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The Book of Joan
The bestselling author of The Small Backs of Children offer a vision of our near-extinction and a heroine—a reimagined Joan of Arc—poised to save a world ravaged by war, violence, and greed, and forever change history, in this provocative new novel.
In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin.
Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule—galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth. When de Men and his armies turn Joan into a martyr, the consequences are astonishing. And no one—not the rebels, Jean de Men, or even Joan herself—can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.
A riveting tale of destruction and love found in the direst of places—even at the extreme end of post-human experience—Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan raises questions about what it means to be human, the fluidity of sex and gender, and the role of art as a means for survival.
In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin.
Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule—galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth. When de Men and his armies turn Joan into a martyr, the consequences are astonishing. And no one—not the rebels, Jean de Men, or even Joan herself—can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.
A riveting tale of destruction and love found in the direst of places—even at the extreme end of post-human experience—Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan raises questions about what it means to be human, the fluidity of sex and gender, and the role of art as a means for survival.
272 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 18, 2017
619 people are currently reading
15147 people want to read
About the author
Lidia Yuknavitch
44 books2,464 followersLidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, and the novel Dora: A Headcase, Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. Her nonfiction book based on her TED Talk, The Misfit's Manifesto, is forthcoming from TED Books.
She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.
She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,260 reviews
May 8, 2017
I loathed this book. There were brief enticing moments of rich writing, smothered in a failed attempt to create a masterpiece and a world vision that just did not coalesce for me. I particularly could not stomach the Christine/Trinculo/Jean de Men story, with its horribly arrogant tone (rich hairless sadists with stupid names trapped in a slave-based space colony practicing body scarification, torture, dismemberment, sexualized asexuality, all with a de-gendered waxen pallor and all in atonement for their sins). I also couldn't stand the weird supernatural elements thrown into this hodge-podge of sci-fi (for instance, the woman who could dissolve walls and travel through space and time, like that's no problem...OK, cool, I can fly into heaven and bring back angels, let me mix this in with a weak rebellion on a dying space colony in the sky...) Oh, and whatever the hell was going on with Joan and the blue light in her head and the song of creation and destruction she sucked out of a maple tree like so much purple-stuff sizzurp...yeah, that just didn't work. Keep trying. What else did I hate here...oh, apparently the sun stopped working. That is highly unlikely to happen, even in a sci-fi dystopia, unless we're talking in millions of years or if it was covered by a volcanic eruption or meteor. What else...oh, basically everything.
April 22, 2020
Read for an Aries inspired vlog https://youtu.be/voSrsRnGL68
June 5, 2017
I never thought I'd be in a position to give a 1-star review to a book I actually bothered to finish, but here we are.
Starting with the good: ...the writing was occasionally pretty.
That's it. And, frankly, the prettiness was severely inhibited by the attempt to be profound with the actual content.
Now for the bad: ...oh boy, where do I even begin?
Do I start with the premise? The sudden devolution of humanity into hairless white androgynes obsessed with their own self-mutilation? This sexless society is sex-obsessed, with ever-present implications of their loss of secondary characteristics and carnal desires is directly linked to an overall loss of humanity.
Maybe I should just address some of the themes. The inverse-Gnosticism that claims all is only matter, and therefore life is no more or less than dirt. That 'spirit' is a myth. That the extinction of humanity in its arrogance is for the good of 'matter'/the universe.
How 'bout that the twist near the ending, in which our primary male antagonist--who has spent the book manually and surgically raping the women around him in an attempt to control and/or induce fertility--is revealed to be
Some people are hailing this as a powerful feminist work--I'm sorry, but there's a scene where a woman's vestigial ovaries are ripped out through her vagina. More than one scene like that. And our hero, for all that she is defined as True Woman, inexplicably untouched by the changes ravaging the rest of the human race, is regularly reduced to 'more matter than human.'
Other people are reading this as an environmentalist work. Yeah, okay. So Joan is kind of an Avatar of earth/matter, but rather than any kind of reconciliation, the book frames the answer to environmental problems in terms of genocide. And for all that it's supposed this might not be the answer early on, we seem to end up in pretty much the same place at the end--but it's okay! Because we're not actually killing people! We're just transitioning them to the next stage of matter! (Can you hear my sarcasm?)
There's just... so much that rubs me the wrong way. It was like reading a train wreck--so horrible I couldn't look away. So utterly repulsive I had a hard time wrapping my head around it.
It's taken me three tries to write this out. I cannot emphasize enough how much I dislike this book. I do not recommend it to anyone.
Starting with the good: ...the writing was occasionally pretty.
That's it. And, frankly, the prettiness was severely inhibited by the attempt to be profound with the actual content.
Now for the bad: ...oh boy, where do I even begin?
Do I start with the premise? The sudden devolution of humanity into hairless white androgynes obsessed with their own self-mutilation? This sexless society is sex-obsessed, with ever-present implications of their loss of secondary characteristics and carnal desires is directly linked to an overall loss of humanity.
Maybe I should just address some of the themes. The inverse-Gnosticism that claims all is only matter, and therefore life is no more or less than dirt. That 'spirit' is a myth. That the extinction of humanity in its arrogance is for the good of 'matter'/the universe.
How 'bout that the twist near the ending, in which our primary male antagonist--who has spent the book manually and surgically raping the women around him in an attempt to control and/or induce fertility--is revealed to be
Some people are hailing this as a powerful feminist work--I'm sorry, but there's a scene where a woman's vestigial ovaries are ripped out through her vagina. More than one scene like that. And our hero, for all that she is defined as True Woman, inexplicably untouched by the changes ravaging the rest of the human race, is regularly reduced to 'more matter than human.'
Other people are reading this as an environmentalist work. Yeah, okay. So Joan is kind of an Avatar of earth/matter, but rather than any kind of reconciliation, the book frames the answer to environmental problems in terms of genocide. And for all that it's supposed this might not be the answer early on, we seem to end up in pretty much the same place at the end--but it's okay! Because we're not actually killing people! We're just transitioning them to the next stage of matter! (Can you hear my sarcasm?)
There's just... so much that rubs me the wrong way. It was like reading a train wreck--so horrible I couldn't look away. So utterly repulsive I had a hard time wrapping my head around it.
It's taken me three tries to write this out. I cannot emphasize enough how much I dislike this book. I do not recommend it to anyone.
January 11, 2022
A seguito di una geocatastrofe, nel 2049 l’umanità si è trasferita in una stazione artificiale fluttuante, la CIEL, sotto il comando di un unico uomo: Jean de Men. La Terra, però, apparentemente disabitata, continua a orbitare al di sotto della piattaforma spaziale della CIEL da cui l’élite di ricchissimi che vi abita, per garantire la loro sopravvivenza, continua a drenare le poche risorse rimanenti del pianeta - ormai ridotto a una palla di fango - tramite le corde celesti, lunghissimi cordoni ombelicali tecnologici che fungono da condotti tra il mondo superiore e il mondo inferiore.
La fantascienza ha sempre giocato con la metafora dell’ascensione – appannaggio delle classi sociali più alte – come unica via per la sopravvivenza: dal cult di Ballard, Il Condominio, fino alle declinazioni meno originali ma più recenti come El hoyo, il film di Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, distribuito da Netflix.
Lidia Yuknavitch però non si inserisce docilmente in questa tradizione, tanto che, leggendo le premesse de Il libro di Joan, potreste facilmente scambiare il romanzo per una derivazione banale di un tema noto (il futuro dell’umanità quando il nostro pianeta morirà).
Influenzata dalla corrente new-weird, l’autrice non usa la crisi climatica come cornice e ambientazione ma come il grimaldello per intraprendere un radicale processo di decostruzione dell’uomo – inteso nella sua prospettiva androcentrica –, del patriarcato, della società intossicata e alienata del tardo-capitalismo.
L’autrice capovolge il racconto lucido e siderale delle storie ambientate nello spazio per restituirci una narrazione cruda, violenta, esacerbata; un linguaggio scurrile, provocatorio, strabordante di immagini paradossali ed erotiche. Sceglie come protagoniste una donna matura (Christine) e una giovane adulta (Joan), le sceglie appositamente ai margini (vecchie e bambine tra le categorie più ignorate) perché proprio le classi meno favorite per rappresentare quel che resta dell’umanità saranno in grado di fare da portavoce ai valori visionari e incendiari della storia. Un romanzo ambizioso e rivoluzionario proprio perché si propone di rinnovare una nuova umanità, di rifondare una nuova società che tuttavia affonda le radici in profondità, in una terra antica, una terra che ha memoria.
Segue analisi della trama con SPOILER
Il mondo al di sopra
Il libro di Joan è radicale fin dalle premesse. L’abbandono del pianeta Terra comporta una metamorfosi, un mutamento morfologico estremo che priverà gli uomini e le donne della loro sessualità, oltre che di gran parte dei loro sensi di percezione. Non emanano odori o altri tipi di secrezione, e di conseguenza nemmeno li percepiscono. Con l’ascensione nello spazio si sono de-umanizzati, lasciando sulla Terra la materia organica.
“Sono priva di genere sessuale, o quasi. Ho la testa bianca, sembra di cera. Niente sopracciglia, né ciglia, né labbra, niente di tutto questo ma ossa sporgenti, zigomi, spalle, clavicole e punti accesso dati”.
La narratrice è Christine, una donna di 49 anni che presto dovrà morire (su CIEL gli individui hanno una data di scadenza per via delle risorse e dello spazio limitato sulla stazione spaziale). È lei stessa a paragonare gli abitanti di CIEL a statue di bianco marmo. È soltanto il primo di molti riferimenti all’apollinea antichità classica. Di contro, alla Terra spetta il compito di rappresentare la controparte dionisiaca.
Quest’umanità sterile, senza più sesso e amore, è nostalgica. È annoiata, lontano da casa e ha fame di desideri perduti. La sua impotenza si nutre di storie perché nelle storie quello che hanno perduto è di nuovo accessibile, almeno in forma testuale. Tuttavia – forse proprio per sopperire alla perdita e per restituire l’evidenza del corpo – i testi su CIEL si creano e si tramandano direttamente sulla pelle, non più su carta: tutti i corpi diventano leggibili e scrivibili.
“Per via della nostra fame, quassù nel nostro falso paradiso, nacquero gli innesti cutanei”.
Gli innesti sono letteralmente storie scritte sulla pelle, racconti in rilievo: “lontani discendenti dei tatuaggi, cugini spuri dell’alfabeto Braille”.
Gli innesti più popolari sono quelli creati da Jean de Men, che proprio grazie al successo dei suoi racconti assurge al potere. CIEL è infatti una società minuscola, regolamentata da algoritmi e in cui tutti sono già ricchi quindi il potere si riduce a una questione di prestigio, una crudele pantomima, un perverso vizio di forma. Non stupisce che i racconti di Jean de Men siano insulsi, banali e misogini (il nome Jean de Men letteralmente si traduce come Jean degli uomini). Favolacce di violenza, infarcite da amori fasulli e convenzionali. Propaganda utile sia come narcotico sia come sollazzo e distrazione per i privilegiati superstiti di CIEL.
“Jean de Men non fece altro che sostituire ogni divinità, ogni etica, ogni scienza, con il potere della rappresentazione: un’idea nata sulla Terra, sviluppata grazie ai media e alla tecnologia e perfezionata qui nello spazio”.
Su CIEL quindi governa una celebrità, un vanesio uomo di spettacolo che guida un popolo ipnotizzato da intrattenimento posticcio e sorvegliato dal Panopticon, un sistema di vigilanza che organizza esecuzioni pubbliche per chi trasgredisce. Panem et circensem, quindi, rivisitata in uno stile tecnoburlesque in cui la giustizia è una tragica farsa.
Ma in cosa consiste la trasgressione in un mondo senza vita come quello di CIEL?
