BookJack talks about the "City of Girls" by Elizabeth Gilbert. This is a letter from the ninety-year-old heroine, in which she tells her whole life: from a dizzying youth in New York to acceptance of herself in maturity.
Elizabeth Gilbert is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Her short story collection Pilgrims was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and her novel Stern Men was a New York Times notable book. Her 2002 book The Last American Man was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.
The name of the American Elizabeth Gilbert is strongly associated with "Eat, Pray, Love", and this, of course, makes her an easy prey for reader snobbery. As a result, a review of any Gilbert's book is doomed to begin with assurances that, despite her almost obscene success and fame, she is a serious and extraordinary prose writer. Let us allow ourselves to omit this ritualistic part and simply take it as an axiom that the creator of Eat, Pray, Love, a real writer, the last thing in need of our indulgence, was one long before the publication of her main bestseller and remains so today - after the release of her new long awaited romance.
The "City of Girls" is built like a letter from an old woman to a younger woman. Ninety-year-old Vivian Morris writes to seventy-year-old Angela Grecco to finally explain who she, Vivian, was to Angela's long-dead father. However, both the question itself and the answer to it are nothing more than a convention: having started from this point, the novel lays a spacious loop, covering, in fact, the whole life of the narrator. Expelled from a prestigious college for absolute idleness, in the spring of 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian, a girl from a wealthy family and with no expressed interests (minus an interest in sewing), comes to New York to settle with her aunt, the owner of a seedy theater in Manhattan. Here, Vivian has to turn from a naive ingenue into a daring vamp, become a costume designer, fall in love, become disillusioned, betray her friend, become a participant in a shameful scandal and survive expulsion from her personal paradise - in order to return here a year later renewed, find forgiveness, family and ultimately, itself.
Gilbert's novel is clearly divided into two unequal parts. Over the course of its first two-thirds, Vivian recounts the story of her exhilarating first year in New York, from her introduction to the city to her ignominious escape. The last third (“Now, Angela, I will tell you as briefly as possible about the next twenty years of my life”) is the story of a grown-up, much more mature and reasonable Vivian, who managed to accept herself and build her life contrary to social norms.
Perhaps, in some imbalance between the two parts - the lively, detailed, emotionally and eventful first and the dryly concise second - is the main (and, in general, the only) shortcoming of the novel. Obviously, as a writer, Gilbert is much more interested in talking about the follies, discoveries and mistakes of reckless youth than about the undeniable advantages of conscious and wise maturity, so the second part looks both overly conceptual (this is where all the main ideas of the novel are concentrated) and patter-schematic.
However, the key theses of the "City of Women" are really good and valuable enough that they are quite capable of compensating for the meager lapidarity of their presentation. The fate of Vivian is important to Gilbert as a visible evidence that the family is not those who are close in blood, but those who are close in spirit, and that we ourselves have the right to choose who to consider as a family. That the conventional model of happiness is far from the only possible one. That neither feminine nor masculine nature is reducible to a typical set of gender roles, and that non-compliance with standards is much less of a problem than is commonly believed.
In the original novel, Elizabeth Gilbert is titled "City of girls", which refers the reader to the famous expression "girl power". Indeed, if it occurred to someone to check the “City of Women” for compliance with the Bechdel test, he would pass it without the slightest difficulty. The most active, interesting, strong and expressive characters in the book are women, and much more than relationships with men, they are concerned about issues of professional self-expression, politics, their own sexual identity, friendship, and trust.
Yet—and this is an important difference between Gilbert's book and other feminist texts—none of her characters is concerned with fighting for her rights as such. All of them - Vivian, and her best friend Mardozhri, and Aunt Peg, and Peg's beloved Olivia, and many others - simply ignore social stereotypes and live their lives as if there were no external pressure in principle. And this absolute inner freedom, combined with the complete absence of aggression, this joyful feeling of victory without the need to participate in the fight makes Gilbert's novel not only fascinating and optimistic, but truly unique and very important - including for the Russian reader.
This article was sponsored by Mira Zecevic
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