FAUSTINE.

by Emma Tennant

"'...I met the sad menopausee and offered her, at the flick of a switch, a return of beauty, youth, and desire. And - after all, I'm no stinge-merchant - power and money as well. Why not? If a man, such as Dr Faustus, was offered such commodities by myself... why not a woman, in this age of equality?'"

Emma Tennant's modern-day reworking of the Faust legend describes a young woman's dark discovery of just what befell her kindly long-lost grandmother.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Contemporary

140 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Since the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-thirties, Emma Tennant has been a prolific novelist and has established herself as one of the leading British exponents of "new fiction." This does not mean that she is an imitator of either the French nouveaux romanciers or the American post-modernists, although her work reveals an indebtedness to the methods and preoccupations of some of the latter. Like them, she employs parody and rewriting, is interested in the fictiveness of fiction, appropriates some science-fiction conventions, and exploits the possibilities of generic dislocation and mutation, especially the blending of realism and fantasy. Yet, although parallels can be cited and influences suggested, her work is strongly individual, the product of an intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, attempt to create an original type of highly imaginative fiction.

Reviews

[Harold · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry but that was completely dreadful. Awful narrative and even worse prose.

[Blue Hole · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the very best books by my very favourite author. A loose retelling of Faustus located in the hidden magical history of the twilight years of the failed 60's spirit.

I could gush on and on about the prose style, which is really unlike anything else. Her supposed contemporaries such as Ballard and M J Harrison are only really superficially similar, and do not come close to the level of social and psychological canniness with which Tennant is possessed. But for sake of convenience, she shares with Ballard the dreamy oversaturation of imagistic language, which piles up like autumn leaf fall and endures in the memory despite not making an awful lot of immediate sense. Flowers are given free reign to droop "like machetes" and "make a golden blur, as if another kind of sun might rise here."

And with Harrison there is the magical realist cynicism. A sustained bitterness, the sense of a disappointment so elaborate and pervasive that it goes beyond a critique of politics or the social order, seeming to represent an actual negation of happiness and good feeling. In the simple network of characters (trapped more often than not in the cobweb gloom between apartment corridors and brickwork housing units) there is an urgent frustration with the limits of reality itself. I like how Tennant remains thoroughly cold and opaque, never indulging in a disgust response.

The understated "icky" content in the narrative is sure to rub some the wrong way, and like some of her other work (Particularly "Woman Beware Woman" and "Alice Fell") there is some rather stark criticism of her characters' failings which operate on an explicitly gendered logic.

Dang this is such a sweet book 10/10,, bon appeiti

[Pippa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A clever reworking of an old myth.