C’è una legge in politica: se vuoi governare, devi avere il controllo della narrazione. La verità è complicata, se riesci a raccontarla in modo convincente, dalla giusta prospettiva, ti crederanno. CIEL e Jean de Men hanno raccontato la storia – che è diventata quindi la Storia – su come la Terra sia diventata inabitabile. È tutta colpa di un’eco-terrorista, una ragazzina ribelle che ha deciso di disertare – nel mondo di prima, sulla terra morente, le guerre venivano combattute da bambini soldato – e di muovere contro il mondo degli uomini e i loro droni: è Joan, una pazza o una santa, che sente voci dal profondo della Terra e ha acquisito la capacità di controllare la materia. Joan, un pericolo per l’umanità, è stata però catturata e giustiziata, arsa vivo sul rogo come una strega. Eppure la sua leggenda vive ancora su CIEL…ed è questo culto che Jean de Men vuole sradicare.
Tra chi non crede alla versione ufficiale e vede in Joan una martire ma soprattutto una speranza, c’è Christine, anche lei maestra nell’arte dell’innesto. Sa bene che nel mondo gelido di CIEL, solo l’immaginazione non è morta. Crede che “le storie salvano vite e danno forma all’azione” quindi vuole scrivere sui corpi di più persone possibili un “poema epico-corporale”che racconti e tramandi la storia di Joan, raccogliendo attorno a se seguaci di un movimento, disposto a tutto per ripristinare i valori di un’umanità perduta.
“Le parole e il mio corpo, il luogo della resistenza”.
La resistenza si organizza attorno ai corpi, è questa la filosofia del romanzo. E scavando più nel profondo, vedremo una contropposizione ancora più netta tra Jean de Men e Joan di Fango (l’assonanza non è un caso). Mentre Jean si arroga anche il diritto di sperimentare sui corpi degli abitanti di CIEL, tentando di raggiungere grazie alla tecnologia un tipo di procreazione per via asessuata (visto che hanno perso gli organi sessuali e non possono riprodursi), Joan per tutto il romanzo userà il suo potere tramite il suo corpo. Da un lato abbiamo un usurpatore di corpi altrui, dall’altro una donna che conserva – a differenza del resto dell’umanità – la capacità di generare la vita (sia perché donna sia perché in diretto contatto con le forza naturali della Terra). Da un lato abbiamo un uomo che si serve della tecnologia come appendice sterile, dall’altro una donna che si serve della solidarietà degli altri e delle energie della Terra, per quanto luride, fangose, disperate siano.
In un mondo che ha espunto il corpo e i suoi bisogni, in un mondo senza madri, i seguaci di Joan riportano la carne e le viscere al centro della politica.
Il mondo al di sotto
“Senza rivolgermi a nessuna verità più alta di questa: noi siamo materia, come la terra e l’acqua e gli alberi e il cielo, come lo erano gli animali, come lo sono le stelle e i corpi umani. Rivendicando la nostra umanità come semplice umanità. Scriverò questo. Racconterò la verità”.
Joan è un’altra ragazzina che si aggiunge alle schiere di ragazzine pericolose e rivoluzionarie delle narrazioni contemporanee (Anna di Ammaniti ma persino Greta Thumberg). Quanto fanno paura le ragazzine al potere? Quanto sono destabilizzanti? Quanto è facile trattarle da pazze, infantilizzarle, trattarle come elementi di disturbo.
“Lui non aveva idea di cosa questa giovane adulta avesse fra le mani. La considerava ancora solo una femmina, una bambina che gioca a una specie di gioco in cui lui era sicuro di superarla in astuzia”.
Eppure sono loro che sopravvivono al (e spesso sono causa del) crollo.
Il rovesciamento nel romanzo di Y uknavitch è trasversale: non c’è solo un crollo di potere ma c’è anche un crollo della concezione di genere sessuale per come lo conosciamo e soprattutto. un crollo che porta il lettore dal sopra (CIEL) al sotto (il pianeta Terra). Possiamo interpretare il romanzo come una lunga discesa dalla sterilità e dalla gelida “nave del nulla” di CIEL al “grumo fangoso”, materico e pullulante di vita del pianeta Terra. Dall’alto al basso in termini di altitudine ma dal basso all’alto in termini di umanità.
In teoria infatti l’elite della popolazione terrestre vive lassù la sua vita elevata, lontana da un ambiente moribondo. Ma non è così. CIEL è una nave senza vita. Invece è sulla Terra che si conserva la vita.
“La Terra adesso non è altro che un suolo apocalittico e maculato; un opaco sole color seppia, di giorno; la notte, una Luna dalla luce così fioca da sembrare un livido sul cielo. Questa è una palla di fango senza vita. Almeno in superficie”. Se in superficie c’è desolazione e distruzione, nel sottosuolo c’è un mondo lussureggiante. Riflettendo sulla sopravvivenza futura, l’umanità ha scelto di guardare in alto, ha scelto lo Spazio. “Ma se invece tutto quello che conta fosse in basso? Lì dove le cose sono volgari e spregevoli? Dove i vermi e la merda e gli scarafaggi conducono la loro esistenza?”.
Mentre Christine organizza la Resistenza su CIEL, sulla Terra seguiamo Joan – miracolosamente sopravvissuta grazie ai suoi poteri rigenerativi – e Leon, la sua fedele compagna, in un viaggio tra le macerie ma soprattutto tra le vite di quei pochi sopravvissutati ai disastri naturali che hanno sconvolto la Terra. Ma la vita va avanti anche in luoghi impossibili. In questi ultimi capitoli, l’autrice declina l’esperienza ultima dell’essere umano, l’esperienza irriducibile dell’Amore (“una parola che ha definizioni sempre esplosive”). L’Amore senza l’incontro con l’Altro è impossibile (“e nell’amare non sei sola”), senza lo scontro con i corpi altrui. Contro la solitudine e l’astrazione di CIEL, si può contrapporre soltanto la contaminazione tra carne, materia, vita e fango della Terra.
Con una poetica incendiaria, Yuknavitch racconta come nei corpi riposa l’ultima risposta.
Un finale problematico?
Doveva concludersi in un solo modo “Il libro di Joan”, dato l’impianto filosofico e poetico alla base: con l’unione tra i due mondi, quello di sopra e quello di sotto, uno scontro che dà vita al conflitto finale tra Jean e Joan (anche tra mondo degli uomini e mondo delle donne? Le iniziali M e F dei cognomi lo suggeriscono). Se la sconfitta di Jean e l’ennesimo sacrificio di Christine, Trinculo e Joan appaiono giusti e anche inevitabili, a livello narrativo, il modo in cui arriviamo alla sequenza finale è un colabrodo, estremamente complicato nelle dinamiche che rimangono fino in fondo opache al lettore. Ancora più insensata – e soprattutto frettolosa - è la rivelazione sul sesso di Jean de Men. Non solo non è coerente con tutto quello che abbiamo saputo del personaggio fino a quel momento ma non aggiunge nulla a quanto già detto. Il fatto che sia una donna dovrebbe essere un’aggravante? Vorrebbe rappresentare il ruolo ancillare di certe donne nel sistema patriarcale? Ma a che serve dirlo tre pagine prima della fine? Non esplora il tema e non è una rivelazione utile all’impianto narrativo, alla filosofia di fondo del romanzo né provoca un qualche tipo di soddisfazione nel lettore (come invece fanno o dovrebbero fare i coup de théâtre). Semplicemente inutile, quando non direttamente dannoso perché getta l’ombra di una possibile interpretazione purista (transfobica?) su cosa rende le donne veredonne TM in opposizione alle nondonne(?).
Conclusioni
A controbilanciare la forza viscerale contenuta in questa storia, c’è purtroppo una debolezza strutturale nell’esposizione degli elementi fantascientifici. Nel corso della narrazione veniamo edotti in maniera progressiva su una mole decisamente considerevole di concetti e termini: si susseguono i protei, il kinema, le generine, il teletrasporto (attraverso energie telluriche?), luci blu innestate sulle tempie e altri espedienti che, per quanto suggestivi, mal si accordano e mal si spiegano in una storia già molto carica di metafore bibliche e mitologiche.
Non è certo un libro perfetto, è meglio. Perché è di troppo, è disturbante e scomodo con una chiave interpretativa originale sulla distopia. Come Le Guin e Atwood, anche Lidia Yuknavitch traccia nuovi sentieri. Una pensatrice che usa il femminismo come detonatore, una forza erotica, perturbante che, stanca di lasciarsi infliggere cicatrici, preferisce lasciarne.
La fantascienza ha sempre giocato con la metafora dell’ascensione – appannaggio delle classi sociali più alte – come unica via per la sopravvivenza: dal cult di Ballard, Il Condominio, fino alle declinazioni meno originali ma più recenti come El hoyo, il film di Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, distribuito da Netflix.
Lidia Yuknavitch però non si inserisce docilmente in questa tradizione, tanto che, leggendo le premesse de Il libro di Joan, potreste facilmente scambiare il romanzo per una derivazione banale di un tema noto (il futuro dell’umanità quando il nostro pianeta morirà).
Influenzata dalla corrente new-weird, l’autrice non usa la crisi climatica come cornice e ambientazione ma come il grimaldello per intraprendere un radicale processo di decostruzione dell’uomo – inteso nella sua prospettiva androcentrica –, del patriarcato, della società intossicata e alienata del tardo-capitalismo.
L’autrice capovolge il racconto lucido e siderale delle storie ambientate nello spazio per restituirci una narrazione cruda, violenta, esacerbata; un linguaggio scurrile, provocatorio, strabordante di immagini paradossali ed erotiche. Sceglie come protagoniste una donna matura (Christine) e una giovane adulta (Joan), le sceglie appositamente ai margini (vecchie e bambine tra le categorie più ignorate) perché proprio le classi meno favorite per rappresentare quel che resta dell’umanità saranno in grado di fare da portavoce ai valori visionari e incendiari della storia. Un romanzo ambizioso e rivoluzionario proprio perché si propone di rinnovare una nuova umanità, di rifondare una nuova società che tuttavia affonda le radici in profondità, in una terra antica, una terra che ha memoria.
Segue analisi della trama con SPOILER
Il mondo al di sopra
Il libro di Joan è radicale fin dalle premesse. L’abbandono del pianeta Terra comporta una metamorfosi, un mutamento morfologico estremo che priverà gli uomini e le donne della loro sessualità, oltre che di gran parte dei loro sensi di percezione. Non emanano odori o altri tipi di secrezione, e di conseguenza nemmeno li percepiscono. Con l’ascensione nello spazio si sono de-umanizzati, lasciando sulla Terra la materia organica.
“Sono priva di genere sessuale, o quasi. Ho la testa bianca, sembra di cera. Niente sopracciglia, né ciglia, né labbra, niente di tutto questo ma ossa sporgenti, zigomi, spalle, clavicole e punti accesso dati”.
La narratrice è Christine, una donna di 49 anni che presto dovrà morire (su CIEL gli individui hanno una data di scadenza per via delle risorse e dello spazio limitato sulla stazione spaziale). È lei stessa a paragonare gli abitanti di CIEL a statue di bianco marmo. È soltanto il primo di molti riferimenti all’apollinea antichità classica. Di contro, alla Terra spetta il compito di rappresentare la controparte dionisiaca.
Quest’umanità sterile, senza più sesso e amore, è nostalgica. È annoiata, lontano da casa e ha fame di desideri perduti. La sua impotenza si nutre di storie perché nelle storie quello che hanno perduto è di nuovo accessibile, almeno in forma testuale. Tuttavia – forse proprio per sopperire alla perdita e per restituire l’evidenza del corpo – i testi su CIEL si creano e si tramandano direttamente sulla pelle, non più su carta: tutti i corpi diventano leggibili e scrivibili.
“Per via della nostra fame, quassù nel nostro falso paradiso, nacquero gli innesti cutanei”.
