Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

 

DNF @ p.62

Once someone sent me a message saying that they went out of their way to five star all the books I don't like and one star all the books I love. Regardless, the author is in luck because it sounds like she has another five star forthcoming then, because I'm giving this book a one.

I found VLADIMIR in a Little Free Library. I'd been thinking about buying it for a while so finding it for free felt like kismet. It had been getting mixed reviews from some of my friends and the idea of a morally grey unlikable heroine who is bitched out about her old age and an apologist for her rapist husband seemed... interesting. If you've been following for a while, you know I have a soft spot for literary fiction that doesn't quite find its niche. I always feel really bad for books with low average ratings. Sometimes it's because they were marketed badly or didn't find their target audience.

I went into this book expecting something like Alissa Nutting's TAMPA. And I sort of got that. But also not. Because at least TAMPA was kind of an exploration of female sex predators and how the same sexism that traps women in a loop of infrastructural sexism also allows such predators to get away scot-free since seeing women as weaker means not seeing women as capable of real harm. But I'm not sure that was the point of VLADIMIR, because the heroine doesn't really do anything. The heroine is what happens when pick mes grow up. She literally opens the book talking about how old men loved her when she was young, and how she basked in their attention because it validated her so much as a sexual an intellectual being. When I washed the taste of vomit from the back of my mouth, I was like, "Okay, interesting. Where is she going with this?"

The narrator/heroine and her husband are both academics. Her husband has gotten in big trouble for sleeping with his students and is in the middle of an investigation. The heroine stands by her man, resentfully but loyally, even as her wandering eye falls on the newest faculty member at the college, Vladimir, who is twenty years her junior. She talks about how gross she is now that she's an old lady (almost sixty), and we watch her convince some well-meaning students who come into her office hours that standing by her husband is a "feminist" choice because feminism is about choice, all the while she's seething with rage, hating on them for being young and pretty and dressing in revealing clothes.

And I thought, "Okay, interesting. WHERE is she going with THIS?"

And then she drugs Vladimir and, like, ties him up in a beach house?

WHAT????

Officially, I stopped reading at page sixty-two but I skipped to the end because I wanted to see how this ended and where the author was going with things. I read about fifty pages of the ending and skimmed the middle, just so I could get a holistic view of the book. Now that I've read it, I'm annoyed. Because I'm not sure that there was a point to this book at all. Maybe not having a point was the point, but that feels like cheating, because while life may be open-ended, books themselves are complete.

Just like how this book was complete. Complete bullshit.

1 out of 5 stars