Erowina;: Or, L'Eternelle blessée (the everlasting wounded one): a sexual novel

by Tom Mallin

Completed in 1962, first published in 1972, Tom Mallin's third novel Erowina is an encyclopaedic portrait of the titular troubled heroine, whose traumatic experiences in childhood and adolescence are transformed in adulthood into self-hatred and wild abandonment to erotic and sadomasochistic activities, ending with her suicide at thirty-six. Over twenty chapters, Erowina utilises a stunning range of styles and forms, from an autopsy report, confessional stream-of-consciousness, theological conversations, surreal symbolical stories, third-person accounts, scenes in dialogue riddled with puns and wordplays, short plays, copious lists, and sections with newspaper headlines, sealing the novel's indebtedness and homage to Joyce's Ulysses. A dark, ambitious, stimulating, and challenging novel, Erowina is Tom Mallin's masterpiece, and a work that remains surprising, fresh and vital.

Genres: Fiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Tom Mallin was born in the Black Country in 1927 and studied on scholarship at the Birmingham School of Art in 1943-1945. Upon returning from national service, Mallin studied at the Anglo-French Arts Centre in St. John’s Wood, and became interested in the ‘New Realist’ school of painting, popular in Paris at the time. He worked as a picture restorer for many years, and moved to stables in Suffolk, converted into an artist’s studio, in 1955 to raise his two children, meanwhile producing a significant body of artistic works, from lifesize sculptures to cartoons and paintings. Mallin began writing around this time, and completed his ambitious first novel, Erowina, in 1962 (published a decade later as his third). Mallin’s work was taken on by Allison & Busby in the early 1970s, and before his death to cancer in 1977, he published five novels: Dodecahedron, Knut, Erowina, Lobe and Bedrok, leaving behind many unpublished works. His play Curtains was also published around this time. Mallin’s works are striking and stifling acts of creative expression, and demonstrate a dark and fertile imagination often exploring the familiar bedfellows of sex, violence, and religion.

http://tmallin.blogspot.ie/

http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsM/m...

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mallin's third published novel, but first composed, in a brilliant surge of first-novel-overambition (which is actually a good thing). In attempted scope and drastically shifting style chapter-to-chapter, it's his Ulysses. Deliberately perhaps, given the there's a direct quote at one point, though it is the queasily memorable "smellow yellow melons" line. Why that bit? Because this is a minute personal history told through a complete trajectory of body and sex, opening with the extreme clinical detail of a coroner's report for our just-dead heroine, then moving rapidly into ribald lavatory scrawl in drunken Scots during the wake. (A sub-theme of language and voice here, as dialogue gets fragmented into varying levels of colloquialism and incoherency under alcoholic influence, and the lavatory inscription is a detailed parody of some kind officially-worded decree). Post-wake, we move directly into our heroine's history via her journals: youthful rebellion, the insanity of family, floundering relationship, lesbian bathhouse encounters. But are we reading:

1. the accurate narrative of her life
2. her own re-composed life via diary and fictionalized story
3. her life as re-written (in attempt at understanding, perhaps) by the one-time lover and doctor-turned-author who now possesses the diaries

This is fairly irresolvable and mostly background during the actual reading, though worth considering. But in any event we are visiting the development and disappointments of an entire life, and the patchwork of perspectives and voices makes sense in capturing its whole. As a patchwork, some of these fair better than others, but the high points -- the sensuously uncomfortable bathhouse, a densely psychological internal account of sex and love and personal opening up, an elaborately grotesque occult ritual, a deliriously cataclysmic return to family home and traumatic past, a final headline-triggered inquisitory encompassing the entire novel's history.

This succeeds for me over Mallin's prior Dodecahedron on its greater personal and emotional involvement, even through its far greater play with form, style, and voice. Against the detached formally-assured immolation of Dodeca, Erowina's erosion under the adverse conditions of (relatively) ordinary life is the far more convincing and affecting.

At the same time that I recognize this though, I also realize that the novel suffered somewhat under my extremely slow reading of it -- I do most of my reading on the subway and I've been largely biking these last three weeks, making it much tougher to be completely drawn in than usual. Even so, I would be intermittently totally grabbed by the deft and varied telling of this unjustly forgotten semi-encyclopedic rendering of a life experience.

...
November 2014 -- I've just re-read his over a much more compressed period of time, and which has allowed me to make a few more connections (there's a lot of metatext, and the whole thing cross-references itself continuously across the whole timeline), and to become even more convinced that it's Mallin's masterpiece.