Gli innesti sono letteralmente storie scritte sulla pelle, racconti in rilievo: “lontani discendenti dei tatuaggi, cugini spuri dell’alfabeto Braille”.
Gli innesti più popolari sono quelli creati da Jean de Men, che proprio grazie al successo dei suoi racconti assurge al potere. CIEL è infatti una società minuscola, regolamentata da algoritmi e in cui tutti sono già ricchi quindi il potere si riduce a una questione di prestigio, una crudele pantomima, un perverso vizio di forma. Non stupisce che i racconti di Jean de Men siano insulsi, banali e misogini (il nome Jean de Men letteralmente si traduce come Jean degli uomini). Favolacce di violenza, infarcite da amori fasulli e convenzionali. Propaganda utile sia come narcotico sia come sollazzo e distrazione per i privilegiati superstiti di CIEL.
“Jean de Men non fece altro che sostituire ogni divinità, ogni etica, ogni scienza, con il potere della rappresentazione: un’idea nata sulla Terra, sviluppata grazie ai media e alla tecnologia e perfezionata qui nello spazio”.
Su CIEL quindi governa una celebrità, un vanesio uomo di spettacolo che guida un popolo ipnotizzato da intrattenimento posticcio e sorvegliato dal Panopticon, un sistema di vigilanza che organizza esecuzioni pubbliche per chi trasgredisce. Panem et circensem, quindi, rivisitata in uno stile tecnoburlesque in cui la giustizia è una tragica farsa.
Ma in cosa consiste la trasgressione in un mondo senza vita come quello di CIEL?
C’è una legge in politica: se vuoi governare, devi avere il controllo della narrazione. La verità è complicata, se riesci a raccontarla in modo convincente, dalla giusta prospettiva, ti crederanno. CIEL e Jean de Men hanno raccontato la storia – che è diventata quindi la Storia – su come la Terra sia diventata inabitabile. È tutta colpa di un’eco-terrorista, una ragazzina ribelle che ha deciso di disertare – nel mondo di prima, sulla terra morente, le guerre venivano combattute da bambini soldato – e di muovere contro il mondo degli uomini e i loro droni: è Joan, una pazza o una santa, che sente voci dal profondo della Terra e ha acquisito la capacità di controllare la materia. Joan, un pericolo per l’umanità, è stata però catturata e giustiziata, arsa vivo sul rogo come una strega. Eppure la sua leggenda vive ancora su CIEL…ed è questo culto che Jean de Men vuole sradicare.
Tra chi non crede alla versione ufficiale e vede in Joan una martire ma soprattutto una speranza, c’è Christine, anche lei maestra nell’arte dell’innesto. Sa bene che nel mondo gelido di CIEL, solo l’immaginazione non è morta. Crede che “le storie salvano vite e danno forma all’azione” quindi vuole scrivere sui corpi di più persone possibili un “poema epico-corporale”che racconti e tramandi la storia di Joan, raccogliendo attorno a se seguaci di un movimento, disposto a tutto per ripristinare i valori di un’umanità perduta.
“Le parole e il mio corpo, il luogo della resistenza”.
La resistenza si organizza attorno ai corpi, è questa la filosofia del romanzo. E scavando più nel profondo, vedremo una contropposizione ancora più netta tra Jean de Men e Joan di Fango (l’assonanza non è un caso). Mentre Jean si arroga anche il diritto di sperimentare sui corpi degli abitanti di CIEL, tentando di raggiungere grazie alla tecnologia un tipo di procreazione per via asessuata (visto che hanno perso gli organi sessuali e non possono riprodursi), Joan per tutto il romanzo userà il suo potere tramite il suo corpo. Da un lato abbiamo un usurpatore di corpi altrui, dall’altro una donna che conserva – a differenza del resto dell’umanità – la capacità di generare la vita (sia perché donna sia perché in diretto contatto con le forza naturali della Terra). Da un lato abbiamo un uomo che si serve della tecnologia come appendice sterile, dall’altro una donna che si serve della solidarietà degli altri e delle energie della Terra, per quanto luride, fangose, disperate siano.
In un mondo che ha espunto il corpo e i suoi bisogni, in un mondo senza madri, i seguaci di Joan riportano la carne e le viscere al centro della politica.
Il mondo al di sotto
“Senza rivolgermi a nessuna verità più alta di questa: noi siamo materia, come la terra e l’acqua e gli alberi e il cielo, come lo erano gli animali, come lo sono le stelle e i corpi umani. Rivendicando la nostra umanità come semplice umanità. Scriverò questo. Racconterò la verità”.
Joan è un’altra ragazzina che si aggiunge alle schiere di ragazzine pericolose e rivoluzionarie delle narrazioni contemporanee (Anna di Ammaniti ma persino Greta Thumberg). Quanto fanno paura le ragazzine al potere? Quanto sono destabilizzanti? Quanto è facile trattarle da pazze, infantilizzarle, trattarle come elementi di disturbo.
“Lui non aveva idea di cosa questa giovane adulta avesse fra le mani. La considerava ancora solo una femmina, una bambina che gioca a una specie di gioco in cui lui era sicuro di superarla in astuzia”.
Eppure sono loro che sopravvivono al (e spesso sono causa del) crollo.
Il rovesciamento nel romanzo di Y uknavitch è trasversale: non c’è solo un crollo di potere ma c’è anche un crollo della concezione di genere sessuale per come lo conosciamo e soprattutto. un crollo che porta il lettore dal sopra (CIEL) al sotto (il pianeta Terra). Possiamo interpretare il romanzo come una lunga discesa dalla sterilità e dalla gelida “nave del nulla” di CIEL al “grumo fangoso”, materico e pullulante di vita del pianeta Terra. Dall’alto al basso in termini di altitudine ma dal basso all’alto in termini di umanità.
In teoria infatti l’elite della popolazione terrestre vive lassù la sua vita elevata, lontana da un ambiente moribondo. Ma non è così. CIEL è una nave senza vita. Invece è sulla Terra che si conserva la vita.
“La Terra adesso non è altro che un suolo apocalittico e maculato; un opaco sole color seppia, di giorno; la notte, una Luna dalla luce così fioca da sembrare un livido sul cielo. Questa è una palla di fango senza vita. Almeno in superficie”. Se in superficie c’è desolazione e distruzione, nel sottosuolo c’è un mondo lussureggiante. Riflettendo sulla sopravvivenza futura, l’umanità ha scelto di guardare in alto, ha scelto lo Spazio. “Ma se invece tutto quello che conta fosse in basso? Lì dove le cose sono volgari e spregevoli? Dove i vermi e la merda e gli scarafaggi conducono la loro esistenza?”.
Mentre Christine organizza la Resistenza su CIEL, sulla Terra seguiamo Joan – miracolosamente sopravvissuta grazie ai suoi poteri rigenerativi – e Leon, la sua fedele compagna, in un viaggio tra le macerie ma soprattutto tra le vite di quei pochi sopravvissutati ai disastri naturali che hanno sconvolto la Terra. Ma la vita va avanti anche in luoghi impossibili. In questi ultimi capitoli, l’autrice declina l’esperienza ultima dell’essere umano, l’esperienza irriducibile dell’Amore (“una parola che ha definizioni sempre esplosive”). L’Amore senza l’incontro con l’Altro è impossibile (“e nell’amare non sei sola”), senza lo scontro con i corpi altrui. Contro la solitudine e l’astrazione di CIEL, si può contrapporre soltanto la contaminazione tra carne, materia, vita e fango della Terra.
Con una poetica incendiaria, Yuknavitch racconta come nei corpi riposa l’ultima risposta.
Un finale problematico?
Doveva concludersi in un solo modo “Il libro di Joan”, dato l’impianto filosofico e poetico alla base: con l’unione tra i due mondi, quello di sopra e quello di sotto, uno scontro che dà vita al conflitto finale tra Jean e Joan (anche tra mondo degli uomini e mondo delle donne? Le iniziali M e F dei cognomi lo suggeriscono). Se la sconfitta di Jean e l’ennesimo sacrificio di Christine, Trinculo e Joan appaiono giusti e anche inevitabili, a livello narrativo, il modo in cui arriviamo alla sequenza finale è un colabrodo, estremamente complicato nelle dinamiche che rimangono fino in fondo opache al lettore. Ancora più insensata – e soprattutto frettolosa - è la rivelazione sul sesso di Jean de Men. Non solo non è coerente con tutto quello che abbiamo saputo del personaggio fino a quel momento ma non aggiunge nulla a quanto già detto. Il fatto che sia una donna dovrebbe essere un’aggravante? Vorrebbe rappresentare il ruolo ancillare di certe donne nel sistema patriarcale? Ma a che serve dirlo tre pagine prima della fine? Non esplora il tema e non è una rivelazione utile all’impianto narrativo, alla filosofia di fondo del romanzo né provoca un qualche tipo di soddisfazione nel lettore (come invece fanno o dovrebbero fare i coup de théâtre). Semplicemente inutile, quando non direttamente dannoso perché getta l’ombra di una possibile interpretazione purista (transfobica?) su cosa rende le donne veredonne TM in opposizione alle nondonne(?).
Conclusioni
A controbilanciare la forza viscerale contenuta in questa storia, c’è purtroppo una debolezza strutturale nell’esposizione degli elementi fantascientifici. Nel corso della narrazione veniamo edotti in maniera progressiva su una mole decisamente considerevole di concetti e termini: si susseguono i protei, il kinema, le generine, il teletrasporto (attraverso energie telluriche?), luci blu innestate sulle tempie e altri espedienti che, per quanto suggestivi, mal si accordano e mal si spiegano in una storia già molto carica di metafore bibliche e mitologiche.
Non è certo un libro perfetto, è meglio. Perché è di troppo, è disturbante e scomodo con una chiave interpretativa originale sulla distopia. Come Le Guin e Atwood, anche Lidia Yuknavitch traccia nuovi sentieri. Una pensatrice che usa il femminismo come detonatore, una forza erotica, perturbante che, stanca di lasciarsi infliggere cicatrici, preferisce lasciarne.
May 24, 2017
In August 2015 I participated in a weekend writing workshop with Lidia Yuknavitch, an experience I chronicled here A Weekend with Lidia. At a reading the evening after our first day together, Lidia told the crowd she was working on a novel about Joan of Arc. Lidia + historical fiction didn't compute for me, but I'm willing to follow her anywhere, so I trusted her version of Joan's legend would be something quite apart from cloaks and swords and dastardly priests.
There were hints along the pre-release way that this wasn't another version of Joan set in the 15th century forests of Lancastrian France. Of course not. This is LIDIA. And this book is a core-shaking revolution of words. Tremblingly prescient, for it was written well before we knew what a dumpster fire of a political scene we were walking into, before demagoguery and willful ignorance would bring us to the edge of a precipice we are in desperate danger of plunging over.
In The Book of Joan the world has already plunged. It is 2049 and Earth is all but destroyed—ravaged and gutted by a multiplicity of wars over scarce resources. Those who could afford to fled the scene and created CIEL, a colony orbiting the space above their former planetary home. Corruption abhors a vacuum and into that space steps Jean de Men, a former television cult of personality turned sadistic cult leader, whose greatest achievement was the capture and public assassination of Joan, an Earthbound girlwarrior-ecoterrorist.
The Geocatastrophe that occurred in less than a generation's span forced shocking and irreversible physiological changes in the remaining human beings who live what remains of their existence on CIEL. This new species cannot procreate. But in their desperation to remain viable, they are destroying what little remains of life on earth, by sucking up its resources through Skylines and using children as fossil fuel.
