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Arusha
Edith Rignaldi clearly understands that she and husband Joe remain together for the sake of their children. It is why they married in the first place. But she never foresaw the lifeless emotional landscape they both now occupy after eighteen years together.
Teachers in a small, God-fearing Tennessee town, they cannot insulate themselves entirely from the cultural encroachment of the late ’80 the inexorable march of the feminist and gay rights movements, the spread of the AIDS epidemic. When the faithful, steadfast Joe is finally overwhelmed by his desire for men, the lives of all four Rignaldis explode.
With the town turned against the disgraced family, the teenaged children Dana and Jeremy repudiate their parents to seek their own answers. And as for Edith–a woman named Linda enters her life. A woman unlike any Edith has ever known.
The journey of Edith and Linda lands them in an African town named Arusha, on a godly mission to witness the Rwanda peace talks. It is a place where Edith will face the ultimate challenge to her emotionally and sexually shut-down life and to everything she has ever believed in.
Arusha is the compelling story of four achingly real people–and you will not soon forget any of them.
Teachers in a small, God-fearing Tennessee town, they cannot insulate themselves entirely from the cultural encroachment of the late ’80 the inexorable march of the feminist and gay rights movements, the spread of the AIDS epidemic. When the faithful, steadfast Joe is finally overwhelmed by his desire for men, the lives of all four Rignaldis explode.
With the town turned against the disgraced family, the teenaged children Dana and Jeremy repudiate their parents to seek their own answers. And as for Edith–a woman named Linda enters her life. A woman unlike any Edith has ever known.
The journey of Edith and Linda lands them in an African town named Arusha, on a godly mission to witness the Rwanda peace talks. It is a place where Edith will face the ultimate challenge to her emotionally and sexually shut-down life and to everything she has ever believed in.
Arusha is the compelling story of four achingly real people–and you will not soon forget any of them.
- GenresLGBT
318 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
1 person is currently reading
21 people want to read
About the author
J.E. Knowles
5 books11 followersJ.E. Knowles's first novel, Arusha, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and her second is The Trees in the Field. She has also edited Faith in Writing, a collection of essays.
She grew up in Carter County, Tennessee, and was first published in Phoenix at the age of seventeen. She then went to the University of Chicago, where she earned a B.A. and was a member of the Grey City Journal Editorial Collective. She also holds a Diploma in Jewish Studies from Oxford.
Her stories and poems have appeared in Chicago Poet, the Chicago Literary Review, Writer's Block, Canadian Writer's Journal, Read These Lips, QWERTY, and Toe to Toe: Standing Tall and Proud. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, and her columns appeared for six years in the lesbian and gay biweekly Xtra!
She moved to England on the same day that Mary Travers died.
She grew up in Carter County, Tennessee, and was first published in Phoenix at the age of seventeen. She then went to the University of Chicago, where she earned a B.A. and was a member of the Grey City Journal Editorial Collective. She also holds a Diploma in Jewish Studies from Oxford.
Her stories and poems have appeared in Chicago Poet, the Chicago Literary Review, Writer's Block, Canadian Writer's Journal, Read These Lips, QWERTY, and Toe to Toe: Standing Tall and Proud. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, and her columns appeared for six years in the lesbian and gay biweekly Xtra!
She moved to England on the same day that Mary Travers died.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 3, 2024
I gave this book 2 stars because I expected to read a novel about, or mostly set in, Arusha. Since my trip to Tanzania last fall, I am interested in reading about the country. Imagine my “surprise” when about 10% of the entire book actually were about a short trip to Tanzania. I’m guessing the author wrote roughly 25 pages, poorly if at all researched, about a Safari offered by some church in Tennessee. These few pages contained silly tidbits, such as “They saw giraffes.” Giraffes on Safari, well I’ll be damned. The actual premise of the church trip, to bear witness to the Arusha peace talks about Rwanda, never materialized. The novel was heavily into the bible and religion, both of which I dislike reading about, and about homosexuality. Three quarters into the book I was seriously wondering, if I had gotten the synopsis mixed up with another novel. It felt like a bait and switch. Awful!
