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Spleen
Dalkey Archive Press first introduced readers to this "best-kept secret" of British literature with the hardback Collected Writings of Olive Moore in 1992. Spleen, the best of the author's three novels, tells the disturbing story of a woman who goes into self-imposed exile to an island off the coast of Italy after giving birth to a deformed child. Filled with self-reproach and guilt about her son and her life (having yearned to give birth to something "new and rare, " she blames herself for her son's deformity), Ruth broods on what it means to be a woman ("nature's oven for nature's bun") and the inequalities between the sexes. Filled with the colors and beauty of the Italian countryside and in a style similar to Virginia Woolf's, Spleen challenges the assumption that women can't help but be tender and maternal, that their heads are only "ever-enlarging hearts."
133 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1930
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 22, 2013
I think I carry my womb in my forehead.
Ruth thinks too much. My old boyfriend (okay, it is Morrissey. He wanted to, though) once asked "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I don't know..."
I still have the "notes" on my phone from my read of this from months ago. My version of notes meaning "womb in forehead" and nothing else. I had had a review in my head, of course. Have any of you ever recaptured the feeling of reading a book entirely to your own satisfaction? I never have. Oh yeah, I also dog-eared the shit out of this thing. It's a curious book, like if you could lie in the dark with another person and the ball volleyed back and forth over the pit of eternal darkness that is your tired body. Ruth must never sleep.
Maybe it was all of those years ago, before she runs away from England to live on the small Italian island with the festering fruit of her loins. She might have never been able to fall asleep when the cruelest thing happened and your mind wouldn't shut off to allow you some blessed rest. I had this feeling that it was always yesterday and her exhaustive mind bends on the today when her tomorrow never comes. Her son grows into adult and raised by others. She stays behind in another room to know that he was dressed by another. Her concern is for herself and he remains passed on infant. Ruth thinks, giving way to brain farts, or indistinguishable heart attacks. I've heard that happens. Did she cause her son's defects with her own finger to the head? Ruth herself makes up in her ideas. The Italian life she holds to herself as her niche in life in comparison to over stuffed pillows of home. It is either winning or losing with her. A husband abandoned, school life separating as a bastard daughter of a nobleman. Herself versus tourists. Older women neglected. She reminds me of a person you would hear be quick to declare themselves as "NOT a feminist". I don't get any kind of a sense of any real person in these words. If they yell a lot about what anyone else says about them to another set of people what does it mean to them as a person who must live anyway. Ruth thinks a lot about the woman's role in life that sounded an awful lot like other women redeemed as a person if they were the only "worthy" woman against a backdrop of men. She could check her pauses with how the cut to her own figure passes through their crowds. She must remain a ghost for her own piece of mind. Ruth is maddening and yet I was intrigued with how her obsessions returned. A Ruth without anyone else around doesn't exist. This is foreign to me that peace can never come. I don't understand why she must have this willed punishment. I don't believe she made her baby deformed, but that she was glad it happened as an excuse to never be alone. She metamorphoses into her own insect, monster for looking too long.
I wish I knew of a kind of vaccine for mental hangups, if not a cure. If you cannot even move for your mental shadows deforming the world you live in.... I was most impressed with how convincing Moore was at this. I believed in this. Setting aside the tick tocking of what she KNOWS about people (says who? society? the church? a man?). This lense filters and it never lets up. It was creepy, even now (and many books later), to take on the nothing underneath their flesh and bone shapes devoid of meaning to Ruth. Spleen is best when she feeds off of this that surrounds her. The swimming ghosts of people deliberately chosen to never understand her or she them. I don't believe in Ruth, feel what it is to be her, but trapped in her lifeless zone as a lizard on the wall. No number of speeches about man versus woman will make me forget to ask about Ruth.
The life on her island was quite good. The jealousy of her landlord's sister and her subservient devotion to her other world tenant. I can see her stalking underneath the windows, jealously guarding what she never herself received. Ruth betrays a flicker of her desire to mentally shape life here. She savored the paranoia of the other woman and her place as outsider. Again with her own security as self based on position above others (or underneath, when she has a lover. The least interesting parts to me were these passages). Despite herself something slips her into today. Knowingly she pits the two against each other. The peasant-hard look on the poor woman's face. I could see her, feel Ruth's words forming in her mind to excuse, to dismiss. It is what she does. If the not-acceptance acceptance she "wins" from the running wild children pleases her life that is her own self image I'd say she's not entirely honest about her not-home home as well.