There is little I can share with you about the book's plot without dancing with spoilers. A work of speculative fiction, it begins on CIEL in the same bewildering, bleak tradition as Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, with Christine as the doomed protagonist and her dearest Trinculo as resistor-martyr, but once the action falls to Earth and into Joan's story, it's grounding and full of love and warm muscle and heart and impossible to set aside. But the plot's not the point, anyway. It's what keeps the pages turning, and it's dazzling. Disorienting. Exasperating. Brilliant and wrenching.
As Lidia told us in that workshop nearly two years ago, The story is not about what happens. The story is why it matters. And there is so much here that matters, it's hard to understand how it's contained in 266 pages, by humble paper and ink. Art as resistance. Women as warriors (THE FUTURE IS FEMALE so many of us around the world chanted on January 21, 2017). The crushing power of fertility. The rape of Earth for profit. The blank slate of body, the only thing that truly belongs to us, this vulnerable, dying canvas of muscle and bone and skin, telling the story of the world. Love as the reason to act. Love for earth, for lovers, for children. Love for hope, love for art.
Lidia's prose is visceral and shocking and physical. She writes from the body as much as from the mind and the heart and you feel her words. As a reader I was stunned, horrified, aroused and broken.
Whatever your expectations of this book, lay them aside. Just read and embrace the power of what fiction can do to tell the truth of the world.
There were hints along the pre-release way that this wasn't another version of Joan set in the 15th century forests of Lancastrian France. Of course not. This is LIDIA. And this book is a core-shaking revolution of words. Tremblingly prescient, for it was written well before we knew what a dumpster fire of a political scene we were walking into, before demagoguery and willful ignorance would bring us to the edge of a precipice we are in desperate danger of plunging over.
In The Book of Joan the world has already plunged. It is 2049 and Earth is all but destroyed—ravaged and gutted by a multiplicity of wars over scarce resources. Those who could afford to fled the scene and created CIEL, a colony orbiting the space above their former planetary home. Corruption abhors a vacuum and into that space steps Jean de Men, a former television cult of personality turned sadistic cult leader, whose greatest achievement was the capture and public assassination of Joan, an Earthbound girlwarrior-ecoterrorist.
The Geocatastrophe that occurred in less than a generation's span forced shocking and irreversible physiological changes in the remaining human beings who live what remains of their existence on CIEL. This new species cannot procreate. But in their desperation to remain viable, they are destroying what little remains of life on earth, by sucking up its resources through Skylines and using children as fossil fuel.
There is little I can share with you about the book's plot without dancing with spoilers. A work of speculative fiction, it begins on CIEL in the same bewildering, bleak tradition as Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, with Christine as the doomed protagonist and her dearest Trinculo as resistor-martyr, but once the action falls to Earth and into Joan's story, it's grounding and full of love and warm muscle and heart and impossible to set aside. But the plot's not the point, anyway. It's what keeps the pages turning, and it's dazzling. Disorienting. Exasperating. Brilliant and wrenching.
As Lidia told us in that workshop nearly two years ago, The story is not about what happens. The story is why it matters. And there is so much here that matters, it's hard to understand how it's contained in 266 pages, by humble paper and ink. Art as resistance. Women as warriors (THE FUTURE IS FEMALE so many of us around the world chanted on January 21, 2017). The crushing power of fertility. The rape of Earth for profit. The blank slate of body, the only thing that truly belongs to us, this vulnerable, dying canvas of muscle and bone and skin, telling the story of the world. Love as the reason to act. Love for earth, for lovers, for children. Love for hope, love for art.
Lidia's prose is visceral and shocking and physical. She writes from the body as much as from the mind and the heart and you feel her words. As a reader I was stunned, horrified, aroused and broken.
Whatever your expectations of this book, lay them aside. Just read and embrace the power of what fiction can do to tell the truth of the world.
Read
August 25, 2017Yuknavitch’s novel is an ultra-feminist, gender-bending acid trip. Her Joan is the hero of our speculative future. This book falls under the category of Dystopian fiction, but I’m not so sure. It was written before our current president was elected, and its antagonist is a psychotic celebrity named Jean de Man. Sound eerily familiar? If The Handmaid’s Tale is an enraged scream, The Book of Joan is a tortured howl. The crimes against women in this imagined future are horrifying beyond belief. Admittedly, I was a little triggered by its content, but I was living for the horror, Sci-Fi, and feminist hybrid. This is Joan (of arc) like you’ve never seen her before. She defies gender. She defies the limits of time and space. She is a mothereffing sorceress.
–Jan Rosenberg
from The Best Books We Read In May 2017: https://bookriot.com/2017/06/02/riot-...
____________________
Joan is a mythical creature who is also extremely real and human in this masterful reimagining of a Joan of Arc savior fit for modern times. In a future world (not very far in the future, mind you), earth’s wealthiest humans have ascended – literally. They live on a space station that is running out of ways to sustain itself, and since sexual organs have shriveled and died, the ability to procreate is also off the table. In that world, a woman named Joan is believed to have been killed – branded an eco-terrorist by the ruling megalomaniac who watches over the space station, Joan was a freedom fighter for none other than Mother Earth. Told with Yuknavitch’s incredible imagination and attention to language, this book floored me.
–Ilana Masad
from The Best Books We Read In March 2017: http://bookriot.com/2017/04/04/riot-r...
–Jan Rosenberg
from The Best Books We Read In May 2017: https://bookriot.com/2017/06/02/riot-...
____________________
Joan is a mythical creature who is also extremely real and human in this masterful reimagining of a Joan of Arc savior fit for modern times. In a future world (not very far in the future, mind you), earth’s wealthiest humans have ascended – literally. They live on a space station that is running out of ways to sustain itself, and since sexual organs have shriveled and died, the ability to procreate is also off the table. In that world, a woman named Joan is believed to have been killed – branded an eco-terrorist by the ruling megalomaniac who watches over the space station, Joan was a freedom fighter for none other than Mother Earth. Told with Yuknavitch’s incredible imagination and attention to language, this book floored me.
–Ilana Masad
from The Best Books We Read In March 2017: http://bookriot.com/2017/04/04/riot-r...
February 21, 2018
I still don't know what to make of this dystopian sci-fi novel. It's a far-flung, imagined future that honors a storied past invoking Joan of Arc and medieval feminist Christine de Pizan (I had to look it up) I know nothing beyond the grade school basics when it comes to Joan of Arc but it didn't impede my enjoyment of the book at all.
This thing is bloody, violent, sexually charged and angry without being overly academic. The story is challenging to say the least, but fiercely compelling. It's completely over the top and outrageous at times, bordering on affectation but I couldn't look away. At this point I'm really just throwing adjectives at the wall in lieu of any sort of penetrating review. It's one of those books that throws you into its orbit and spits you out at the end dazed and disoriented, but its ideas have burrowed under my skin leaving me scratching at it still.
This thing is bloody, violent, sexually charged and angry without being overly academic. The story is challenging to say the least, but fiercely compelling. It's completely over the top and outrageous at times, bordering on affectation but I couldn't look away. At this point I'm really just throwing adjectives at the wall in lieu of any sort of penetrating review. It's one of those books that throws you into its orbit and spits you out at the end dazed and disoriented, but its ideas have burrowed under my skin leaving me scratching at it still.
April 8, 2018
Notes on Diversity/Inclusion:
The Book of Joan seems to have a very complicated relationship to marginalization and oppression, and it doesn't seem to realize it. This is a book that is trying to say something about the nested issues of gender oppression and environmentalism, but because the story takes place on a space station, and because there are issues of access getting to that space station, the cast is largely wealthy and largely (literally) White.
This is a book full of very strange contradictions. For example, queerness is represented--Trinculo is a queer man, and Joan and Leone are clearly in love. However, none of those characters are in a satisfying relationship. Trinculo is queer and obsessed with what he's lost, and ultimately becomes a tragic/fallen queer character. Joan and Leone are a pair of untouched and intact people, in love, but they can't consummate their relationship because of Joan's otherworldy abilities. So, even though queerness is threaded through the book, no one is getting what they want. No one is happy. The way these queer characters are written feels regressive.
Content Warnings for Book:
Oh, wow, so many:
- Transphobia, in multiple ways, at multiple times, by multiple characters. IT WAS A THING.*
Racism in the form of literal colorblindness--the ascendant denizens of the space station CIEL all have paper-white skin, and one of the protagonists, Christine, remarks that this transformation renders race a meaningless construct. I don't think that's actually true at all.**
- Sexualized and gendered brutality more than once. Women's bodies throughout the book are a site of violence.
- There is at least one especially vicious beating of a queer man, and it happens, in my reading, at least partially because of his sexuality.
- Christine burns text into her skin, and the scarification she practices is both ritualized and commodified. There are scenes throughout the book of her practice where she describes the act with extremely explicit and lurid detail, so if you have a sensitive stomach go in knowing. There is also an element of this thread of the text that really treads a line of self-harm in my reading of the book.
Review:
Blurb (from Goodreads):
Reading The Book of Joan was an immensely strange experience for me. I enjoyed this book, and I hated it.
Let me explain.
Lidia Yuknavitch is a great writer. She writes with passion and urgency and fluency. I could not stop reading this book even as it became clear that this book was Definitely Not For Me. I just loved the way she wrote. I loved the way she put sentences together. I loved the way she structured the book. She does this fantastic thing where she starts the book in first person in Christine's POV, then switches to Joan's POV in third person, then switches to Christine again, this time in third person, and then ends the book in Joan in first person. It worked! I could not believe that it worked, and I loved it!
But the content of the book itself was not good. It was like walking through a restaurant, and everything looks and smells amazing, and then you realize it's a seafood restaurant and, oops, you're allergic to shellfish.
The thing about The Book of Joan is that it was trying to have a conversation with me that I was deeply uninterested in having. Yuknavitch is trying to talk about sex and gender and the primacy of binaries in both of those things, and their relationship to environmentalism, in ways that I am fundamentally sick of hearing about. This is an allegorical, and somewhat satirical book, and for a book like that to work, you have to be willing to engage with its philosophical underpinnings. The philosophical underpinnings of The Book of Joan seem largely rooted in lesbian separatism, trans-exclusionary radical feminism, and literally no understanding of asexuality at all.
Leaving aside that the actual mechanics of the plot (CIEL, the rapid mutation of humanity to shed genitalia, etc) do not make sense and were not adequately explained, the book overlooked the actual real-life fluidity of gender and sexuality, despite what the blurb said.
- In a world where virtually all people suddenly have androgynous bodies, everyone is still using binary gender pronouns. Why? And also, do no non-binary people exist, either before or after? Yes, I understand that the move to this new body cause Christine dysphoria, but the move to this new body would actually remove a lot of my dysphoria! Nothing like this was explored at all in the book.
- Was no one asexual or aromantic on CIEL? These people were obsessed with having sex.*** There was truly no one who was like "oh, well, no worries." COME ON.
- Besides that, there's more than one way to explore one's sexuality beside with genitalia. Think broader.
This is not even getting into my actual plot questions, which are legion. The big issue was that this book was deeply transphobic. Joan, the hero of the book, is the type to talk about "womb magic." The main villain is eventually revealed to be a transgender man--and after the reveal, is gleefully deadnamed and misgendered for the rest of the book. The horrific acts he metes out are directly linked in the text to his hatred of women and his own body. This is a book that made me, as a reader, feel targeted by the text itself.
Takeaway & Rating:
The Book of Joan is a glorious hot mess of a book. Yuknavitch is a talented writer, but her ideas about gender and sexuality are outdated, and her play at allegory left me cold.
2/5 stars
*Again, I really cannot in good conscience recommend this book to others with its handling of trans issues.
**Take, for example, people of color who are also albinos. Race is, of course, about pigmentation, but it's also about far more than pigmentation, and only a white writer would think that literally whitewashing all bodies would eliminate racism.
***One of the Plot Questions I had, and maybe it was explained and I missed it, was that Jean De Men forbade everyone on CIEL from banging For Reasons, but I don't know what those reasons were?? So, no one had junk, but wanted to bang, but COULDN'T, so it was VERY FRAUGHT. But I know had I been on CIEL that a) I would have been way less dysphoric than I am this moment and b) I would have been the only one there with any damn chill.
