The Passion According to G.H.

[Patrick]

** 1/2

Nearly 200 pages to describe a mystical experience undergone by sculptress G.H. when she squashed a cockraoch against the doorframe of her maid's bedroom. The writing is nice and exalted, but I failed to grasp what was the point of all this. Maybe there was a symbolic aspect I was blind to. Let's start analysing here: the initials G.H. are exactly the pair of letters within 3 letters from the author's initials (C.L.). Am I on the right track?

[Rosemary]

A young woman goes to clean out a room in her apartment and finds some disturbing things, including a big fat cockroach. She embarks on a long introspective "stream of consciousness" monologue, which I found fascinating - I think the experience is the point and how it forces her to reconsider every aspect of her life from her relationship with her maid (or lack of it) to her interactions with friends and lovers. She has been self-centred and entitled and she's suddenly shaken out of that.

The descriptions of her interaction with the cockroach are sometimes disgusting. I have lived with cockroaches in warmer countries, and I have been traumatised by the big black ones that fly and land on you if you make the mistake of wearing a white T-shirt at night, but it was a long time ago so I just about coped with this. I gave it 4 stars but you have been warned.

The cockroach is the scene-stealer, but I think the crude drawings that she finds on the wall of her maid's room are the primary transformative force.

I am fascinated by the word "passion" and how it has come to mean strong and usually positive emotion when the Latin root means "suffer or endure" and in Christianity it refers to Christ's suffering on the cross. In the title of this book I suppose it has the Latin/Christian meaning and refers to the endurance of a life-changing moment that is a terrible epiphany.

[George P.]

I'm halfway through this strange novel and wondering if I'm going to be able to finish it. I had hopes I would find comments here to spur me on. When I finish I will come back and delete this most likely. If I haven't done so by the end of January it will mean that I gave it up.

[Jenna]

4.5 rounded down because I think to get to 5 stars I would need to re-read, almost bath in it. Because it is full of seeking, both intellectual and also linguistic, the two together. A few hours spent trying to articulate the meaning of life to oneself, to strip away identity and find existence. Meditation is a wordless path to this same place, how much harder to get there with words, but how important to try if we are to understand each other.

I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity," our hands that are coarse and full of words.