"La Balsa de Piedra" - José Saramago (19 Feb - 29 Mar)

Well this one has taken especially long to write because of "life" and stuff... But here it is. Finally, "La Balsa de Piedra".

Unsurprisingly, I also took a while reading this one. Started mid-February and finished it late-April. I'm not going to keep blaming dissertation writing and university stuff for this, rather Saramago's jumpy way of intertwining the characters' stories with the omniscient narrator that gets side-tracked all the time. This doesn't make it any less enjoyable, mind you, I find a lot of his social commentary incredibly engaging and sharp, it's just that it takes a while to get into the story because sometimes the narrator's own voice seems more important than the characters'. I will, however, blame university stuff for taking so long to write this.

Now, if there is one thing I take from this novel, is that we really are all cosmonauts wandering aimlessly through space, the very existence of humankind doomed to end at some point due to the fact that about 4 billion years into the future, the Milky Way is expected to collide with the Andromeda galaxy. Yet we go on with our lives because this is so alien and far away that it seems irrelevant. But the destiny of the Iberian Peninsula is a condensed representation of the same, and it is only when people see the end coming that they are jolted into action of some kind. This comparison with the fate of our galaxy is explicitly mentioned once in the novel, but of course the point of it all is to explore how people would spend what they perceive as their last days/months/years faced with the unexpected, and I found that a beautiful journey because it tries to rescue the little things in times of uncertainty.

This discussion around "the meaning of it all" reminds me a lot of a book I've started and dropped about four times now: "Maya", by Jostein Gaarder. The first few times I abandoned it because I would spend more time looking up Norwegian words than actually reading it. I started it again a few weeks ago, and I managed more than half the book, but despaired once again on a more philosophical basis: it asks the question of "why the bloody hell do we exist at all" way too bluntly, and at this point in life, I can't really afford to get lost in such thoughts.

But there is of course so much more to "La Balsa de Piedra". One of the questions I liked is how much people can and should actually get to know one another to base their decisions:

 "If in order to like someone, one had to wait to get to know that person, not even a lifetime would suffice" says Joana Carda to Jose Anaico.

Funny that this seemed to be a recurrent thought in some of the books we've read for this list... I know I've mentioned it before, I remember Toru Okada asks himself a similar question (but on a more pessimistic note) in "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle".

I really enjoyed how clueless some of the men were at points like this, and how much the women took matters into their own hands. Very much like back in Latin America, even. Cultural resonance, I suppose.

Though I can't say I sympathized more with a particular character - I think I often don't - maybe because of Saramago's own ever-present voice and wit:

"Opinions are but the apparently rationalized expressions of taste."

 Once, in conversation with a Colombian bookworm very close to my family, she said something that I believe was Saramago's own expression about his critics, shortly before he passed away:

(paraphrasing) - "At the beginning [of his literary career], they used to say 'oh Saramago is good, but he's a communist'. Now they say 'oh Saramago is a communist, but he's good'"

Even though yes, of course there is a lot of political commentary, I get the impression that he was too self-conscious to be easily classifiable one way or other. After all, both novels I've read by him are more centred around individual people and their unlikely circumstances, instead of larger societal questions. I think that's one thing I really like about him: the individual stories matter, and make up the whole.

And again, if we had to wait for an academic committee to confirm our beliefs through infallibly proven empirical data, or for an "expert in problems" to define what a problem is, or to get to know all the antics and misgivings of one we love to know for sure we are willing to spend a lifetime together, I'm sure the raft would dismember on a coral reef before we had a chance to taste the proverbial lover’s lips.

On that note, a song to wrap it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM8t29gD8J8

La balsa de piedra by José Saramago, 08.01-04.03 (first 32 pages), 04.03-23.03 (remaining 300 pages) by Sunniva

Yes, man. I finished it. I've never spent this amount of time on a book without picking up other books inbetween, because I can often read several books at once, if they have different purposes (breakfast book, mid-day book, late-at-night-book) or I find one challenging to read. Now, I really haven't, apart from reading a few pages of Dracula every time I go swimming (because I am made of logic), and reading Meg Eier Ingen during the film festival, during which I also ignored this book completely.