The Book of Joan seems to have a very complicated relationship to marginalization and oppression, and it doesn't seem to realize it. This is a book that is trying to say something about the nested issues of gender oppression and environmentalism, but because the story takes place on a space station, and because there are issues of access getting to that space station, the cast is largely wealthy and largely (literally) White.
This is a book full of very strange contradictions. For example, queerness is represented--Trinculo is a queer man, and Joan and Leone are clearly in love. However, none of those characters are in a satisfying relationship. Trinculo is queer and obsessed with what he's lost, and ultimately becomes a tragic/fallen queer character. Joan and Leone are a pair of untouched and intact people, in love, but they can't consummate their relationship because of Joan's otherworldy abilities. So, even though queerness is threaded through the book, no one is getting what they want. No one is happy. The way these queer characters are written feels regressive.
Content Warnings for Book:
Oh, wow, so many:
- Transphobia, in multiple ways, at multiple times, by multiple characters. IT WAS A THING.*
Racism in the form of literal colorblindness--the ascendant denizens of the space station CIEL all have paper-white skin, and one of the protagonists, Christine, remarks that this transformation renders race a meaningless construct. I don't think that's actually true at all.**
- Sexualized and gendered brutality more than once. Women's bodies throughout the book are a site of violence.
- There is at least one especially vicious beating of a queer man, and it happens, in my reading, at least partially because of his sexuality.
- Christine burns text into her skin, and the scarification she practices is both ritualized and commodified. There are scenes throughout the book of her practice where she describes the act with extremely explicit and lurid detail, so if you have a sensitive stomach go in knowing. There is also an element of this thread of the text that really treads a line of self-harm in my reading of the book.
Review:
Blurb (from Goodreads):
In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin.
Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule—galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth. When de Men and his armies turn Joan into a martyr, the consequences are astonishing. And no one—not the rebels, Jean de Men, or even Joan herself—can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.
A riveting tale of destruction and love found in direst of places—even at the extreme end of post-human experience—Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan raises questions about what it means to be human, the fluidity of sex and gender, and the role of art as means for survival.
Reading The Book of Joan was an immensely strange experience for me. I enjoyed this book, and I hated it.
Let me explain.
Lidia Yuknavitch is a great writer. She writes with passion and urgency and fluency. I could not stop reading this book even as it became clear that this book was Definitely Not For Me. I just loved the way she wrote. I loved the way she put sentences together. I loved the way she structured the book. She does this fantastic thing where she starts the book in first person in Christine's POV, then switches to Joan's POV in third person, then switches to Christine again, this time in third person, and then ends the book in Joan in first person. It worked! I could not believe that it worked, and I loved it!
But the content of the book itself was not good. It was like walking through a restaurant, and everything looks and smells amazing, and then you realize it's a seafood restaurant and, oops, you're allergic to shellfish.
The thing about The Book of Joan is that it was trying to have a conversation with me that I was deeply uninterested in having. Yuknavitch is trying to talk about sex and gender and the primacy of binaries in both of those things, and their relationship to environmentalism, in ways that I am fundamentally sick of hearing about. This is an allegorical, and somewhat satirical book, and for a book like that to work, you have to be willing to engage with its philosophical underpinnings. The philosophical underpinnings of The Book of Joan seem largely rooted in lesbian separatism, trans-exclusionary radical feminism, and literally no understanding of asexuality at all.
Leaving aside that the actual mechanics of the plot (CIEL, the rapid mutation of humanity to shed genitalia, etc) do not make sense and were not adequately explained, the book overlooked the actual real-life fluidity of gender and sexuality, despite what the blurb said.
- In a world where virtually all people suddenly have androgynous bodies, everyone is still using binary gender pronouns. Why? And also, do no non-binary people exist, either before or after? Yes, I understand that the move to this new body cause Christine dysphoria, but the move to this new body would actually remove a lot of my dysphoria! Nothing like this was explored at all in the book.
- Was no one asexual or aromantic on CIEL? These people were obsessed with having sex.*** There was truly no one who was like "oh, well, no worries." COME ON.
- Besides that, there's more than one way to explore one's sexuality beside with genitalia. Think broader.
This is not even getting into my actual plot questions, which are legion. The big issue was that this book was deeply transphobic. Joan, the hero of the book, is the type to talk about "womb magic." The main villain is eventually revealed to be a transgender man--and after the reveal, is gleefully deadnamed and misgendered for the rest of the book. The horrific acts he metes out are directly linked in the text to his hatred of women and his own body. This is a book that made me, as a reader, feel targeted by the text itself.
Takeaway & Rating:
The Book of Joan is a glorious hot mess of a book. Yuknavitch is a talented writer, but her ideas about gender and sexuality are outdated, and her play at allegory left me cold.
2/5 stars
*Again, I really cannot in good conscience recommend this book to others with its handling of trans issues.
**Take, for example, people of color who are also albinos. Race is, of course, about pigmentation, but it's also about far more than pigmentation, and only a white writer would think that literally whitewashing all bodies would eliminate racism.
***One of the Plot Questions I had, and maybe it was explained and I missed it, was that Jean De Men forbade everyone on CIEL from banging For Reasons, but I don't know what those reasons were?? So, no one had junk, but wanted to bang, but COULDN'T, so it was VERY FRAUGHT. But I know had I been on CIEL that a) I would have been way less dysphoric than I am this moment and b) I would have been the only one there with any damn chill.
August 28, 2017
This book rates a solid "meh." I know many love it, and to each their own, but I found it too removed from real emotion to be enticing. Most of the characters felt shallow, and while I really loved the potential in Trinculo I felt like this was never fully fleshed out.
And then there was the crass sexuality. I know, I'm sure it was meant to be blunt, to be shocking maybe, but ultimately it was just... obtuse. Too many sewn-up c**ts, shriveled penises, flattened boobs. Seems like for that to happen within a generation there would be more... angst. Perhaps the rage was expressed in factual verbal flotsam?
Maybe it all feels so removed because we're supposed to feel how shuttered, how lost, how empty humanity (at least the ascended) has become. Dunno.
What I do know is that the ending didn't touch me. The middle didn't either. Awful things happen to characters I'm supposed to care about, and I just kept checking to see how many minutes left in the audiobook.
Not a top-notch dystopian novel. Some interesting stuff, but reads too much like an outline.
And then there was the crass sexuality. I know, I'm sure it was meant to be blunt, to be shocking maybe, but ultimately it was just... obtuse. Too many sewn-up c**ts, shriveled penises, flattened boobs. Seems like for that to happen within a generation there would be more... angst. Perhaps the rage was expressed in factual verbal flotsam?
Maybe it all feels so removed because we're supposed to feel how shuttered, how lost, how empty humanity (at least the ascended) has become. Dunno.
What I do know is that the ending didn't touch me. The middle didn't either. Awful things happen to characters I'm supposed to care about, and I just kept checking to see how many minutes left in the audiobook.
Not a top-notch dystopian novel. Some interesting stuff, but reads too much like an outline.
June 16, 2017
"Silent skinsongs.
That's all we are."
After Earth has been destroyed, humanity is trying to survive in genetically modified forms in the nearby universe. The future species is occupied with trying to find ways to reproduce - the ability has been lost and they are dwindling. Their stories intertwine with the girl who caused the revolution and destruction in the first place, and may be enough of a force to start another. Joan of Arc? Somewhat.
There are some scenes of violence to women that I felt were unnecessary, jarring enough to almost make the book a 3-star read. Those scenes were not only gratuitous-feeling, which is bad enough, but simply did not match the tone of the rest of the novel, so they really stood out to me.
Sidenote: At one point, a character reads a poem, and it is so beautiful - I would love to read a book of Yuknavitch's poetry!
Thanks to the publisher for providing early access through Edelweiss.
That's all we are."
After Earth has been destroyed, humanity is trying to survive in genetically modified forms in the nearby universe. The future species is occupied with trying to find ways to reproduce - the ability has been lost and they are dwindling. Their stories intertwine with the girl who caused the revolution and destruction in the first place, and may be enough of a force to start another. Joan of Arc? Somewhat.
There are some scenes of violence to women that I felt were unnecessary, jarring enough to almost make the book a 3-star read. Those scenes were not only gratuitous-feeling, which is bad enough, but simply did not match the tone of the rest of the novel, so they really stood out to me.
Sidenote: At one point, a character reads a poem, and it is so beautiful - I would love to read a book of Yuknavitch's poetry!
Thanks to the publisher for providing early access through Edelweiss.
June 17, 2019
Concept > Execution
Several decent ideas can be found in The Book of Joan, but nothing holds the book together. I like the technological aspects, especially the concept of “skylines”—umbilical cords connecting dead Earth to a failing-to-thrive space station. But that’s about it.
The prose feels YA, the content is definitely not. Every emotion results in a physical reaction, and that gets old after the first occurrence.
This is an exploration of eco-feminism dealing with sex, violence, and gender-fluidity. In the end, too many ideas fail to follow through and meet in a memorable conclusion.
2.5
Several decent ideas can be found in The Book of Joan, but nothing holds the book together. I like the technological aspects, especially the concept of “skylines”—umbilical cords connecting dead Earth to a failing-to-thrive space station. But that’s about it.
The prose feels YA, the content is definitely not. Every emotion results in a physical reaction, and that gets old after the first occurrence.
This is an exploration of eco-feminism dealing with sex, violence, and gender-fluidity. In the end, too many ideas fail to follow through and meet in a memorable conclusion.
2.5
June 22, 2023
I will not even try to summarize this post-apocalyptic novel except to sketch out the barest of details. It’s 2049 and the earth is all but uninhabitable following a series of wars for the dwindling resources and the resulting eco-catastrophes. Most of those who survived now live in a space colony—CIEL—orbiting the earth. Their bodies are devolving, becoming pale white and virtually indistinguishable, their genitalia atrophying and disappearing. They face extinction. They are ruled over by sadistic dictator. It’s grim. But there is a small group of resistance fighters opposed to CIEL, inspired by Joan of Dirt (the novel is a re-imagining of Joan of Arc’s divine visitation and rise to leadership). That’s enough to know in broad terms of the plot.
Yuknavitch creates an intricate and in many ways fascinating dystopian world, yet she seems more intent on establishing the intellectual weight of her story rather than on developing a compelling narrative standing on its own. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there are times when the narrative scaffolding seems a bit too apparent, a bit too ready-made for the message.
So what’s the message? Well, the most obvious one is that the world is rushing toward an ecological disaster as we charge blindly into the future using up—rather than finding a way to sustain—the world’s resources. The collapse of the social order will then follow, a dismantling summarized by one of the characters thinking back to times when the world is coming undone: “As Earth’s resources dwindle, technology is seized by those who kill best.”
That’s the most obvious takeaway. But on another, more general level, circulating throughout the narrative is the idea that in the world in which we now live and into which we are racing ever further, we are progressively losing touch with our bodies and with the world in which we (used to) live, becoming ever more like the sexless and featureless humans aboard CIEL. Put another way: A world in which people live most enthusiastically in front of screens will eventually lead to the atrophying of the body and our connection to it, as well as our connections to others and to nature. It’s quite significant that the hero is named Joan of Dirt—that is, the person who is most connected to the world—the mud, the microbes, the leaves, the trees, the animals, and everything else that surrounds us and from which we come. The ultimate goal of Joan and her followers’ fight against CIEL is to bring people back into contact with the earth, even if that means dying and being regenerated into the elements. “Our love for Earth and for all living matter violently trumps humans’ love for one another,” says one of her followers. “We are not more than the animals we made extinct. We are not above the organic life we destroyed. We are of it. Our desire, unlike what yours has been thus far, is to give the earth back its life. No single human life is more important than that.” In pondering what it means to be human, Joan herself asks, “What if being human did not mean to discover, to conquer. What if it mean rejoining everything we are made from.”
