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The Tattooed Heart and My Name Is Rose

Lidia Yuknavitch Autor Theodora Keogh
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 30 apr 2014 – vârsta de la 17 ani
The Tattooed Heart finds June Grey dreaming a summer alone with her grandmother in a large isolated house at Grey's Neck on the Long Island shore. Wooded hills surround the house and gives way to beach and sea. It is there she meets Ronny, a young man still firmly anchored in the fantasies of childhood. The young couple becomes cruelly caught in the complicated motives and desires of their elders as their erotic summer draws to a close.

My Name Is Rose is an equal mix of journal entry and conventional narrative. Keogh's novel is an unwavering “examination of conscience” by a young wife whose marriage is breaking up after seven years. Original in perception, story, and a highly personal idiom, My Name is Rose is an enthralling work alive with the mystery and pulsating quality of life.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781940436012
ISBN-10: 194043601X
Pagini: 260
Dimensiuni: 167 x 207 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Editura: Pharos Editions

Notă biografică

Theodora Keogh, the granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, wrote nine novels between 1950 and 1962. A complicated and captivating prose stylist, her work has been compared with that of Patricia Highsmith for its psychological depth and complex, often morally conflicted characters. Appearing as they did midway in her brief career, these two novels provide a wonderful introduction to this overlooked author.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of Dora: A Headcase, and The Chronology of Water, as well as three works of short fiction. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction International, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She received the 2011 Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award. She lives in Portland.

Extras

My Name is Rose and The Tattooed Heart by Theodora Keogh
“Digging for Matter: Theodora Keogh: An Introduction” by Lidia Yuknavitch

Lately, I’ve taken to digging up women.

What I mean is, I’ve become obsessed with going back and down and under to find women writers whose work made it possible for the rest of us, for the present tense of us, to “matter”. I’ve developed this obsession in relation to finding the “market” for women writers in the present to be an abject abyss of dead tropes and formulaic forms, whereas the “matter” in the writing that came before us, even from dead women, remains astonishingly generative.

As my profound case study I give you Theodora Keogh, a novelist who wrote nine novels in the 1950’s and 60’s that, to be modest, blew the doors and windows off of what we mean when we say “women’s writing.” When we say “women’s writing” today, unfortunately, we mean a subset of writing entirely dictated by market-driven gatekeepers of money-making products. Whereas Theodora Keogh’s novels perform the act, the verb, the glorious excess of an actual woman writing. Writing through her body, to be precise. Without flinching or pulling punches.

Imagine that.

Her debut novel, Meg, is about a 12-year old girl who drifts away from her private school friends toward the streets where she is raped. She published Meg in 1950. That was where Theodora Keogh began. Think about that for a minute. From there she went on to publish The Double Door, a novel in which a cloistered teen heiress finds a secret door and ends up making love with her father’s paid male lover, The Fascinator, where a young girl is seduced by a sculptor, Gemini, an incest and murder narrative about twins, Street Music, a story in which a music critic falls desperately in love with a child criminal, and The Other Girl, a fictionalized retelling of the Black Dahlia murder.

And it wasn’t just her themes that ruptured the literary landscape. The formal moves she performed in each novel were every bit as daring as her contemporary male counterparts—which is probably the least interesting thing I could say, so I’ll say this as well: her formal moves interrogated subjectivity from the specific site of a woman’s body.

Like many of her characters, she also lived a full and novel-worthy life in France. She was dancer. She was friends with all things and people Paris Review, including the Plimptons. She was a designer, she worked for Vogue, she divorced and remarried, she bought a tugboat and married its captain, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel, she divorced and remarried again.

She kept a Margay as a pet; it nibbled her ear into a different shape.

And she wrote nine formidable novels.

So why haven’t you heard of her?

It’s a good question, isn’t it?

With Pharos’ re-release of My Name is Rose and The Tattooed Heart, we can turn away from the glitz and gleam of the market, away from “women’s writing,” and look back at what a woman writing looked like on the page. In My Name is Rose, by alternating between first person and third person, Theodora gives us an unhappily married woman who writes her second self alive through a passionate affair only available in the pages of her journal. A passionate affair with an underage boy. What emerges is the crisis between two women—the women we are from the inside-out and the women we are told to be by cultural scripts of “wife” and “mother.” Written in 1956.

Similarly, in The Tattooed Heart, a girl nearing adolescence spends a summer with her grandmother and discovers a younger boy in the wooded hills of the Long Island shore. The two revel in the younger boy’s childhood fantasies, almost as if it is possible to hover at the cusp of things, until the adult world around them shatters the possibility space of sexuality and creativity.

It’s as if all of her novels meant to explore the form and content of passion—what territories of the body, life and language are available?

As Joan Schenkar wrote in her wonderful essay “The Late, Great, Theodora Keogh” which appeared in The Paris Review Daily, “But if passion is Keogh’s real subject, it’s also the wrecking ball in her democracy of desire. In each of her books, passion equalizes class, age, race, and identity.”

Thrillingly, then, we get a chance to go back, down, under. Like Anais Nin. Like Virginia Woolf. Like Gertrude Stein. Like Marguerite Duras. Like Djuna Barnes. Other women writing who I keep digging up to reassure myself that we always already knew exactly what we were, and are, doing.

Lidia Yuknavitch