I struggled for a long time (almost two months), keeping the book by my bed, taking it down to the living room and writing a letter instead, checking Facebook and reading blogs and tidying up the desktop on my computer. I also brought my tiny Spanish dictionary with me, seeing that there were a lot of words I was uncertain about, and plenty I'd never seen before, and oh! the conjugations.

The book starts off talking about different people, doing slightly unorthodox things or having them happen, all while throwing in comments about Greek mythology, dogs and whatnot. I found it very confusing to begin with, although now that I look back, I can see that all the five main characters are introduced in the first chapter, that is, the first nine pages, and it is actually very concise.

At the beginning of March, I just realised that I had to pull myself together, to be able to finish by the end of the month, and so I've been reading between ten and twenty pages each day, and I'm allowing myself to feel proud of that.

Obviously, I've been skipping words or sentences I do not understand – that is, I have read them once and moved on.

If we remove the frustration of understanding that there is a joke, a political comment or a social one, and not understanding why it's funny or whether it's important, I have thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I need to read more of his works, if I can only decide which language to read them in.

My one disappointment was that I thought Saramago would be a feminist, after this comment:

'A toda prisa, los hombres de informacion, algunos de los cuales eran mujeres(...)'

p.24

but then I realised that he was having more fun with the language than making a comment. Later on in the book, there are so many examples of Joana Carda and Maria Guavaira making the food and the beds and making everything comfortable, making a home, cleaning up and so on, that I just couldn't believe it. I can't excuse it either, seeing that it is quite a recent book, unlike The Day of the Triffids.

Even though the women are strong characters, they conform to far too many clichés.

That said. I love the conversations in this book, even though they can be hard to follow, with only a capital letter signifying a different speaker, and commas are used instead of any other punctuation marks. People have brilliant conversations as well.

HERE COME THE SPOILERS

My soul fell apart when I read about the lonesome sailor. I didn't see it coming, even though everything had been laid out in advance. That is another thing about this book, Saramago is very good at preparing the story, all while you're not paying attention. The same thing happened when Pedro Orce met Roque Lozano, or that is, he let Roque Lozano meet the other two men a few hundred pages before, so he could be there in the end.

Talking about Pedro Orce. WHAT. Seriously. I didn't understand what happened the first time I read that Maria Guavaira followed him into the forest. WHY. I understand that he was lonely. But couldn't they have foreseen all the pain and awkwardness that they were creating? And Pedro Orce was left even more lonely than before, with a lessened friendship with the other men. This made no sense to me. Although, Joana Carda's decision to follow up on Maria Guavaira's act, was a good one, I think, because it made them both guilty – as Saramago says at one point, changing it from being an exception into being something regular. Almost. I could really have done without this. I suppose it was partly there to show that not all the decisions these people made were for the best, because throughout the rest of the book, they pretty much make all the right decisions.

Again, I know that I read all books far too literally (ironically enough). I laughed at the comments about the White House and the United States and how and why they were willing to help. I enjoyed the little stabs at Spain that came from this Portuguese author. There were doubtless points I missed, especially that long passage about poets was completely lost on me. What I enjoyed about the book is that it encompassed all of this, but also what the inscription in my copy says: friendship, dreams and solidarity.

'(..)queremos pronunciar la palabra final y nos damos cuenta de que ya habíamos vuelto a principio.'

p.320

Saramago, José. La balsa de piedra. 1987. Editorial Seix Barral, Barcelona.

"Invisible Cities" - Italo Calvino (7-21 Dec)

I'm not too sure what I expected after reading "If on a winter's night a traveller...", but it certainly wasn't this.

One thing I liked about that one was the puzzle-like way it was written in, kind of like "The Solitaire Mystery", together with the smoked-up reflections on what it is to read, write, and simultaneously being part of the made-up narrative that is life. "Invisible Cities" was definitely much more loose, and more of an expressionistic way of talking about a city, or cities. Or the world. Or everything, as according to Calvino, it seems, everything relevant to human history can be learned by remembering, looking at, or imagining a city.

As usual, with a book without much of a plot, it took me a while to ease myself into it, but this one I ended up enjoying, and as the interlude-like conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan began to take shape - or rather, to more explicitly lose it in clear directions - things began to click together.