January 8, 2010
Edith Rignaldi, the forty-something wife and mother at the heart of this novel, lives a life of quiet desperation in small-town Tennessee until her family falls apart and she begins to discover herself.
The narrative voice shifts from Edith’s viewpoint to those of her husband Joe, her son Jeremy and her daughter Dana. All the viewpoints are handled sensitively and clearly-enough not to confuse the reader.
The author knows her territory. The suffocating community of Poudre Valley, Tennessee (site of a munitions factory during the American War of Independence in the 1770s, named in honor of the French allies of the American colonists) is dominated by the Methodist morality that Edith grew up with, and its chief mouthpiece in the book is her Aunt Anna, who brings God into every conversation. Edith is a Grade Eight science teacher who considers herself conservative at the beginning of the book because she more-or-less accepts the family values that her family has practiced for generations.
During the scene-setting chapters, the reader learns that Joe is sexually frustrated and that Edith simply accepts the fact that sex only happens when a couple wants to make a baby. Slowly, it becomes clear that Joe and Edith have had a pact from the time he proposed to her in 1970. He knew then that he was attracted to men, but he wanted children and was terrified of the dismal fate of known homosexuals. He loves Edith in his own way, and she loves him in hers, so for almost twenty years they have coexisted in a marriage they both jokingly describe as “arranged.”
Joe (Guiseppi) is one of the most heartbreaking characters in the novel. Edith met him in Chicago, where she went to university, and he agreed to move to her home in Tennessee, where he was bound to be seen as an exotic outsider; his family is Italian Catholic. Soon after the wedding, Joe’s mother Isabella moved south to join the young couple. She lives next door, often cooks for the family, and bicycles to Mass every Sunday while Edith, Joe and the kids go to their own church. For years, Joe seems happy enough teaching elementary school, since he loves the innocent company of children.
Jeremy, the firstborn, seems inarticulate and unreachable to his mother, although he expresses himself by playing the guitar. He and his slightly-younger sister Dana seethe with teenage frustration and a visceral knowledge that their family is not really as it appears to be. Sixteen-year-old Dana calls most of the adults in her life “hypocrites.” When Jeremy has his first epileptic seizure, this is the catalyst that starts shaking the family apart.
Is this really a lesbian novel? Yes, but the woman-to-woman attraction doesn’t appear until more than halfway through the narrative, and then it only reaches fruition (so to speak) when Edith, her daughter Dana and their two close female friends go on a once-in-lifetime trip to Arusha, a town in east Africa where actual peace talks in 1993 failed to prevent the slaughter of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda. Somehow the horrific violence in an African country is meant to echo the conflict in Edith’s life.
Edith’s disturbing (to her) crush on Linda, a woman she met in an Episcopalian women’s Bible-study group, is presented as the real love that Edith has unconsciously been seeking all her life. Like Joe, Linda loves children so much that she has been willing to accept low-paid child-minding jobs all her life, and she has gained wisdom through suffering. Unlike Joe, Linda is sexually attracted to Edith and she literally seems like a godsend, although Edith is unable to accept a sexual relationship with her until near the end of the book.
This novel consists of several different plots which are each well-presented, but which don’t create a coherent effect. The murder-mystery subplot is suspenseful and resolved in a way that is both intellectually satisfying and emotionally convincing. The descriptions of the small Rignaldi family home, in which everyone desperately needs privacy once in awhile, and where spaghetti stains and knife gouges in the kitchen floor suggest warfare, work equally well on a literal and a symbolic level.
Just as there are subtle cracks in the “agreement” between Edith and Joe at the beginning of the book, there are subtle discrepancies between what the author tells us and what she shows us. Edith claims that she became a science teacher because chemical reactions are indisputable even when shown (or explained) by a woman. However, her stream of consciousness largely consists of word-games: puns and verbal associations. She thinks more like a novelist than like someone who sees the world in scientific terms, yet we are not told that she wants to stop teaching science so that she can write a novel like the one in which she appears. Edith’s awareness of the AIDS pandemic could have led her to think about the biological processes involved, yet it does not.