I'd be interested to read more of Moore and see if the half awake was just put to good use here. I suspect I'd like this book less if it is something she always did. The idea that your beliefs become flesh as her nightmare is a good one. Have you ever read a book that you liked more intellectually than emotionally? This is bordering more on that for me, I guess. The prose is also more than lovely, but that's not everything. I can delete my totally useful notes. Oh yeah, and the Italian parts reminded me of an Alfred Chester short story I freaking loved. I appreciated the similarities between the two. What it must feel like to feel a time traveler to a land before time. I also suspect that whomever Morrissey stole the "Nature played this trick on me" lyric from (one of the beats, can't recall who) probably got it from Moore (or they both thought of it, only Moore first). Her prose really is that best poetic prose style, if such a thing exists in this world. I get this feeling, though, of wanting to take shape when I'm wandering around in the nightmare dark. Ruth was Ruthless. She's never going to leave.
Ruth thinks too much. My old boyfriend (okay, it is Morrissey. He wanted to, though) once asked "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I don't know..."
I still have the "notes" on my phone from my read of this from months ago. My version of notes meaning "womb in forehead" and nothing else. I had had a review in my head, of course. Have any of you ever recaptured the feeling of reading a book entirely to your own satisfaction? I never have. Oh yeah, I also dog-eared the shit out of this thing. It's a curious book, like if you could lie in the dark with another person and the ball volleyed back and forth over the pit of eternal darkness that is your tired body. Ruth must never sleep.
Maybe it was all of those years ago, before she runs away from England to live on the small Italian island with the festering fruit of her loins. She might have never been able to fall asleep when the cruelest thing happened and your mind wouldn't shut off to allow you some blessed rest. I had this feeling that it was always yesterday and her exhaustive mind bends on the today when her tomorrow never comes. Her son grows into adult and raised by others. She stays behind in another room to know that he was dressed by another. Her concern is for herself and he remains passed on infant. Ruth thinks, giving way to brain farts, or indistinguishable heart attacks. I've heard that happens. Did she cause her son's defects with her own finger to the head? Ruth herself makes up in her ideas. The Italian life she holds to herself as her niche in life in comparison to over stuffed pillows of home. It is either winning or losing with her. A husband abandoned, school life separating as a bastard daughter of a nobleman. Herself versus tourists. Older women neglected. She reminds me of a person you would hear be quick to declare themselves as "NOT a feminist". I don't get any kind of a sense of any real person in these words. If they yell a lot about what anyone else says about them to another set of people what does it mean to them as a person who must live anyway. Ruth thinks a lot about the woman's role in life that sounded an awful lot like other women redeemed as a person if they were the only "worthy" woman against a backdrop of men. She could check her pauses with how the cut to her own figure passes through their crowds. She must remain a ghost for her own piece of mind. Ruth is maddening and yet I was intrigued with how her obsessions returned. A Ruth without anyone else around doesn't exist. This is foreign to me that peace can never come. I don't understand why she must have this willed punishment. I don't believe she made her baby deformed, but that she was glad it happened as an excuse to never be alone. She metamorphoses into her own insect, monster for looking too long.
And children, very young children, have it : and therein lies their charm. It comes before speech in some whole and mysterious way: infusing them with sudden reality and beauty as they lie staring at space. Which was why it was so beautiful to watch an infant smile. Smiling without words or spoken humour; with no need for a cultivated taste in buffoonery or the ridiculous. How far away one was from it all! Used up and old beyond recall one felt before the sight of a child making its own joy because of a texture, a soft hand, a silky sleeve, a sound, a colour. But with the coming of speech they lose it; as though by an added faculty of expression they weakened that of sensation: and nothing was left to wonder at but the commonplace.
She that this restlessness continually washing over him in a wave should be gathering him in an ebb and flow of fold and wrinkles. Knowing this she raised her eyes from the loose formless pads of waxen flesh that were his feet to his impassive infant face in which two light eyes widely spaced and set stared at her and stared; and this time she understood the vacant fixity of his infant stare and his utter soundlessness and immobility.
I wish I knew of a kind of vaccine for mental hangups, if not a cure. If you cannot even move for your mental shadows deforming the world you live in.... I was most impressed with how convincing Moore was at this. I believed in this. Setting aside the tick tocking of what she KNOWS about people (says who? society? the church? a man?). This lense filters and it never lets up. It was creepy, even now (and many books later), to take on the nothing underneath their flesh and bone shapes devoid of meaning to Ruth. Spleen is best when she feeds off of this that surrounds her. The swimming ghosts of people deliberately chosen to never understand her or she them. I don't believe in Ruth, feel what it is to be her, but trapped in her lifeless zone as a lizard on the wall. No number of speeches about man versus woman will make me forget to ask about Ruth.