To begin with, there was the expanding conversation about language. It wasn't long before I realized that these two personas might not have actually been talking at all. Not just because they openly say something along the lines of "this moment might not be real", but because they bring up the illusion of communication all the time. While Marco Polo learns new languages through his (imagined?) travels, presumably being able to make himself more and more clear, I kept wondering more and more whether these cities were actually the ones he imagined. Suddenly, this comes to mind, especially the last verse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11uI-uy33uU

So it's not so much about what is told, but about the whole impression of the book:

- Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."

- Polo answers: "Without stones, there is no arch."

Pretty straightforward wisdom at first, if you ask me: no man is an island, we're all connected, of course. But I think they're not just talking about "the arch of human history/society", they're also talking about smaller things, like telling a story; the way you react to a certain comment; why your orange juice tastes funny right after brushing your teeth, which leaves a sense of disappointment in your mouth that lingers throughout your morning and keeps you from fully enjoying the cup of coffee you will have between your morning lectures, making you fall asleep halfway through the second one and thus feeling extremely embarrassed at your lecturer, because she's also your dissertation supervisor and oh gosh, you've already asked her to write you a recommendation letter for a postgraduate programme at Oxford University and... Well...

"It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear." Which I think applies on two levels: we read others' stories filling them with our own experiences or expectations; at the same time we arrange our own histories in the order that seems to suit us best - the ear, here, being whatever is in our best interest, how we want to see ourselves.

A couple of the cities seemed riven with Christian morality. The description of one of them struck me as strongly sexist (the "inhabitants" would cyclically take up different "wives").  Another few seemed plagued with a straightforward consumerist ethos. Some others were interestingly mystical and made me think that Borges' library was actually hidden in there. One of them reminded me particularly of Caracas - one of the most grim ones. But then again, maybe I've made this particular impression of Caracas feel like all of Caracas to me, as an excuse for me to be disgusted by it. Maybe that's just me being smug and justifying the desires that draw me in other directions.

But as the last passage reminds me way too much of this:

http://italian.about.com/library/anthology/dante/blinferno003.htm

I can't help but taking the very closing line as sound advice I shall carry close to heart.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, 15.-28.12 (Sunniva)

Half of this was written as notes at home the night before I left for England, and right now I am writing it into text directly on Internet Explorer on Karla's parents' laptop.

I was definitely not entirely awake and aware when I started reading the book, since I can't remember much of the first cities. As mentioned before, I find it difficult to read short stories and poems, because they require a completely different reading pattern to my usual and preferred one. I prefer sitting down with a book and reading for a long time, and I just can't do that with shorter texts without forgetting some of them and mixing them up with one another.

That said, I really enjoyed this book once I got into it. I spent almost two weeks reading it, and only really read it at breakfast and before bedtime, so the reading pattern fit more with reading about one or two cities, which was perfect.

Here are some of my thoughts from looking through the book again once I'd finished it:

Cities and Signs were the most interesting ones to me: the importance of signs, Cities and Signs 4 with the palace being the prison and so on. 5 that there is a back to every pretty façade. The idea is repeated in several other cities, especially Cities and Eyes 5.

Trading Cities 3 where they swap their living, houses and surroundings every now and then to keep
happy seemed like a perfect but fantastical solution to the problem that pretty much every person in the world has at one time or another.

Cities and the dead frighten me. They're intriguing, but also disturbing.

Cities and the sky 2: Different cities but the same - I have no idea what this note means as I do not have the book with me.

Cities and memory, changing but having the same name. This goes into the whole theme of the book - which is not cities, to me, not even Venice, which I see it is to some, but society. The book, and specific cities, can be applied to so much, so many places and settings, that it's difficult to write about it.

Continuous cities 1: Leonia, where they buy new things every day "So you begin to wonder if
Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not,
instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity." p. 114
Leonia, to me, is Norway. Or the society we've become, which wants new things all the time, and half the reason is that we feel grand and rich and happy throwing away old things.

2: That all cities are becoming the same.

Sometimes there's an underground and skyscrapers, and so we are pointed to the meta fiction of it
all – same with Marco Polo and Kublai Khan debating their own existence.