The reader is teased with questions about Dana’s emerging sexuality. Is she a lesbian with a crush on her worldly-wise roommate? Is she bisexual? Dana steadfastly remains “asexual” (her term for herself) throughout four years of university. She is clearly interested in people but not in sex as such, and this seems to be a quality she inherited from her mother.
Descriptions of the American cultural zeitgeist of the 1980s and ‘90s in this book work better for this reviewer than references to American “conservatism” in the late 1960s and ‘70s. That was the era of Janis Joplin’s famous formula for staying fit: “sex and drugs and rock-and-roll.” It seems unlikely that two students at the University of Chicago in that time would be completely unaware of contemporary social upheavals: the creation of a birth-control pill that helped launch the “sexual revolution,” the Stonewall Riots that kicked off the “gay rights” movement, “women’s lib,” “Black Power” and riots in the ghettos, the slogan that “God is Dead.” Students like Edith and Joe might well have been frightened into a pact to lead a traditional life together, but they would have been aware of making a choice.
The descriptions of wildlife and architecture in Tanzania are colorful, and the conversations about the morality of tourism are thought-provoking, but the claim that the four women are going there as “witnesses” in a Christian sense, rather than as tourists, seems hollow. They are on a tour rather than a mission of any kind, and although one of the women is of African descent and has some knowledge of several languages, none of them has any chance of influencing political events in the region. The massacre in Rwanda ultimately looks like a red herring or a digression from the major issues that have already been introduced.
However, the author knows how to set a scene and introduce characters that can be imagined living in the real world. For patient readers who are not looking for lots of hot lesbian sex, this book is a rewarding read.
-------------
The narrative voice shifts from Edith’s viewpoint to those of her husband Joe, her son Jeremy and her daughter Dana. All the viewpoints are handled sensitively and clearly-enough not to confuse the reader.
The author knows her territory. The suffocating community of Poudre Valley, Tennessee (site of a munitions factory during the American War of Independence in the 1770s, named in honor of the French allies of the American colonists) is dominated by the Methodist morality that Edith grew up with, and its chief mouthpiece in the book is her Aunt Anna, who brings God into every conversation. Edith is a Grade Eight science teacher who considers herself conservative at the beginning of the book because she more-or-less accepts the family values that her family has practiced for generations.
During the scene-setting chapters, the reader learns that Joe is sexually frustrated and that Edith simply accepts the fact that sex only happens when a couple wants to make a baby. Slowly, it becomes clear that Joe and Edith have had a pact from the time he proposed to her in 1970. He knew then that he was attracted to men, but he wanted children and was terrified of the dismal fate of known homosexuals. He loves Edith in his own way, and she loves him in hers, so for almost twenty years they have coexisted in a marriage they both jokingly describe as “arranged.”
Joe (Guiseppi) is one of the most heartbreaking characters in the novel. Edith met him in Chicago, where she went to university, and he agreed to move to her home in Tennessee, where he was bound to be seen as an exotic outsider; his family is Italian Catholic. Soon after the wedding, Joe’s mother Isabella moved south to join the young couple. She lives next door, often cooks for the family, and bicycles to Mass every Sunday while Edith, Joe and the kids go to their own church. For years, Joe seems happy enough teaching elementary school, since he loves the innocent company of children.
Jeremy, the firstborn, seems inarticulate and unreachable to his mother, although he expresses himself by playing the guitar. He and his slightly-younger sister Dana seethe with teenage frustration and a visceral knowledge that their family is not really as it appears to be. Sixteen-year-old Dana calls most of the adults in her life “hypocrites.” When Jeremy has his first epileptic seizure, this is the catalyst that starts shaking the family apart.
Is this really a lesbian novel? Yes, but the woman-to-woman attraction doesn’t appear until more than halfway through the narrative, and then it only reaches fruition (so to speak) when Edith, her daughter Dana and their two close female friends go on a once-in-lifetime trip to Arusha, a town in east Africa where actual peace talks in 1993 failed to prevent the slaughter of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda. Somehow the horrific violence in an African country is meant to echo the conflict in Edith’s life.