Although far from a satisfying novel, The Book of Joan challenges us to ponder the future we seem to be rushing toward. Perhaps there's still time to avert that future. Perhaps.
Yuknavitch creates an intricate and in many ways fascinating dystopian world, yet she seems more intent on establishing the intellectual weight of her story rather than on developing a compelling narrative standing on its own. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there are times when the narrative scaffolding seems a bit too apparent, a bit too ready-made for the message.
So what’s the message? Well, the most obvious one is that the world is rushing toward an ecological disaster as we charge blindly into the future using up—rather than finding a way to sustain—the world’s resources. The collapse of the social order will then follow, a dismantling summarized by one of the characters thinking back to times when the world is coming undone: “As Earth’s resources dwindle, technology is seized by those who kill best.”
That’s the most obvious takeaway. But on another, more general level, circulating throughout the narrative is the idea that in the world in which we now live and into which we are racing ever further, we are progressively losing touch with our bodies and with the world in which we (used to) live, becoming ever more like the sexless and featureless humans aboard CIEL. Put another way: A world in which people live most enthusiastically in front of screens will eventually lead to the atrophying of the body and our connection to it, as well as our connections to others and to nature. It’s quite significant that the hero is named Joan of Dirt—that is, the person who is most connected to the world—the mud, the microbes, the leaves, the trees, the animals, and everything else that surrounds us and from which we come. The ultimate goal of Joan and her followers’ fight against CIEL is to bring people back into contact with the earth, even if that means dying and being regenerated into the elements. “Our love for Earth and for all living matter violently trumps humans’ love for one another,” says one of her followers. “We are not more than the animals we made extinct. We are not above the organic life we destroyed. We are of it. Our desire, unlike what yours has been thus far, is to give the earth back its life. No single human life is more important than that.” In pondering what it means to be human, Joan herself asks, “What if being human did not mean to discover, to conquer. What if it mean rejoining everything we are made from.”
Although far from a satisfying novel, The Book of Joan challenges us to ponder the future we seem to be rushing toward. Perhaps there's still time to avert that future. Perhaps.
May 20, 2017
Copies of Lidia Yuknavitch's post-apocalyptic dystopian novel The Book of Joan must be flying off the shelves. The reviews have been raves. It's been called a "dizzying, dystopian genre mash-up" and, in a New York Times Book Review cover story, "brilliant" and "incendiary." So why isn't it good? The novel's premise is pretty intriguing. Earth's sole survivors, all affluent and upper class, are floating around in space on a craft called CIEL. They can see Earth off in the distance, no longer a beautiful blue marble, now nothing but a brown ball of dirt as the result of various catastrophes both man-made and natural. The survivors' reproductive organs have atrophied, their skin has lost all pigmentation, and they have merged with their machines, using implanted technology instead of screens to view holograms and communicate at a distance. Via skin grafting and scarification, they use images and symbols burned onto their bodies to tell stories. The point-of-view character, Christine, is a body artist. She is also angry about all the survivors have lost, and a fan of the Joan of the title, a rebel heroine -- modeled on the legend of St. Joan of Arc -- who was burned to death on videotape by the evil leader Jean de Men (uh, yeah). Yuknavitch's writing is flagrantly poetic in its anger and scorn for the people who have destroyed Earth and caused such suffering to humanity, especially its children.
These are very relatable feelings as our troubled planet barrels toward its own climatic end-times, and I looked forward to the story that would be carried forward by this intriguing set up. Trouble is, I've struck chapter 5, and nothing much has happened, at least nothing that leads to deeper layers of complexity, like a plot. The story is not taking me anywhere, at this point, except back into the new Joan's childhood, where she happens to be the kind of lonely kid who likes trees and has an imagination, and just in case we readers are missing the point, Yuknavitch tells us, "There are entire populations of children living such lives, on the periphery." Now she's editorializing, and I'm bored. And I'm also depressed, because a post-apocalyptic dystopia is not a fun place to hang when there's no danger, no conflict, no fleeting sense of hope. Since I already know how Joan's story is going to end, I would need some compelling reasons to want to go back to the beginning and hear all about her childhood. And Yukavitch is not providing them; instead, she revels in forgone conclusions.
However, I am curious about one thing. If this space-traveling race of semi-humans is unable to reproduce, why is it necessary for them to be killed off as soon as they hit the age of 50? Christine herself is about 49 and 1/2 at this point, and you'd think she'd be itching to know. The population on the CIEL is static, not growing. And if they keep killing people off at age 50 (with great ceremony, Christine tells us), eventually it's going down to zero, right? Perhaps a slowly evolving plot point hinges on this issue, but for the moment, I lack the incentive to continue reading.
January 26, 2021
Lidia Yuknavitch is best known for boiling her novel in noodles with Raymond Federman (footage now erased from the internet) during her years as a FC2 stablemate. Later, she wrote this post-apocalyptic retwisting of the Joan d’Arc story set in a floating space colony filled with agender freaks who tattoo narratives onto their bodies as the last remaining art form. Coming from a background in unconventional fiction, Yuknavitch brings stylistically explosive prose to the science-fiction / historical intertext / environmental catastrophe thriller narrative, creating a conceptually dense and sanguineous world of unbound invention that manages to be simultaneously captivating on the sentence level and engaging on a plotty plane.
March 21, 2018
lidia yuknavitch is a genius. she is also an artist. it's not easy to be an intellectual genius and a genius artist. the outcome, typically, is difficult, unwieldy books, books like (someone else said this) some of Doris Lessing's books, or (this is me) Octavia Butler's books, or Ursula K Le Guin's. what these four titans have in common is a tremendous understanding of things, a super duper clarity of vision, and the gift of magical language. but, you see, when you cram language with difficult ideas, visionary ideas, language sometimes cracks at the seams. what all these authors have in common is that they don't care.
but you do. and you protest. this doesn't quite work. this is not realistic. this is too didactic.
yes, maybe. americans are gluttons for engaging storytelling. lidia yuknavitch's Joan is not american fare, and lidia herself - the book says this at every turn - uses a lot of european history and european philosophy to write Joan.
all her body stuff - her deep concern for the function of bodies, the alienation of bodies from the rest of the material world, and the eventual utilization of bodies only as signifiers - is rooted in french feminist thought, foucauldian theory, and post-structuralist feminism.
but it's not really that difficult, is it? she breaks it down for you. if you are a body you cannot live like you are not. it's not complicated.
except it is, and she is so passionate about it that she keeps repeating it. so, yes, it becomes a bit didactic, just like The Dispossessed is didactic and the Xenogenesis or Lilith's Brood trilogy are didactic. people bristle. maybe i bristle a little too. but the point is not the bristling, the point is the learning. in this case, you have to learn to reconnect to the matter of the planet because the stakes are so fucking high. they are so high that joan, our beautiful, fierce, unbeatable joan, prefers to blow the world to smithereens. cuz we are FUCKING EVERYTHING UP.
there is tremendous urgency in this book. lidia is shouting from the rooftops that we are dying, that we are killing each other with technology, disembodiment, massive surveillance, the election of demagogues, war, authoritarianism, the killing of children, to the point (gasp) that children are killing us and each other.
when i read this sentence, about children taking up weapons and killing people, i thought, lidia, man, this is old news. and then i recoiled, and burned in shame, because it is never old news. no no no no.
so yeah, we totally deserve the sterility lidia anticipates, the dying out of the species.
lidia is a strange sex writer. she likes sex very much, clearly, but sex in this book never gets consummated. or it does, but in ways that rarely involve touch - up in CIEL touch is forbidden and down on earth, well, joan is a virgin isn't she.
so okay, okay, get a bit annoyed at the didacticism, as you do with butler or le guin, but then, for all that is good in the world, learn something. cuz things are going sideways fast.
but you do. and you protest. this doesn't quite work. this is not realistic. this is too didactic.
yes, maybe. americans are gluttons for engaging storytelling. lidia yuknavitch's Joan is not american fare, and lidia herself - the book says this at every turn - uses a lot of european history and european philosophy to write Joan.
all her body stuff - her deep concern for the function of bodies, the alienation of bodies from the rest of the material world, and the eventual utilization of bodies only as signifiers - is rooted in french feminist thought, foucauldian theory, and post-structuralist feminism.
but it's not really that difficult, is it? she breaks it down for you. if you are a body you cannot live like you are not. it's not complicated.
except it is, and she is so passionate about it that she keeps repeating it. so, yes, it becomes a bit didactic, just like The Dispossessed is didactic and the Xenogenesis or Lilith's Brood trilogy are didactic. people bristle. maybe i bristle a little too. but the point is not the bristling, the point is the learning. in this case, you have to learn to reconnect to the matter of the planet because the stakes are so fucking high. they are so high that joan, our beautiful, fierce, unbeatable joan, prefers to blow the world to smithereens. cuz we are FUCKING EVERYTHING UP.
there is tremendous urgency in this book. lidia is shouting from the rooftops that we are dying, that we are killing each other with technology, disembodiment, massive surveillance, the election of demagogues, war, authoritarianism, the killing of children, to the point (gasp) that children are killing us and each other.
when i read this sentence, about children taking up weapons and killing people, i thought, lidia, man, this is old news. and then i recoiled, and burned in shame, because it is never old news. no no no no.
so yeah, we totally deserve the sterility lidia anticipates, the dying out of the species.
lidia is a strange sex writer. she likes sex very much, clearly, but sex in this book never gets consummated. or it does, but in ways that rarely involve touch - up in CIEL touch is forbidden and down on earth, well, joan is a virgin isn't she.
so okay, okay, get a bit annoyed at the didacticism, as you do with butler or le guin, but then, for all that is good in the world, learn something. cuz things are going sideways fast.
November 20, 2023
Ecco il Pianeta Terra distrutto in ogni sua forma:
”Vedo anche una morente palla di fango.
Cosí è ridotta, nel 2049 circa, la nostra ex casa: la Terra.
È una macchia indistinta color seppia.”
Un esiguo gruppo di privilegiati si è rifugiato su una stazione orbitale fluttuante capeggiata da un despota.
La sopravvivenza avviene attraverso il saccheggio di quello che rimane sul pianeta moribondo e a cui si accede attraverso le Corde celesti e, mentre lo sviluppo tecnologico va oltre ogni immaginazione, questo brandello di superstiti, in realtà, ha perso, nel giro di poche generazioni, i connotati fisici umani.
Christine, prima voce narrante si descrive così:
"Sono priva di genere sessuale, o quasi.
Ho la testa bianca, sembra di cera. Niente sopracciglia né ciglia né labbra piú o meno carnose, niente di tutto questo ma ossa sporgenti, zigomi, spalle, clavicole, e punti accesso dati, cioè quei punti del nostro corpo in cui possiamo interagire con la tecnologia.
C’è un leggero rialzo lí dove un tempo cominciava il mio seno, e una specie di monticello dove dovrei avere l’osso pubico, ma finisce qui. Di femminile non mi è rimasto altro."
Lo scenario distopico ha il sapore dei racconti cyberpunk negli aspetti ipertecnologici, nella brutalità degli scenari.
Ormai è chiaro che questo genere di narrativa ha accorciato le distanze temporali.
“Il libro di Joan” ci racconta una storia del futuro prossimo (tra trentanni giusti!!) e, allo stesso tempo, mette sul piatto tematiche che sono parte di questo mondo contemporaneo.
E’ un libro non facile per una certa dose di violenza (anche erotica in un certo qual modo) e di dettagli tecnici.
Entrambe le caratteristiche possono far procedere a singhiozzo la lettura (se non addirittura bloccarla) a me è successo il contrario.