I loved this idea in Trading cities 1: The trading of memories after one keyword.
"at each word that one man says – such as "wolf", "sister", "hidden treasure", "battle", "scabies", "lovers" – the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel's swaying or the junk's rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles." p.36-37

Continuous Cities 5:

Penthesilea the city of suburbs reminds me of Managua - I'm too literal-minded but still it does. The neverendign suburbs, the non-existing city centre...

Berenice (Hidden Cities 5) is politics in my mind, even the new ones that take over are never that good even if they started with "just" thoughts.

You can tell that I'm a) busy celebrating New Years with friends I haven't seen in 18 months and b) not used to writing about short stories. I just put down all my thoughts about the different cities at home when I was supposed to be packing, late at night, the day before I flew over to England. And now the rest of the group is having pizza and I am honestly going to run off and join them and we can talk more about the book in comments and real life.

Short summary: I liked it. I need another book to read on the side in case I want to sit down with it for a long while, but I could easily do that. I do want to read his other books. And I am happy that this project is soon over, because it has been a little exhausting.
This edition: Published by Vintage, The Random House Group Limited, 1997

"Sommerboken" - Tove Jansson (29 Nov - 8 Dec)

This book fit very neatly into my life these days for a few different reasons. To begin with, university-related responsibilities finally got serious - about time, you'd expect that after three years I would be tired already, but honestly I feel that in London I usually have more free time than I had in high school back in Venezuela. Until now, that is. So even though it is pretty short, and actually much easier to read than I expected, I read it very intermittently. Because of this, the lack of a straight-up plot that I've missed in some of the previous books of this list, actually played in my favour: I would usually be content having read a chapter or two at a time.

Also, I've recently had to put quite a bit of time into planning "The Future" and whatever will become of it after this year in London. Some plans have already failed, others have come up, new ideas have arisen - all in all, it's a very tolling process. Fortunately classes finish this week, and with that comes a brief break. But these past few weeks, through "Sommerboken", I've had brief incursions into a little Baltic idyll that have been nearly as refreshing.

Well there, that's where I've been for the past few weeks. Now on with the book...

I can't remember if I read this in the foreword or elsewhere, but even though Sophia and her grandmother were born decades apart, they seem to take turns in being the driving force of their relationship. Sometimes it was Sophia's naivety that made her be so determined, and it was heaps of fun to be led by the hand by an - 8-year old? Who also happens to be a bit more obscure than your average 8-year old, I think. Not that I know many 8-year old at the moment, but this girl... This girl is up to something:

"You know what, sometimes I think it's deadly boring when everything is alright."

(I actually spent a lot of time reading this book with a dictionary beside me), which immediately reminded me of that old Garbage song, "I'm only happy when it rains".

And sure enough, Sophia ends up having some kind of fascination with storms which I found  quite charming, but I can't exactly say why. I suppose that growing up, or at least spending a big part of your childhood in these windy northern archipelagos gives you fixations that a sprawling city cannot.

I also quite liked the romantic idealist in Sophia:

"There's something weird about love," said Sophia. "The more you love another, the less the other likes you."
"That's quite true," noted her grandmother. "And what do you do then?"
"You keep loving," said Sophia menacingly. "You keep loving all the more badly."

to the point that I got personally threatened when her grandmother was a bit too cynical when talking about religion, and not that I'm a religion person myself, but Sophia just kind of wants to believe in something, whatever it is, and her grandmother keeps being the nagging voice of reason and old-age behind her. The grandmother's really smart about it though: Sophia will only push her grandmother as far as her limited language allows. Once the grandmother finds the gap in Sophia's logic (like saying, "yes but I prayed before you did, so clearly it was God's answering to me"), Sophia becomes just as willing to believe her as she had been to persuade her just a minute before.

Rhetoric and beliefs aside, I appreciated the heaps of  down-to-earth popular wisdom:

"Dreams require a good amount of petrol."

(There was another bit which I tried to translate but gave up after a while. Something about wanting kittens in June and a drunken cat by the first of September, and about needing something to desire in between, which also reminds me of "Singing softly to me", by The Kings of Convenience.)

