All This Belongs to Me by Petra Hůlová, Alex Zucker

Abstract

WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW ^ i I Petra H?lov?. All This Belongs to Me. Alex Zucker, tr. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2009. 195 pages. $17.95. isbn 978-0-8101 2443-1 It is not every day that a young and unknown author rises to prom inence with her first work. Petra H?lov?, born in Prague in 1979, was able to achieve this feat with her debut novel, Pamet mojt babicce (In memory of my grandmother), pub lished in the Czech Republic, and voted by the popular daily Lidov? noviny as Book of the Year in 2002. In the meantime, H?lov? has pub lished four more novels and won several literary awards. Now her first novel has been translated into English by Alex Zucker under the title All This Belongs to Me. As a student in Mongolian stud ies at Prague's Charles University, H?lov? spent one year in Mongolia, mostly in the capital, Ulan Bator, but also in the wide steppes of the countryside. She was writing there, but started over after her return to Prague, and soon realized how much she was influenced by her stay. The novel ranges from the nomadic yurts in the Red Mountains to Ulan Bator, in the isolated and sparsely populated country in the middle of Asia, transforming itself to a democratic republic after seventy years of communism and proud of its heroic past under the emperor Genghis Khan. The story is narrated in the first person by three generations of women: a mother-grandmother, three daughters, and a daughter granddaughter. Each of them tells important episodes of her life, revealing the endpoint of her family relationships, painting a complex and sometimes contradictory pic ture. The grandmother raises her kids in the yurt, a woman's world where the man is usually absent from dawn to dusk. The book contains six parts, told through the words of the main nar rator Zaya; her daughter, Dolgorma; her mother, Alta; her youngest sis ter, Oyuna; and her younger sis ter Nara. Going full circle, the last part returns to the old Zaya, who is back from the big city, wise in her ways, sitting in front of her yurt and thinking "All this belongs to me." Zaya and Nara are both illegitimate, born from a Chinese and a Russian father, a circumstance that brings them closer but complicates their acceptance by their nomadic fellows. Both move to the capital, where they experience hardships and struggle to preserve their identities. The novel is written in a live ly, colloquial style, using a rich palette of comparisons and adjec tives. Practically without dialogue, each woman narrates her story in a unique way. The author takes a detailed psychological look at her heroines, like Seurat's pointillism, immersing the reader in this femi nine world, where the male charac ters are just sketches. All This Belongs to Me invites us into this singular universe cre ated by Petra H?lov?, Mongolian but also abstract and timeless, filled with memorable female characters that resonate with the readers. Michaela Burilkovova Gainesville, Florida Fabienne Kanor. Anticorps. Paris. Gal limard. 2010. 170 pages. 15.90. isbn 978-2-07-012717-7 Fabienne Kanor's fourth novel, Anti corps (Antibody), is a portrait of the failures of feminism to change a woman's life. The narrator, Louise Singer, is seventy years old. For merly an editor of a well-known feminist magazine, Premier Sexe, she is now obsessed with growing old, with her aging body and that of her husband. She mocks his desire for sexual activity, and even feels ashamed of her own pleasure. Her body is a "suit one can't take off." Louise's story begins with a trip to Morocco, where she makes fun of both the tourists and the tourist guide. She is often aware of the absurdities of the bourgeoi sie. They feel good because they have arranged a few automatic bank deductions t? support humanitarian causes. The bourgeois family, she says, is like a theater: "Each per son plays a role. Masks are handed out, dialogue is learned." Instead of power, most women are like a dancer in a mechanical music box...