[Tony Vacation · Rating 5 out of 5]

As wild and uproarious as it is grungy and moribund, this dark gem deserves a much more extensive review than you will find here. Reads like Joyce raised on Swans, Mike Leigh's Naked and Joris-Karl Huysmans's Là-Bas, and a must-read for fetishists whose tastes favor the word-drunk. (You know who you are!) After all, it is not every day you find a twenty page description of a female orgasm and a twenty page description of a satanic ritual in the same book. If that doesn't sound like your idea of fun, then we will never marry, I'm afraid. Get yer beautiful reprint of this criminally ignored wonder from the following link: http://www.verbivoraciouspress.org/er...

[Fede · Rating 5 out of 5]

The hardest thing to conceive is not one's death: it's one's life. Or rather, how one's life is perceived by the others.
What remains of us after our death is but a handful of fragmented, faulty, defective and desperately unreliable images each of our acquaintances has been conjuring up in his mind for his own use. Thus our death deprives them of the tenuous bond between their idea of us and the inner territory none of them was able to trespass on: our identity.
That bond is our body. Our flesh. The border nobody can really cross, ever.

Erowina.
Heroine. Heroin. Eroina.
Eros.
Erowina, or: The Restlessly Shattered Being,
or: The Eternally Raped Consciousness.

Erowina has many identities, none of which is either fake nor real. She has as many names as lovers and acquaintances.
Erowina's truth is haphazardly scattered among her lies, and all her lies are infused with her truth.
Erowina has been variously and repeatedly abused until she willingly joined her abusers. She's the Everlastingly Wounded One - come full circle.
Erowina is shameless and guiltless. Her pain is as protean as her pleasure, the bubbling magma of an ambivalent sexuality.
Erowina takes her own life at the age of 36, when her lifelong work of self-erosion is finally completed.
The moment I realised what an intimate cord this book would strike, I gave up trying to understand it and started to adore it: I surrendered to its (black) magic.

How martyred the erotic body can be.
How blurred the line between who we are and who we've become; how hard to choose who we want to be, in the eyes of the world as well as in our own.
How meaningless to discern between the two, when the quest for the identity gets inextricably entangled with the exploitation of the body.
Because Erowina has no clue who she actually is, and neither does the reader. In a way, she's the most reliable narrator, inasmuch as she makes no attempt to conceal her total unreliability: nothing she says can be ascertained, as there is no way to even ascertain whose voice we're actually listening to in each of these twenty chapters.
The parallels between Mallin's book and Joyce's "Ulysses" are indeed obvious, at least with regards to both the concept and the effect on the reader. An autopsy report, first- and third-person narration, dreamscapes, surreal tales, theological conversations between Erowina and her lovers (a male Jewish pornographer and a Catholic married lady), pun-riddled dialogues, stream of consciousness, diary excerpts, newspaper clippings... the protagonist's unbalanced identity is thus mirrored by a bewildering proliferation of viewpoints and perspectives, as well as by the inherent variety of writing styles it implies. Ranging from what a reviewer aptly calls an 'ethereal' scene of sapphic sex to the explicit description of a black mass, not to mention Erowina's teenage dabbling with S/M and quite a few morbid episodes involving her relatives, all the information we're able to gather is a chaotic assemblage of pictures whose chronological order is but the ultimate deception.

This woman has escaped an abusive, non-affective family; had questionable juvenile experiences, partners of both sexes and a miscarriage. She's beautiful yet full of insecurities - her age, her weight, her failed attempt at motherhood, a hidden birthmark. She's practiced magick and self-mutilation, written poetry and dated authors and artists; she's erudite and unstable. She lives in a Swinging London tinged with gloomy hues, where elusive ghosts lurk in seedy nightclubs, Turkish baths and neon-lit corners.
Ambiguous, obscene, cerebral, disquietingly farcical: what's left of her existence sheds no light whatsoever on either her life or her death. All her mysteries are still safe, somehow, somewhere.

This is the story of a multifaceted non-existence. Erowina, shapelessness of the self haunting the memories of those who never knew her.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A breathtaking book, with some astonishing bursts of creative writing. The chapter where Erowina is making love (Alter Ego) is amongst my favourite ever sequences in a novel - not erotic but... ethereal. This fair dazzled me as a teenager, yet I'm not even sure I understood what was going on at times. Still, I came away in awe of Mallin, and of this book in particular.