As I write this I realize that this is probably the main message I'm taking from this book (this time around): these in-between periods of time - like "the summer", or at least the Western conception of "the summer" and "holidays" that we live with - are really important in more than a few ways. We need to fill them up with something meaningful, even if it has little to do with the rest of our years. I don't really know what Sophia's father was working on the whole summer on his table, and I don't know where Sophia goes to school or if the mother has ever been a part of this family, but all of these temporary adventures are essential. Even if you stop believing them afterwards, this hands-on escapism is wonderful and necessary.

Sommerboken by Tove Jansson, tried to start both 30. November and 3. December, read in its entirety 7. December (apart from the introduction by Tove Nilsen because it seemed spoilery and I forgot about it until now) (Sunniva)

As "randomly" as we selected these books, we still selected authors we knew, or at least one of us knew, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that all of the books (7 so far, out of 9) have been enjoyable, even if they have all also had their problems.

This book I really like as well. It has no moral problems as far as I can tell (trespassing doesn't really count), and the parts that I don't outright enjoy, I still enjoy for their quirkiness and something which I've chosen to think of as a Northern Scandinavian something. Yes, I am clearly a master of words.

After looking through many book shops and second hand shops for this book, I finally found it in a commercial book shop in Oslo last weekend, when I was there for the Global Dignity evaluation meeting, and also to meet friends – some of the girls I went to Nicaragua with, and my friend Maja whom I both studied and lived with in Falmouth. I had a brilliant but tiring time, since I've been moving house, finishing the layout of our Nicaragua photography book, working almost full time in day care centres, and then this Oslo-trip came in the middle of my post-move-and-no-sleep-week-developed-cold.

I finally realised I would be better off reading the book on my trip to Harstad this weekend, when I was spending six hours return on a boat on Saturday... And I read it in about two hours, even reading slowly.

The way she writes... This might be imagination, but I do think it represents a Scandinavian way of thinking, a Northern way of thinking, which she is aware of, with her comments on the people coming from town, and the different ways of the island dwellers.

Sophia's grandmother must be the one I identify with the most. Partly in the ideas of child rearing – which again I see reflected in the day care centres where I work – and again I (maybe vainly) think of as Nordic – but also in being very independent and in need of time away from the people she has around her, in being stubborn and doing stuff because she has decided that it should be done or she wants to do it, and starting to prepare for leaving the island way before time, preparing for all eventualities... I could go on for a while, it seems.

I wonder what the dad's work is. Writing? Or sculpting? I believe I read that Jansson's parents were artists.

As I finished this review, I quickly read the introduction, to see if I'd missed something. The only thing was that Tove Nilsen wants to see it as a novel, talking only of one summer. I disagree, or if it is, then the chapters are in a jumbled order, because we move from midsummer to late summer (with darkness) and back to the flowers blooming in May. An impression of different years also gave itself to me, for unknown reasons. Maybe Sophia gets older? I can't be sure. The only thing I can say with certainty is that I will have to read this many times, and that I hope to discover new things again and again.

Now, my last comment will be that I wrote all this on my laptop without the letter 'e'. Please give me some kind of prize?

"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" - Milan Kundera (8-13 Nov)

Between 2008 and 2009, a much younger Juan had begun to wander into the fields of post-modern and erotic literature. It was only convenient that two kinds of changes were taking place in his life, which contributed to his liking "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" so much: first of all, he was becoming a young adept at juggling different kinds of affections with women, and secondly, he had recently left the place where he was born, never to settle there again. So this two-fold sympathy with Milan Kundera was a fertile foundation for his pretentious blend of intellect and spirituality, which, much to his disappointment, brought him some complications with women throughout the following couple of years.

Some years later he came across "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting". In reading it, he re-discovered some less likeable traits in these problematic men, which he had ignored some years back with a youthful gaiety. At the same time - because it seems like Kundera does have a habit of intertwining the historical with the romantic - he was able to trace many common threads between the political reality of these people and his own. Alas! He has lived first hand the struggle of blotching out bits and pieces of the past to shape his new self. But while Kundera rightly point out that this is a problem when applied to a nation, why should it be so when one talks about oneself?