Edith’s disturbing (to her) crush on Linda, a woman she met in an Episcopalian women’s Bible-study group, is presented as the real love that Edith has unconsciously been seeking all her life. Like Joe, Linda loves children so much that she has been willing to accept low-paid child-minding jobs all her life, and she has gained wisdom through suffering. Unlike Joe, Linda is sexually attracted to Edith and she literally seems like a godsend, although Edith is unable to accept a sexual relationship with her until near the end of the book.
This novel consists of several different plots which are each well-presented, but which don’t create a coherent effect. The murder-mystery subplot is suspenseful and resolved in a way that is both intellectually satisfying and emotionally convincing. The descriptions of the small Rignaldi family home, in which everyone desperately needs privacy once in awhile, and where spaghetti stains and knife gouges in the kitchen floor suggest warfare, work equally well on a literal and a symbolic level.
Just as there are subtle cracks in the “agreement” between Edith and Joe at the beginning of the book, there are subtle discrepancies between what the author tells us and what she shows us. Edith claims that she became a science teacher because chemical reactions are indisputable even when shown (or explained) by a woman. However, her stream of consciousness largely consists of word-games: puns and verbal associations. She thinks more like a novelist than like someone who sees the world in scientific terms, yet we are not told that she wants to stop teaching science so that she can write a novel like the one in which she appears. Edith’s awareness of the AIDS pandemic could have led her to think about the biological processes involved, yet it does not.
The reader is teased with questions about Dana’s emerging sexuality. Is she a lesbian with a crush on her worldly-wise roommate? Is she bisexual? Dana steadfastly remains “asexual” (her term for herself) throughout four years of university. She is clearly interested in people but not in sex as such, and this seems to be a quality she inherited from her mother.
Descriptions of the American cultural zeitgeist of the 1980s and ‘90s in this book work better for this reviewer than references to American “conservatism” in the late 1960s and ‘70s. That was the era of Janis Joplin’s famous formula for staying fit: “sex and drugs and rock-and-roll.” It seems unlikely that two students at the University of Chicago in that time would be completely unaware of contemporary social upheavals: the creation of a birth-control pill that helped launch the “sexual revolution,” the Stonewall Riots that kicked off the “gay rights” movement, “women’s lib,” “Black Power” and riots in the ghettos, the slogan that “God is Dead.” Students like Edith and Joe might well have been frightened into a pact to lead a traditional life together, but they would have been aware of making a choice.
The descriptions of wildlife and architecture in Tanzania are colorful, and the conversations about the morality of tourism are thought-provoking, but the claim that the four women are going there as “witnesses” in a Christian sense, rather than as tourists, seems hollow. They are on a tour rather than a mission of any kind, and although one of the women is of African descent and has some knowledge of several languages, none of them has any chance of influencing political events in the region. The massacre in Rwanda ultimately looks like a red herring or a digression from the major issues that have already been introduced.
However, the author knows how to set a scene and introduce characters that can be imagined living in the real world. For patient readers who are not looking for lots of hot lesbian sex, this book is a rewarding read.
-------------
May 15, 2021
I try to read as little of the blurb/synopsis as possible for a book because I don't want to have any expectations of the characters or plot. That being said, I knew nothing about this book, but had read positive comments about the author in a Facebook group. So, I gambled, and bought it.
This book isn't a love story, but it *is* about love. It's about a family with a son and daughter, and their lives going through trials and tribulations, and self realizations from about 1970-1994. It touches on a few significant historical events during those years, and how they effected the family. It's about family secrets and sacrifices. Mostly, it's about life.
This book isn't a love story, but it *is* about love. It's about a family with a son and daughter, and their lives going through trials and tribulations, and self realizations from about 1970-1994. It touches on a few significant historical events during those years, and how they effected the family. It's about family secrets and sacrifices. Mostly, it's about life.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews