Our Lady of Babylon
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A funny, sexy, stylistically elegant, tongue-in-cheek rewriting of history” from the New York Times–bestselling author of City of Night (Booklist).
A retelling of the stories of the fallen women of history, recounted by an eighteenth-century lady who realizes that these women’s lives bear a remarkable resemblance to her own. Told by a mystic that her dreams are memories of past lives, she must face the public to vindicate all women falsely accused of crimes.
“Mr. Rechy’s renditions of these seemingly familiar stories can . . . be surprisingly fresh, creating an ominous sense of tragedy and doom.” —The New York Times Book Review
“With a colorful ribbon of feminist revisionism festooning its New Age wrapping, Rechy’s latest novel indulges in past-life grandiosity and some scandalous speculation about the erotic lives of Adam, Medea and Jesus, among others.” —Publishers Weekly
“Subversive and quite funny . . . A fictional absolution of women known historically as ‘whores’ . . . framed by a deadly serious look at erotic history and a formidable exploration of the power of words and their interpretation to alter our existence.” —Booklist
“Rechy writes gracefully, and sometimes poignantly, of the fate of fallen women over the centuries.” —The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With a colorful ribbon of feminist revisionism festooning its New Age wrapping, Rechy's latest novel indulges in past-life grandiosity and some scandalous speculation about the erotic lives of Adam, Medea and Jesus, among others. An unnamed countess in a decaying 18th-century European city flees to the country after being unjustly accused of having killed her husband, the count. She temporarily escapes a wily plot spun by the count's evil sister and--naturally--the pope, finding sanctuary in the chateau of Madame Bernice, a mystic who helps the countess recall that her "essence" is to be on a "journey of redemption" to vindicate the lives of all unjustly blamed women. In a succession of afternoon teas, the narrator tells the mystic of her incarnations as Eve, Mary Magdalene, Delilah, Salome, Helen of Troy, Medea and La Malinche, Cortes's lover. But the villainous pope is on to them. Rechy (The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez) does capture some of the breathless Perils-of-Pauline pacing of a good 18th-century novel, but some of the incarnations are related with so little verve that they become one-liners. The Trojan War, we learn, was fought because Paris suffered from penis envy. None of the principals--the countess, the mystic, Lucifer, God, Adam, Jesus, Judas or John the Baptist--comes to life. Rechy's spectacle of maligned Woman pursued through the annals of history by a vengeful and petty Holy Father (God, the pope) strives for the power of liberating myth but attains--and only in its best moments--a comic, and cosmic, absurdity.