It was a tough book. On the one hand, Kundera's scattered and impressionistic style has always been a challenge for our Juan - which doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy it - as his recent experiences with Murakami have demonstrated. Juan likes consistent plots (no matter the size, and regardless of whether they are winding or not) and when the author himself becomes self-aware and throws in bits and pieces of advice ('[this] is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina goes off-stage, it is a novel for Tamina'), he feels tricked. Kind of like when somebody says "don't think about a white elephant". On the other hand, because there are so many precise questions he can relate to, it becomes harder to keep track of all the common threads. So this time Juan has attempted to collect some of the most interesting ones he came across, and just write them down with some of his own to try and make some more sense out of them:

'"I don't really get what it means, that they all turn into rhinoceroses," said Gabrielle.
"You have to see it as a symbol," Michelle explained.
"That's right," said Gabrielle. "Literature is made up of signs"'

Yes, yes, this is a good start.

He also finds a good laugh when he reads about symbols written from an Eastern European perspective, that easily apply to his Latin-American upbringing:

"Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things (a Moscow-trained Marxist believing in horoscopes), make us laugh". Or adherents to a radical 21st Century socialism who rush into a home-appliances store to loot flat-screen tellies larger than their bookshelves. http://www.ultimasnoticias.com.ve/noticias/actualidad/economia/fotos-y-video---saqueos-y-destrozos-en-daka-valenc.aspx

"You know," said Banaka, "the novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?"
"Nothing," said Bibi.
"That's true," said Joujou.
"All anyone can do," said Banaka, "is give a report on oneself. Anything else is an abuse of power. Anything else is a lie."

This surprised Juan at once, as it echoed one of the first thoughts introduced by Murakami, when Toru Okada wonders how much he actually knows Kumiko. Only it seemed to be a problem for the Okada, not so much for the merry and the not-so-merry folk in Kundera's universe. But what do we do if not tell our own stories? Isn't every personal account a novel of sorts? I think we structure our stories in a way that makes sense to us, and it might be misleading, but it's what we've got, and I'd much rather believe that we can actually do so intending to cross personal boundaries, as opposed to the so-called 'graphomaniacs'. It seems to Juan that Kundera has more than just a handful of criticisms directed to particular authors or people he knows, and since speaking from outside of his novels is not Kundera's cup of tea, he has to give up on that question.

In other respects, Juan struggles with (one of) Kundera's definitions of love: "(...) because love is a continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love." Juan thinks he knows some more suitable definitions (though not necessarily more lofty or romantic), but because he's also an aspiring writer, he's saving those for later. Mind you, they are of coursed based solely on his experiences of love, and the ones he has witnessed around him.

Then, as he realizes his ramblings have been drawn out too long, Juan tries to tie some loose ends in the shoelaces of Kundera's helplessly childish and spoiled male characters: many of the men in this book remind him of someone, as if they were shadows or sketches of somebody else he has known for a while, but who could this be... Ah, yes! Of course! It is Tomas, the slightly more complex (but hopeful) womaniser of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Could it not be? The difference being that Tomas actually wanders back and forth in this cycle of 'lightness' and 'weight'. It doesn't mean that he has overcome his oppressive desires, but Tereza does seem to keep him true to himself, in her innocence and gentleness.

In the dreamlike island of the children where Tamina finds herself at a loss, she feels a hollowness in her stomach. "That hollowness in her stomach is exactly that unbearable absence of weight. And just as an extreme can at any moment turn into its opposite, so lightness brought to its maximum becomes the terrifying weight of lightness, and Tamina knows she cannot bear it for another moment. She turns around and starts to run." Much like Tereza fears Tomas.

"'When a woman says "No," she really means "Yes."' That male aphorism has always outraged me. It's as stupid as all human history."
"But that history is inside us, and we can't escape it," replied Jan. "A woman fleeing and defending herself. A woman giving herself, a man taking. A woman veiling herself, a man tearing off her clothes. These are age-old images we carry within us!"
"Age-old and idiotic! As idiotic as the holy images! And what if women are starting to be fed up with having to behave according to that patter? What if that eternal repetition nauseates them? What if they want to invent other images and another game?"
"Yes, they're stupid images stupidly repeated. You're entirely right. But what if our desire for the female body depends on precisely those stupid images and on them alone? If those stupid images were to be destroyed in us, would men still be able to make love to women?"
Edwige broke into laughter: "I don't think you need to worry"

Silly, silly Jan... You haven't been paying attention, it seems, to all the talk about how capable we are to alter our history.