The life on her island was quite good. The jealousy of her landlord's sister and her subservient devotion to her other world tenant. I can see her stalking underneath the windows, jealously guarding what she never herself received. Ruth betrays a flicker of her desire to mentally shape life here. She savored the paranoia of the other woman and her place as outsider. Again with her own security as self based on position above others (or underneath, when she has a lover. The least interesting parts to me were these passages). Despite herself something slips her into today. Knowingly she pits the two against each other. The peasant-hard look on the poor woman's face. I could see her, feel Ruth's words forming in her mind to excuse, to dismiss. It is what she does. If the not-acceptance acceptance she "wins" from the running wild children pleases her life that is her own self image I'd say she's not entirely honest about her not-home home as well.
I'd be interested to read more of Moore and see if the half awake was just put to good use here. I suspect I'd like this book less if it is something she always did. The idea that your beliefs become flesh as her nightmare is a good one. Have you ever read a book that you liked more intellectually than emotionally? This is bordering more on that for me, I guess. The prose is also more than lovely, but that's not everything. I can delete my totally useful notes. Oh yeah, and the Italian parts reminded me of an Alfred Chester short story I freaking loved. I appreciated the similarities between the two. What it must feel like to feel a time traveler to a land before time. I also suspect that whomever Morrissey stole the "Nature played this trick on me" lyric from (one of the beats, can't recall who) probably got it from Moore (or they both thought of it, only Moore first). Her prose really is that best poetic prose style, if such a thing exists in this world. I get this feeling, though, of wanting to take shape when I'm wandering around in the nightmare dark. Ruth was Ruthless. She's never going to leave.
February 13, 2015
Excellent yet somehow unloveable. The prose is exquisite and her engagement with Motherhood profound. Well worth tracking down.
October 31, 2024
this book, like arabesques (which i finished yesterday and gave one star) is super ramble and confusing. BUT THIS ONE IS FEM FIC. also, the prose is gorgeous like i often wasn’t sure what was going on but i was also have a grand time just reading her beauitful writing yayyyy
April 12, 2022
Really not my cup of tea, unfortunately. I enjoyed the plot, where it was decipherable, but the style of writing turned me off. If you like Virginia Woolf, however, you’ll enjoy this. Unfortunately, I hate Virginia Woolf.
April 18, 2019
Basically Olive Moore actually did what Virginia Woolf was trying to do.
April 11, 2021
not. not.
April 26, 2021
This goes beyond the basic authors known in Modernism. If you're wanting to extend your repertoire of Modernist authors, give Moore a try. You won't regret it.
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November 23, 2023This is a novel about a young British woman who gives birth to a deformed child and then goes on a self-imposed exile. She spends this exile in a kind of relative amount of guilt, shame, and distance. She feel strongly that she owes her crime/sin a certain amount of penance, but sees this almost as an exchange compared to a kind of sentence. Essentially, because she didn’t want to have the child, that she wasn’t given a lot of options regarding it once it was here, “running away” comes at a cost, but does not require her to constantly live in her own shame. In a way, she inverts the expectations of motherhood by refusing to punish herself for her own selfish choice. Selfish it is, but it’s no worse than so many men who have been forgiven for this and so she figures she’s just got to ride it out.
In that sense, this is a kind of shocking book because it clearly goes against our sense of right and wrong, but the book and perhaps the reader resists the urge to overly punish her for her choice simply because she is the easiest to punish. It becomes a mirror on our own sense of fairplay….do we punish the least powerful person guilty of a crime simply because she lacks the power to ignore our judgment? In any event, this is an interesting book because it challenges those notions.
Here:
“She had not always felt this about going up to see him and say goodnight. In the beginning it had been a comparatively easy, almost a natural task. Even when Uller was there her attitude had not changed. She had always been somewhat afraid of the darkness which fails with such remorseless certainty. Only recently had it become a menace. ”
In that sense, this is a kind of shocking book because it clearly goes against our sense of right and wrong, but the book and perhaps the reader resists the urge to overly punish her for her choice simply because she is the easiest to punish. It becomes a mirror on our own sense of fairplay….do we punish the least powerful person guilty of a crime simply because she lacks the power to ignore our judgment? In any event, this is an interesting book because it challenges those notions.
Here:
“She had not always felt this about going up to see him and say goodnight. In the beginning it had been a comparatively easy, almost a natural task. Even when Uller was there her attitude had not changed. She had always been somewhat afraid of the darkness which fails with such remorseless certainty. Only recently had it become a menace. ”
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews