The Book That Did Not Want to Be Read

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It’s really hard to describe the book and do it justice, but suffice to say it has been an instant hit in our house. It’s a very special kind of reading adventure that would make a great addition to any home library.

Motherhood was an institution fathered by masculine consciousness. This male consciousness was male unconsciousness. It needed its female partners who were also mothers to stamp on her own desires and attend to his desires, and then to everyone else's desires. We had a go at cancelling our own desires. and found we had a talent for it." Overconsumption: “he understood that with more came less. That there was an equilibrium to life, and that with everything you gained you lost something as well, in the same measure, so that whatever further bliss was available to him would have to be paid with equal degrees of pain. He had just one life, not two, meaning more was an illusion, a traitorous chimera.” I had been told to say my thoughts out loud and not just in my head but I decided to write them down."As I read this I kept thinking of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft where Stephen King warns idealistic authors not to focus on themes in their fiction. Just write a good story, he says, and the themes will evolve. I wondered whether Jonathan Miles followed this advice. Certainly the novel didn't suffer for this, but the themes were prominent and it's hard to imagine he didn't work from theme --> story as opposed to the other way around.

Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure- and unhappy too- but never as miserable as the twenty-first- century Neopatriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled. We were to be Strong Modern Women while being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong. Aesthetic Enthusiasm" - The final part of Levy's essay is the shortest. Here she sums up her thoughts on why she, this woman, writes. This totally weird book is well worth a read. But only if you’re up to the challenge! You’ve been warned. Deborah Levy was asked to write a response to George Orwell's essay "Why I Write." She uses the four motives he proposed as titles for the four parts of her essay, Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing.

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Finally we return to Majorca for "Aesthetic Experience" where a Chinese shopkeeper advises her that sometimes we have to know when to stop and where she meditates on Apollinaire’s line "The window opens like an orange". She wonders "What do we do with the things we do not want to know?" And her answer is, she writes about them. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness." He divided reasons into"sheer egoism", "aesthetic enthusiasm", "historical impulse" and "political purpose". When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense." This is so true. I have come to understand this and have learned to let go and truly enjoy the moment.

Does your child show symptoms that something’s wrong? If kids complain of stomachaches, don’t like going to school, or don’t like reading anything, then they’re probably struggling. I won’t lie. It takes a real effort. But, I read books, that’s what I do. I wasn’t going to be stopped. After all, I’d already said I’d review it. How could I review it if I couldn’t read it? I was frustrated by Political Purpose, the opening chapter of Deborah Levy’s four-part memoir—a work which some regard as “a feminist response to Orwell’s ‘Why I Write’.” I found it hard going, pretentious, and opaque. Could you just get to the point, I wondered. Well, Levy does eventually manage to do that—sort of. One spring, she writes, “life was very hard”, and its difficulty was often most apparent to her when she was standing on an ascending escalator. Something about being moved passively upwards would cause her to cry, almost to the point of sobbing. A good part of her trouble was related to her having been submerged in the role of mother for years. Motherhood is a qualitatively different experience from fatherhood, she writes, and it is not uncommon for women to cancel their own desires. According to Marguerite Duras, whom Levy quotes, being a mother “means that a woman gives her body over to her child, her children . . . they devour her, hit her, sleep on her.” Women become “shadows of their former selves,” metamorphosing into hormonally programmed creatures whose breast milk flows at their babies’ cries. Such women become people who no longer understand themselves. The title of this book is not a joke. This book does not want to be read. Seriously! Not by you. Not by me. Not by anybody!Again, ask a librarian to recommend some high-interest, age-appropriate stuff and share some fun parts of it. If your kid likes a movie, bring home the book. Really get down to their interests. What should parents not do when they’re reading with their kids?