There She Goes: A Reading List on Women Adventurers
The women you'll find on top of the world.
https://longreads.com/2023/04/04/there-she-goes-a-reading-list-on-women-adventurers/
The Kindness of Strangers Summary & Book Review | Emma Garman
Introduction to The Kindness of Strangers Summary & Review
What if your entire life was a meticulously constructed lie, and one knock at the door could bring it all crashing down?
That is the chilling reality for Honor Wilson in The Kindness of Strangers.
Emma Garman, a columnist for The Paris Review and a sharp-eyed literary critic, makes her fiction debut with this atmospheric noir set in 1953…
She was treated as a delightful novelty: a pretty, soft-voiced blonde with a doctorate in Heidegger’s existentialism
“Yet it is Bachmann’s relationship with the Jewish poet Paul Celan that has passed into romantic legend, a Mitteleuropean version of Ted and Sylvia or Barrett and Browning. Celan was introduced to Bachmann, a twenty-one-year-old doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna, while visiting Austria in the spring of 1948. Like Hamesh, Celan was six years Bachmann’s senior, orphaned, stateless, and deracinated. He grew up in Bukovina, a region then in Romania but now partly in Ukraine, with German as his mother tongue. His parents were murdered by the Nazis and he survived years in a labor camp. When he met Bachmann, he had already published one of the most important poems of the Holocaust, Death Fugue. After their encounter, she bragged in a letter home that “the Surrealist poet” Celan had, “splendidly enough, fallen in love with me … My room is a poppy field at the moment, as he inundates me with this flower.”
Celan soon returned to Paris, where he lived, and they sent notes back and forth. “I should have a castle for us and have you come to me,” Bachmann wooed him, “so that you can be my enchanted master in it, we will have a great many carpets inside and music, and we will invent love.” In October 1950, after she’d completed her Ph.D., Bachmann finally visited Celan in Paris and they spent two brief months together. Over the ensuing years they were sporadic and neurotic correspondents, with the shared emotional undertow of recent historical tragedy, Celan’s trauma and Bachmann’s generational guilt. “It frightens me a great deal to see you floating out into a great sea,” she wrote in an early letter, “but I mean to build a ship and bring you back home from your forlornness.”“
Known in France as "l'Androgyne du Desert," Eberhardt traveled North Africa at the turn of the century, dressed as a man. Her wild life transformed her into a legend.
“When the Swiss-Russian writer and explorer Isabelle Eberhardt died in the Algerian Sahara in 1904, she was physically ravaged. She was only twenty-seven, but heavy smoking, drinking, and drug use had taken their toll, as had poor nourishment. On her travels she’d carried a gun, but not a toothbrush, and so she had lost her teeth. She suffered from malaria and possibly syphilis, and just before her death had spent weeks hospitalized with fever. An assassination attempt a few years earlier, when a religious enemy attacked Eberhardt with a sword, had nearly severed her arm and left her in constant pain. Despite her youth, her body could no longer carry on. Her strange and brilliant mind, though, was immortalized by the travelogues, journalism, and fiction she left behind. “No one ever lived more from day to day than I, or was more dependent upon chance,” Eberhardt wrote shortly before her death. “It is the inescapable chain of events that has brought me to this point, rather than I who have caused things to happen.”
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“I assume for the gallery the borrowed mask of the cynic, the debauched layabout. No one yet has managed to see through to my real inner self, which is sensitive and pure and which rises above the degrading baseness I choose to wallow in, out of contempt for convention and also out of a strange desire to suffer.”
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“Eberhardt didn’t seem to worry about pregnancy. Judging by her readiness to live among men in the most basic conditions, she probably didn’t menstruate. If she was anorexic, as has been suggested, it ties in to both her religiosity and her masochism. “Suffering is a very positive thing,” she wrote, “for it sublimates the emotions and produces great courage or devotion; it creates the capacity for strong feelings and all-encompassing ideas.” Like her fellow Aquarian mystic Simone Weil, who starved herself and insisted on doing tough physical labor, Eberhardt would always choose a hard floor over a soft bed. Physical abnegation was a means of liberation, of transcendence over inconvenient biology.
[her biographer Annette] Kobak remarks that Eberhardt “was living out in reality to an extraordinary degree the omniscience and androgyny that many writers take on in their imaginations.” By the same token, she viewed writing as a form of exhilarating exploration. “For me it seems that by advancing in unknown territories,” she wrote, “I enter my life.””
