Would it be necessary to pursue fleeing women into those ravished buildings? Would inmates and volunteers grapple with each other in dark rooms where ordinarily and under lock and key these same women slept during their endless and unnatural nights? In the midst of his fellows and standing inside the walls of La Violaine at last, suddenly he began to feel that he recognized the yard, the buildings, the catacombs and labyrinths of this world of women, as if he too were a prisoner in this very place and had always been so.
-pg 50 (Dalkey Archive ed)
The man referred to here is Konrad Vost, a widower who lives in a nameless city attached to a large women's prison called La Violaine. Vost lives an unremarkable life marked more by routine and habit than anything else, and aside from the demands of work and keeping his spare house in order for the sake of his daughter, he makes a daily visit to a cafe across from the prison, which is also called La Violaine, where the husbands and relatives of the incarcerated women all wait, each day, more as a ritual act of devotion than out of any expectation that their wives, daughters, or mothers will be freed. The woman for whom Vost waits is his mother, who is serving time for murdering Vost's father.
The only remarkable aspect of Vost's life is that it is defined by women, and not only by their mere absence or presence in his life, but also by their transgressions against him. His mother kills his father, his wife sleeps with another man, and, as the narrative unfolds, we find out that his daughter, far from being the perfect picture of a young student, has taken up prostitution. Later on, we come to find out that Vost's entire life has been one of suffered indignity at the hands of women, but in the story it is his daughter's turn toward prostitution that seems to jolt him into action. As soon as he finds out, he haplessly hires one of his daughter's schoolmates, who is a prostitute as well, and that marks the beginning of Vost's initial transformation into a man who is striving against the power that women seem to have had over his entire life.
After his tryst with the girl, the women in the prison riot, revolt and take control of the prison, forcing the men in the city to organize a response. Vost joins in and takes part in the battle for the prison, trading sex for violence in his struggle against women, and the violent and sex-filled narrative that follows is a peculiar odyssey of discovery and revelation, wherein Vost comes to understand and break free of the prison of his misogyny.
Thematically, the book runs the risk of being precious, or pat, but it is the way in which it is told that allows the book its modest success; Hawkes's nightmare-dread prose is operating at the same high caliber you would expect if you had read any of his other books. The physicality of the theme and the action matches well with his sensual style, and the horror intrinsic in his internal life is heightened by the dream-like quality of his writing. But, and there always seems to be a but for me when speaking of Hawkes, the book is not one of the best of his that I have read, and even the prose seems not to rise as high in its achievement as it does in, say, The Beetle Leg or The Lime Twig. Nevertheless, I know of no other book that treats the subject of misogyny so frighteningly, and Vost's strange cast of mind becomes, by the end, entirely familiar, even if its starting point of upended gender roles seems so alien at the beginning.
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