Credo, infatti, che, per chi condivida il messaggio dell’autrice, sia più facile entrare nella disposizione corretta per apprezzarne il valore.
Essenzialmente troviamo in questo romanzo la tematica di de-costruzione del concetto di potere (in ogni sua forma) e il riconoscimento del valore di ogni forma di controcultura.
La narrazione è assieme al corpo come metafora ne è il fulcro.
Y. rielabora personaggi storici e non:
◾Christine Pizan che ricalca l’immagine dell’omonimo personaggio storico (scrittrice del ‘400 che fu “molto famosa inoltre per aver dato inizio alla cosiddetta "Querelle des femmes": dopo avere letto due opere rispettivamente di Boccaccio e di Jean de Meun, che difendevano l'idea che la donna è per natura un essere vizioso”- https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christi...)
◾Jean de Men- Jean de Meun o Jean de Meung, nato Jean Chopinel o Jean Clopinel (Meung-sur-Loire, 1240 circa – Parigi, 1305 circa) è stato un poeta francese del XIII secolo, noto soprattutto per la sua continuazione del Roman de la Rose.
◾Joan del Fango- è chiaramente ispirata a Giovanna d’Arco
◾Trinculo omonimo dell’ubriacone della Tempesta shakespeariana con la differenza che qui è un personaggio più devoto ad Eros che a Bacco
Opera affascinante ma, insomma, non per tutti…
”Cosa diede un impatto epico alla mia piccola sfida letteraria?
La pelle, ecco cosa diede un peso epico alla rappresentazione letteraria. Il mezzo era il corpo umano. Non i rotoli sacri. Non ideologie militariste o discutibili teorie intellettuali.
L’unica cosa che ci fosse rimasta, e cosí crollò il divario fra rappresentazione e vita.
In principio era la parola, e la parola diventò il nostro corpo.
”Vedo anche una morente palla di fango.
Cosí è ridotta, nel 2049 circa, la nostra ex casa: la Terra.
È una macchia indistinta color seppia.”
Un esiguo gruppo di privilegiati si è rifugiato su una stazione orbitale fluttuante capeggiata da un despota.
La sopravvivenza avviene attraverso il saccheggio di quello che rimane sul pianeta moribondo e a cui si accede attraverso le Corde celesti e, mentre lo sviluppo tecnologico va oltre ogni immaginazione, questo brandello di superstiti, in realtà, ha perso, nel giro di poche generazioni, i connotati fisici umani.
Christine, prima voce narrante si descrive così:
"Sono priva di genere sessuale, o quasi.
Ho la testa bianca, sembra di cera. Niente sopracciglia né ciglia né labbra piú o meno carnose, niente di tutto questo ma ossa sporgenti, zigomi, spalle, clavicole, e punti accesso dati, cioè quei punti del nostro corpo in cui possiamo interagire con la tecnologia.
C’è un leggero rialzo lí dove un tempo cominciava il mio seno, e una specie di monticello dove dovrei avere l’osso pubico, ma finisce qui. Di femminile non mi è rimasto altro."
Lo scenario distopico ha il sapore dei racconti cyberpunk negli aspetti ipertecnologici, nella brutalità degli scenari.
Ormai è chiaro che questo genere di narrativa ha accorciato le distanze temporali.
“Il libro di Joan” ci racconta una storia del futuro prossimo (tra trentanni giusti!!) e, allo stesso tempo, mette sul piatto tematiche che sono parte di questo mondo contemporaneo.
E’ un libro non facile per una certa dose di violenza (anche erotica in un certo qual modo) e di dettagli tecnici.
Entrambe le caratteristiche possono far procedere a singhiozzo la lettura (se non addirittura bloccarla) a me è successo il contrario.
Credo, infatti, che, per chi condivida il messaggio dell’autrice, sia più facile entrare nella disposizione corretta per apprezzarne il valore.
Essenzialmente troviamo in questo romanzo la tematica di de-costruzione del concetto di potere (in ogni sua forma) e il riconoscimento del valore di ogni forma di controcultura.
La narrazione è assieme al corpo come metafora ne è il fulcro.
Y. rielabora personaggi storici e non:
◾Christine Pizan che ricalca l’immagine dell’omonimo personaggio storico (scrittrice del ‘400 che fu “molto famosa inoltre per aver dato inizio alla cosiddetta "Querelle des femmes": dopo avere letto due opere rispettivamente di Boccaccio e di Jean de Meun, che difendevano l'idea che la donna è per natura un essere vizioso”- https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christi...)
◾Jean de Men- Jean de Meun o Jean de Meung, nato Jean Chopinel o Jean Clopinel (Meung-sur-Loire, 1240 circa – Parigi, 1305 circa) è stato un poeta francese del XIII secolo, noto soprattutto per la sua continuazione del Roman de la Rose.
◾Joan del Fango- è chiaramente ispirata a Giovanna d’Arco
◾Trinculo omonimo dell’ubriacone della Tempesta shakespeariana con la differenza che qui è un personaggio più devoto ad Eros che a Bacco
Opera affascinante ma, insomma, non per tutti…
”Cosa diede un impatto epico alla mia piccola sfida letteraria?
La pelle, ecco cosa diede un peso epico alla rappresentazione letteraria. Il mezzo era il corpo umano. Non i rotoli sacri. Non ideologie militariste o discutibili teorie intellettuali.
L’unica cosa che ci fosse rimasta, e cosí crollò il divario fra rappresentazione e vita.
In principio era la parola, e la parola diventò il nostro corpo.
March 9, 2022
3.5/4 stelle
February 5, 2020
My feelings for the book went up and down as I read - by page 2 I was thrilled by the language (especially in comparison to the book I read just before it, The Three-Body Problem), by page 50 I was so physically repulsed by the grotesque humans on CIEL that I had to force myself to continue, and by the end of the book I was astounded by its intellectual depth. At least I suspect it is very deep - certainly deeper than my mind can go on its own. Some GR readers have talked about the need to know the Joan of Arc story better, but I think the keys to this novel are through Freud and Foucault. Bear in mind, I know very little about Freud, and enough about Foucault to fill a thimble, but still I suspect. I feel like this novel is filled in complex ways with Eros and Thanatos, desire and death (at least that's what I think they mean!) and the meaning of sex in human nature (self-mutilation is eroticized and idealized on CIEL when physical sex is gone). I think examining the character of Trinculo would unlock a lot of that - so many ideas are invested in that character. I'm way too lazy to try and think all this through myself, but I'd sure like to take a class on it.
The Joan side of the story hasn't engaged my mind as much so far, even though it was the only part of the book I could say I 'enjoyed' as I was reading it, especially Joan's relationship with Leone. But I think that will change. And of course Joan was exactly the opposite of the humans on CIEL - she wasn't just from the earth, she WAS the earth, an engenderine.
I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 because it didn't quite hang together as a story for me. Especially towards the end, things happened kind of fast and slap-dashed. Fans of intense world-building probably won't like it, but I think this is a book of ideas, and the world-building doesn't need to be hole-proof. It was good enough for me anyway.
The Joan side of the story hasn't engaged my mind as much so far, even though it was the only part of the book I could say I 'enjoyed' as I was reading it, especially Joan's relationship with Leone. But I think that will change. And of course Joan was exactly the opposite of the humans on CIEL - she wasn't just from the earth, she WAS the earth, an engenderine.
I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 because it didn't quite hang together as a story for me. Especially towards the end, things happened kind of fast and slap-dashed. Fans of intense world-building probably won't like it, but I think this is a book of ideas, and the world-building doesn't need to be hole-proof. It was good enough for me anyway.
Read
April 20, 2017My first thought upon finishing The Book of Joan was the question of what I just read. My second thought was that this was one of those books where I probably should have DNF’d it. I continue to read stories in the perpetual hope that they will improve or that an ending will buoy the entire novel. In this case, I hoped the ending would coalesce the disparate stories into one cohesive unit and improve my understanding; spoiler alert – it did not.
There is so much promise within The Book of Joan which makes the less-than-coherent story that much more disappointing. The basic essence of the novel is a cautionary tale devised for today’s political climate. In fact, the rise of Jean de Men is disturbing in its familiarity of a TV “star” who gets involved in politics and eventually becomes a political leader:
We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power.
Our existence makes my eyes hurt.
People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can’t happen. If it doesn’t exist in thought, then it can’t exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand. Jean de Men. Some strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan. A war-hungry mountebank. How stupidly we believe in our petty evolutions. Yet another case of something shiny that entertained us and then devoured us. We consume and become exactly what we create.
Then there is the rising tension among world superpowers and the subsequent wars that help to destroy the world. It is eerily prescient to the increasing animosity between North Korea and the Trump regime administration. Similarly, the use of child soldiers in the wars draws on Taliban and ISIS terrorists using women and children for their suicide bombs. Finally, there is the lack of environmental awareness. While in Jean de Men’s case, it is a direct result of the wars, one cannot help but think of the undoing of the EPA that is occurring right now even while scientists around the globe continue to show the effects global warming has on our ecosystem.
That basis should make The Book of Joan a modern-day horror story. One of the areas where the story falls apart though is in fleshing out the different elements of the fight. In particular, the rebels remain an enigmatic group. It is not until more than halfway through the novel where readers understand that they are an actual group. Because we only see this aspect from Christine’s point of view, it is too easy to mistaken her desire for revenge as personal and not political, and the fact that she dwells on her friend’s(?) torture continues to confirm the idea that she is acting out of personal feelings rather than for the betterment of others. The group of people she uses in the plot appear almost overnight and, aside from one person, remain anonymous and completely without motivation. Joan’s story has more depth to it, but even her story remains clouded by confusion.
The main weakness of the story is that certain sections are too slow and plodding, contributing very little to the overarching plot, but key plot development scenes are rushed and provide little explanation. Christine’s scenes, with their focus on burning and lack of sex, are particularly slow and unwieldy. Joan’s history is interesting and help readers understand the girl warrior in the aftermath of the wars, but her actions once she runs into the rebels are a blur. That essential connection is missing, and the story jumps between past and present and from rebel to warrior without much to tie them together.
In The Book of Joan, there is none of the elegance of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian masterpiece, with its careful world-building and sympathetic heroine. The story, which should read like a cautionary tale, reads more like an action-adventure story that just happens to take place in the near future. There are certain gaps in the plot which are puzzling and only add to the general confusion caused by the lack of connection between the characters. The Book of Joan is a novel that should be better than it is.
There is so much promise within The Book of Joan which makes the less-than-coherent story that much more disappointing. The basic essence of the novel is a cautionary tale devised for today’s political climate. In fact, the rise of Jean de Men is disturbing in its familiarity of a TV “star” who gets involved in politics and eventually becomes a political leader:
We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power.
Our existence makes my eyes hurt.
People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can’t happen. If it doesn’t exist in thought, then it can’t exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand. Jean de Men. Some strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan. A war-hungry mountebank. How stupidly we believe in our petty evolutions. Yet another case of something shiny that entertained us and then devoured us. We consume and become exactly what we create.
Then there is the rising tension among world superpowers and the subsequent wars that help to destroy the world. It is eerily prescient to the increasing animosity between North Korea and the Trump regime administration. Similarly, the use of child soldiers in the wars draws on Taliban and ISIS terrorists using women and children for their suicide bombs. Finally, there is the lack of environmental awareness. While in Jean de Men’s case, it is a direct result of the wars, one cannot help but think of the undoing of the EPA that is occurring right now even while scientists around the globe continue to show the effects global warming has on our ecosystem.
That basis should make The Book of Joan a modern-day horror story. One of the areas where the story falls apart though is in fleshing out the different elements of the fight. In particular, the rebels remain an enigmatic group. It is not until more than halfway through the novel where readers understand that they are an actual group. Because we only see this aspect from Christine’s point of view, it is too easy to mistaken her desire for revenge as personal and not political, and the fact that she dwells on her friend’s(?) torture continues to confirm the idea that she is acting out of personal feelings rather than for the betterment of others. The group of people she uses in the plot appear almost overnight and, aside from one person, remain anonymous and completely without motivation. Joan’s story has more depth to it, but even her story remains clouded by confusion.
