I loved the sections about her travel to France (where she started calling herself the Suspicious Wanderer). In a way, I think that by wanting to escape to France she is both trying to run away from herself with the hope that she would actually find a different version of herself. When I went overseas to live, in many ways I think I was hoping to find a better version of myself, but in the end what I did find was that no matter how far you travel, where you go, the one thing that you actually take with you is yourself.  When asked where are her roots:

She thought for a moment. She loved Australia but she also loved France. She wondered if she might be like a plant whose roots do not travel down but sideways.

As much as I find Deborah relatable, and sometimes that is quite uncomfortable, the thing that is really making this book a good read is the quality of the writing.

As I read, I always keep an eye out for quotes to use in future posts, whether it be food related like the one I posted on Saturday, or perhaps about Christmas for later in the year, or for the upcoming Paris in July event. The author has the words leaping off the page in such an attention catching way so regularly I ran out of random bits of paper to use as bookmarks and had to start turning down the page corners.   *gasp*

I am really looking forward to finishing the book to see where the author is leading us with this narrative. I suspect that there may be shocks towards the end of the book.

Readalong Week 1: My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson

Over the next few weeks I am participating in a readalong of My Hundred Lovers by Australian author Susan Johnson. The readalong is hosted by Bree from All the Books I Can Read. My first order of business is to apologise to Bree for being so late with my post, but I have been busy with all sorts of other bookish goodness! This week's post covers pages 1-88 and I have to warn....


SPOILERS AHOY!


If you look at the title of this book you do have possibly have a fair idea of what to expect from this book, and the book blurb would also reiterate that:

A woman, on the eve of her fiftieth birthday, reflects on one hundred moments from a lifetime's sensual adventures. After the love, hatred and despair are done with, the great and trivial acts of her bodily life reveal an imperfect, yet whole self. By turns humorous, sharp, haunting and wise, this is an original and exhilarating novel from one of Australia's premier writers.

Lyrical and exquisite, My Hundred Lovers captures the sheer wonder of life, desire and love.

It is at times shocking, at other times funny, but it is also surprising. I was expecting this to be an exposition of our main character Deborah's sex life and it is indeed that, but it is also more than that with observations about many sensory adventures including passages about food, observations about aging, about unhappy childhoods, about depression and unhealthy relationships and so much more.

The writing is often a treat for the senses. There is a section that I will be sharing later in the week that just had me wishing that I had a trip to Paris planned sooner rather than later. Then again, it doesn't take that much to get me to that point really.

The structure of the novel is interesting. The chapters are for the most part short and jump around from topic to topic, and with the narrative jumping forwards and backwards in time and from first person narrative to third person. It makes the reader work more than you would have to with a straight narrative but I think that the short chapters make that easier than it would if you had more substantial chapters.

Bree gave us some suggestion points to discuss and so I thought I would address those

How do you feel about Deborah? Do you like her? Can you relate to her? Did you feel sympathy for her? If so, why and if not, why?

At this stage I am not sure that we are meant to really like Deborah. So far, we have been given glimpses of the events in her life that coloured her impressions of herself and how she came to be the woman that she is now, but I am not convinced that we have seen too much of the real Deborah just yet. It will be very interesting to see how she treats many of the milestone moments in life in the rest of the book. For example, she just kind of glossed over the fact that she has at least one child which for most mothers would be a pretty major event!

I do think it is very telling though that for much of this section Deborah is referred to as 'the girl' rather than by her name, almost as if the fact that she is a girl is the complete definition of her as an entity and that the Deborah-ness of the entity is an after thought. This idea of 'the girl' also manages to keep the reader at arm's length for quite a bit of this opening of the book so it will be interested to see if this technique continues.

I do relate to Deborah though in particular in relation to her relationship with her family. Having grown up in a difficult family relationship I can see why she made many of the choices she made, particularly when it comes to sex and to the relationships that she chose to pursue. The search for love can be very problematic if you never learnt how to do that properly within the family environment, and to be honest, I feel that is very much reflected in my own life right now.

She is much more overtly sexual, particularly from a very young age and I must admit that in some ways I found that quite confronting because I don't remember being that way as a young girl myself, although I would have classified my teenage activity as relatively normal - at least I think so.

Do you think that her upbringing and her parents’ fractured relationship sent Deborah on a path of looking for acceptance and love, often in the most unlikely and unfortunate places? Does she use sex as a way to find or feel love?

Without any question of doubt. In my experience, there are two ways that people who have had traumatic childhood experiences will react to those events when it comes to their sexualness (if there is such a word. I didn't want to use sexuality in case it indicated sexual orientation whereas I am talking more about activity). One is that they will be very restrictive in relation to their relationships and the opposite can also be true where  the person concerned will look for 'love' wherever they can find it and will easily accept sex as a substitute for love.

Then again, some people are just more adventurous than others, and it could well be dependent of which activities they have been introduced into over the years. Deborah could well just be one of the more  naturally adventurous, and perhaps this is also reflected in other aspects of her life including the travel she has done for example.

As an aside, it seems that often these readalong books are trigger's for me to think about my past a lot. It happened with Foal's Bread which was very uncomfortable for me and is happening again with this book!

It turns out I had quite a lot to say about this section. We will see what happens in the next section!