Tag: women

The Pull of the Stars: A message contaminated by melodrama

(Owing to time constraints, I have not consolidated our group members’ reflections into a single document. I present them as more or less individual conversational snippets.)

The title The Pull of the Stars draws it meaning from the Latin word influentia, “to flow into “and comes from an Italian superstition that the stars were having an influence on health. Emma Donahue began her book in 2018, one hundred years after the influenza pandemic, and the book was published in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic descended on the globe.

I enjoyed the writing and the stories, but I did not think the three main characters, Julia, Bridie, and Dr. Kathleen Lynn were well developed. The closet ward to which maternity patients with flu-like symptoms were dispatched was an interesting lens through which to view contemporary Dublin society with its privileged and poverty-stricken classes, the aftermath of the Easter uprising and the consequence of unwanted pregnancy. The story was equally interesting in that it placed men and the consequences of war in the background of women’s lives. As additional background, we were referred to A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle which describes the first twenty years of Henry’s adventure-filled life in early twentieth-century Ireland.

‘Another plague book’, I didn’t enjoy it. Not as good as Room nor as The Barbary Plague by Marilyn Chase which was about the epidemic of bubonic plague centered on San Francisco’s Chinatown. I agree that the characters were not well developed.

I liked that the book was divided into parts but I found the setting very confining (forgive the pun) and thought the book could do without the last 20 pages. I didn’t like the absence of quotation marks. I found the initial description of bicycling to the hospital evoked memories of our experience of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. I didn’t mind Part 1 which includes a graphic picture of childbirth including stillbirth but Part 2 contained more blood and gore as did Part 3 with its more difficult births, but the babies survived. Part 4 was overly dramatic and demonstrated the harm caused by relaxed interpretation of public health advice.

This book provided a vivid picture of the fate women suffered in this religiously dominated patriarchal society. I became angry over the injustice to women, their value attributed to their baby producing capacity, the cavalier use of pubiotomy as an obstetrical tool and the horrific treatment to which orphans and unwed mothers were subject.

Donoghue packed a lot into this book. I enjoyed it. I got really steamed about the Catholic Church and the social conditions. I found the descriptions in the early part of the book quite evocative.

I thought the first half of the book was much better than the second. I appreciated that the author had done a tremendous amount of research. And some of the material felt very real. However, the lack of character development and the turn of events in the last part left me with the impression of a sort of Harlequin romance novel.

I really liked it. I thought it was well written and her research was fantastic. I liked the historical aspects and the use of an actual person in the role of the woman doctor. I disagree with those who felt the characters were not developed as I felt in touch with them very quickly. I can remember in the 50s in Montreal that there were orphanages full of unwanted children. Basically, we were taken there to do charity work. I certainly don not fault those, mostly Catholic, institutions for taking unwanted children, only for abusing them.

For me, I had a sense of the characters very quickly. I was unaware of some of the issues that were explored—the ignorance around childbirth, the midwifery challenges, the valuing of women as reproductive stock, and the questionable empathy of the male physicians. I appreciated the author’s presentation of the pandemic from a different perspective.

My mother had the ‘flu’ and survived; at the time she was in boarding school. I am familiar with families of more than ten children. And their circumstances and the welfare of the children varied from good to bad. So that’s what happened in the past. I liked this book, but I think the author went overboard with the roof scene and the baby snatch. The ending spoiled the beginning and turned it into an Irish dirge.

For me, this book recalled my Project Literacy experience with a Mount Cashel survivor who showed up illiterate in our program at 60 years of age. From that encounter I learned that despite the travails people endure, there exists within them the spirit to overcome great difficulties.

I had the feeling that too much was piled on without allowing time for introspection. The dilemma was carefully delivered followed by an impromptu fantasy vision for the future!

Our Rating

The Silence of the Girls: a heroic gesture?

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker caught our readers’ attention readily with Achilles reputedly saying to Apollo ‘But we both know if you weren’t immortal, you’d be dead’. However, we found reading became more difficult quickly as the material in the book was brutal—not life as a woman wants it—with women and children treated as chattel. Yet, perhaps due to the quality of the narrative, we were engaged. “I looked forward to reading a chapter or two each night when I went to bed.”

We were confronted with a grim portrait of male culture—fighting all day and drinking all night, and a hopeless picture of women’s life—enslaved, brutalized and toiling, where the afterlife was the main hope for solace.

We found the introduction of so many characters interrupted the reading experience—who’s on first and who is playing, and what was their nature—who are the gods, the demigods, and the ordinary mortals?

In a departure from our usual format, we explored how the book raised “Then & Now” questions. Firstly, we discussed the continuing use of rape as a weapon of war, and the recent report from the Ukraine where 25 women in an occupied shelter were repeatedly raped for the purpose of ensuring that they would never produce a Ukrainian baby. Our group lamented with sadness how this echoed the low value assigned to women in Homeric times and the reported contemporary concern that refugee women may end up being housed by predators. One member remarked upon the concurrence of infectious disease and war, the plague during the Trojan war and COVID-19 during the Ukrainian invasion, and the associated blaming games. We noted the remarkable perversity of Apollo as god of healing/music and plague/vengeance.

We debated the use of modern idiom to describe the sexual violence. Many found these descriptions jarring and questioned the need to use them. Upon reflection we, and possibly the author, realized we had no way of knowing what words the women from 1200 BCE would have used to describe those events and their circumstances. And recognized that the author wanted to be graphic about the pain experienced by the women. Furthermore, we appreciated that from the beginning of the book there was little evidence that the narrative language was rooted in the past.

“This is a very brave topic for the author to have chosen”, commented one member. Modern knowledge of the period in which the Iliad was written and the time in which the supposed events occurred is limited. It is likely that our knowledge of male culture during those times exceeds our knowledge of female culture. We can criticize what the author chose to develop and what she left fuzzy. Nonetheless, the group shared the concern that it was difficult to locate in the place where the action was happening and found the use of modern language a barrier to transcending from now to then. There was a suggestion that the presentation of this material in verse form with a chorus (like the original) might have been more appealing.

Many commented upon ‘missed opportunities’ related to character development but we realized that Pat Barker may have heard that we did not want to include a book with more than 400 pages on our reading list.