The main weakness of the story is that certain sections are too slow and plodding, contributing very little to the overarching plot, but key plot development scenes are rushed and provide little explanation. Christine’s scenes, with their focus on burning and lack of sex, are particularly slow and unwieldy. Joan’s history is interesting and help readers understand the girl warrior in the aftermath of the wars, but her actions once she runs into the rebels are a blur. That essential connection is missing, and the story jumps between past and present and from rebel to warrior without much to tie them together.
In The Book of Joan, there is none of the elegance of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian masterpiece, with its careful world-building and sympathetic heroine. The story, which should read like a cautionary tale, reads more like an action-adventure story that just happens to take place in the near future. There are certain gaps in the plot which are puzzling and only add to the general confusion caused by the lack of connection between the characters. The Book of Joan is a novel that should be better than it is.
March 1, 2018
I think some of the greatest feminist dystopian fiction includes Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Angela Carter’s “The Passion of New Eve”, Sandra Newman’s “The Country of Ice Cream Star” and Naomi Alderman’s “The Power”. They don’t just speculate about terrifying ways that humanity can go wrong for women, but also powerfully comment upon the continued subjugation of women today. Lidia Yuknavitch has created an utterly original and wildly imaginative take on this narrative in her new novel “The Book of Joan”. This novel takes readers to the near-future 2049 when a series of cataclysmic events have reduced our planet to a “dirt ball” around which orbits a slipshod repurposed satellite. Upon this resides the mutant elite of humankind who survive on the scarce resources they can suck out of the decimated planet Earth. This will most certainly be the end of the human race as these mutants’ genitals have dropped off or sealed up and people’s skin has turned so (ugly) white they are nearly transparent. They are led by a powerful former self-help guru Jean de Men who organizes trials and executions of “offending” citizens as entertainment. But there is a resistance to this tyranny in the form of a strike branding artist Christine who tattoos poetry on the grafted skin covering her body. She mythologizes the story of Joan who created chaos across the planet and was ritually burned like her 15th century French-warrior namesake. The ensuing conflict is not only a mesmerizing and grisly adventure but makes striking observations about gender, genetics and the meaning of story-telling.
Read my full review of The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch on LonesomeReader
Read my full review of The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch on LonesomeReader
June 26, 2020
Ugh. I hated this and only “finished” in a very desultory inattentive way. The initial (gruesome) premise - that in a near future dystopia people have abandoned conventional text for texts written on their flesh through burning - never really gets off the ground. Similarly, the book’s intertwined “retellings” of Joan of Arc and Christine de Pisan/Jean de Meune are both overwhelmed by their antecedents and extremely difficult to make sense of, at least for me (I didn't know much about dePisan/deMeune going in). Add in a lot of very graphic violence and bodily disfigurement, extreme coincidence, on the nose metaphor, and lots of florid writing, and you have a recipe for both revulsion and boredom.
I admire her project and feminist/environmentalist rage but really disliked the book.
I admire her project and feminist/environmentalist rage but really disliked the book.
May 3, 2017
Corporeal: of or relating to a persons body, especially as opposed to their spirit.
Each novel I read by Lidia Yuknavitch is some how, even better than the last. I had to pace myself while reading, as to savor it. The Book of Joan is dystopian unlike anything I've read before. Beautifully written and full of riveting action. I'll definitely be buying the hardcover when it comes out in April, and re-reading this masterpiece. Thanks to HarperCollins for the E- galley.
Each novel I read by Lidia Yuknavitch is some how, even better than the last. I had to pace myself while reading, as to savor it. The Book of Joan is dystopian unlike anything I've read before. Beautifully written and full of riveting action. I'll definitely be buying the hardcover when it comes out in April, and re-reading this masterpiece. Thanks to HarperCollins for the E- galley.
June 2, 2019
fair warning to would-be readers out there that this book, despite an interesting plot (on the surface, anyway, it gets confusing towards the end) and at times gorgeous prose, is pretty violently transphobic. the book of joan presents trans people as disgusting monsters and is pathologically obsessed with genitalia in a way that you usually only see in the dark corners of, like, terf tumblr. really disappointing.
May 25, 2017
Absolutely revolting. Highly recommend.
Read
April 20, 2017Startling and strange. Not really sure how to rate it so here are some striking passages:
Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies. That is how art has preserved its toehold in our universe. Where there was poverty, there was also a painting someone stared at until it filled them with grateful tears. Where there was genocide, there was a song that refused to quiet. Where a planet was forsaken, there was someone telling a story with their last breath, and someone else carrying it like DNA, or star junk. Hidden matter.
She closed her eyes and saw the future. Waves and waves of global torture and slaughter weaving their way slowly across the planet. Calculated starvations and ghettoizations in the form of so-called refugee camps larger than former cities or even countries where millions and millions perished or killed one another in the crazed haze of being left for dead. Poisoned land poisoned water poisoned air poisoned land poisoned animals poisoned food. Children set to forced labor to collect and surrender resources all over the world, armies of orphans working and killing and dying for an ever-narrowing pinpoint of power - the only star in the sky - a ruthless inhuman grotesque - a darkness made from all of us. She saw survival overtaking the possibility of empathy in such vast swaths of being that people looked disfigured and lost-eyed, as if consciousness receded and an empty-headed nothingness took its place. She saw birds dropping from the skies and bees peppering the world's roads and fish washing ashore in cascades and deer and bear alike - all manner of animal - including humans - hunted and slaughtered or starved to extinction. Everything consuming every other thing.
If we look at history - those of us who study it, who can remember it - we understand the reason why those who come to power swiftly, amid extreme national crises, are so dangerous: during such crises, we all turn into children aching for a good father. And the truth is, in our fear and despair, we'll take any father. Even if his furor is dangerous. It's as if humans can't understand how to function without a father. Perhaps especially then, we mistake heroic agency for its dark other.
Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies. That is how art has preserved its toehold in our universe. Where there was poverty, there was also a painting someone stared at until it filled them with grateful tears. Where there was genocide, there was a song that refused to quiet. Where a planet was forsaken, there was someone telling a story with their last breath, and someone else carrying it like DNA, or star junk. Hidden matter.
She closed her eyes and saw the future. Waves and waves of global torture and slaughter weaving their way slowly across the planet. Calculated starvations and ghettoizations in the form of so-called refugee camps larger than former cities or even countries where millions and millions perished or killed one another in the crazed haze of being left for dead. Poisoned land poisoned water poisoned air poisoned land poisoned animals poisoned food. Children set to forced labor to collect and surrender resources all over the world, armies of orphans working and killing and dying for an ever-narrowing pinpoint of power - the only star in the sky - a ruthless inhuman grotesque - a darkness made from all of us. She saw survival overtaking the possibility of empathy in such vast swaths of being that people looked disfigured and lost-eyed, as if consciousness receded and an empty-headed nothingness took its place. She saw birds dropping from the skies and bees peppering the world's roads and fish washing ashore in cascades and deer and bear alike - all manner of animal - including humans - hunted and slaughtered or starved to extinction. Everything consuming every other thing.
If we look at history - those of us who study it, who can remember it - we understand the reason why those who come to power swiftly, amid extreme national crises, are so dangerous: during such crises, we all turn into children aching for a good father. And the truth is, in our fear and despair, we'll take any father. Even if his furor is dangerous. It's as if humans can't understand how to function without a father. Perhaps especially then, we mistake heroic agency for its dark other.
June 16, 2017
This was a 4.5 read for me.
My thoughts:
Brilliant, unflinching, imaginative and scathing.
These were the words that came to mind when I finished Yuknavitch’s literary tale of the reimagining of Joan of Arc set in the near future.
This multilayered tale with a feminist bent and where the past is the present of the future appealed, intrigued and provoked me in that this book was always in my mind whenever I had to put it down for other life commitments.
This book exposed me to the concept of “corporeality” – “where all our knowing comes from out bodies. And stories come out of you differently if you write from there.”
I was taken on this concept influenced/evolved the themes of gender, climate change, humanity, and power as the storyline unfolded.
I loved how storytelling is shown to be a form of resistance and a form of control, how having stories means having a self.
Other story threads that struck a chord with me:
- The thin line between creation and destruction
- The underestimation of the evil of power or the power of power.
- The well-played tragedy and cathartic hope
I definitely look forward to reading more books by the author in the future.
My thoughts:
Brilliant, unflinching, imaginative and scathing.
These were the words that came to mind when I finished Yuknavitch’s literary tale of the reimagining of Joan of Arc set in the near future.
This multilayered tale with a feminist bent and where the past is the present of the future appealed, intrigued and provoked me in that this book was always in my mind whenever I had to put it down for other life commitments.
This book exposed me to the concept of “corporeality” – “where all our knowing comes from out bodies. And stories come out of you differently if you write from there.”
I was taken on this concept influenced/evolved the themes of gender, climate change, humanity, and power as the storyline unfolded.
I loved how storytelling is shown to be a form of resistance and a form of control, how having stories means having a self.
Other story threads that struck a chord with me:
- The thin line between creation and destruction
- The underestimation of the evil of power or the power of power.
- The well-played tragedy and cathartic hope
I definitely look forward to reading more books by the author in the future.
March 29, 2017
Lidia Yuknavitch's post-apocalyptic retelling of Joan of Arc's story is flat-out brilliant. The Earth is decimated and the only possibility of life is on the hovering stations suspended above the barren landscape. The stations are highly patrolled and the inhabitants are continuously watched; is this a life worth living? But, despite its ruin, there are two women left on the Earth; Joan and Leone.
Exploring female relationships to each other, to men, and to their own bodies, Yuknavitch's tale is both chilling and comforting. A story about what it means to be human, to be a woman, and how our bodies and souls connect and divide us, Yuknavitch's beautiful feminist story takes us back to a place before body and soul were separated. Stunning.
Exploring female relationships to each other, to men, and to their own bodies, Yuknavitch's tale is both chilling and comforting. A story about what it means to be human, to be a woman, and how our bodies and souls connect and divide us, Yuknavitch's beautiful feminist story takes us back to a place before body and soul were separated. Stunning.
November 5, 2016
Another brilliant novel from Lidia Yuknavitch. Yuknavitch is at the forefront of feminist writing. She can explore the complex relationship women have with their bodies like no other. Her dual protagonists have a strength and purpose that is inspiring and heartbreaking. Given our current political climate, this book is incredibly timely and eerily prescient. Yuknavitch's corporeal writing is a marvel.
Thank you HarperCollins and Edelweiss for the ARC.
Thank you HarperCollins and Edelweiss for the ARC.
April 6, 2017
Writing crackles. Sharp as hell. My first time reading Yuknavitch. Didn't love the book. Love how she writes.
July 12, 2017
I loved the idea of this novel much more than the execution. The Book of Joan is at times chilling and unique in its portrayal of a post-apocalyptic earth, but I found the story became too convoluted as it progressed. I know a major part of the novel was meant to be commentary on the importance of the arts in maintaining true humanity and in our current political nightmare, this was a rather fitting aspect of a frightening future. Unfortunately, Yuknavitch's hints of Shakespearean dramatic comedy just felt out of sync with the overall novel. Trinculo (yes, I know - the jester) was uncomfortably comical and the final chapters of the book were a bit baffling to me.
I had such high hopes for this book so I'm upset that it didn't live up to my expectations. For those looking for novels with a similar theme, but with a clearer plot I would recommend seeking out Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy instead.
I had such high hopes for this book so I'm upset that it didn't live up to my expectations. For those looking for novels with a similar theme, but with a clearer plot I would recommend seeking out Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy instead.
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