Favorite Book Of The Year

“Theory” by Dionne Brand is my favorite book and I just finished reading it. I feel sorry that it is not longer, it doesn’t have a real plot, it talks about relationships but steering away from feelings. Despite all these, I love and admire the book so much that I am probably going to reread it before the new year.

I was thinking that I wanted to read all the books by Dionne Brand in the beginning of this year, but soon I realized that her books are never on sale, and each is about $20. Even in the second-hand book stores, her books are rarely more than one or two dollars less than the new ones. Being perpetually price conscious and always enjoying things on sale, I had to scrap my “ambitious” plan and settle for getting five of her books only. So far I’ve read about 2.5 out of the 5. And yesterday just by accident, I was brought to Canadian amazon website, where I found that her books cost half as much in Canada than in the U.S., and I wondered why. We all know that prescription drugs are much cheaper in Canada than in the U.S., and probably her books are just like dosages of good drugs that we all need.

By the way, this is the first woman-love-woman book I’ve read. I have two other woman-love-woman books, which I hope I will read in the new year.

The book is about a graduate student–named Teoria–who tries to finish writing her thesis, which is too ambitious and too ground-breaking to be finished in a short period of time. When she is working on her thesis, she had three consecutive love affairs with three lovers, each inspiring her as well as impeding her academic advancement. The first one is Selah, who is beautiful and worldly and living in the moment. Teoria admires her beauty but often uses academic jargon to show her intellectual superiority, which Selah disregards. Selah knows she is beautiful and wants to be admired, but she is very angry when she realizes that Teoria admires theories and medieval architecture more.

The second lover is Yara, who is a writer and an actress. Yara wants to save the world and everyone in it. She is funny, smart, beautiful. However she is also having non-stop drama every day. It ends up that Yara is trying to save every sad soul in the world and Teoria tries to save Yara. Their unstable, uncommitted, unrestricted relationship is exciting as well as exhausting. Eventually they have to stop seeing each other.

The third lover is Odalys, who is very spiritual, who inspired Teoria to finish her thesis, but the head of her thesis committee dies of heart attack, which provokes a long and profound reflection from Teoria. Actually Teoria doesn’t really like the academic elites that she tries so hard to be a member of. She becomes furious towards the end of her love affair, not only with Odalys who is having a new lover (or probably an old lover who has never left), but also with herself and her own conflicting goals and emotions.

I highlighted almost 70% of the book, which defeated the purpose of highlighting in the first place. Now it is hard for me to find my best quotes. Let me try to quote it:

After all, in this world there is a shared aesthetic, however oppressive, however repetitive, of loving a certain manifestation of a woman, and Selah inhabited that manifestation.

Selah can’t take care of anything but herself. Her body requires far too much time on its own invention and maintenance.

They had fooled themselves into thinking that merely because they had privilege, they had earned it. They’d never taken into account the violence their existence had perpetrated on the world….They’d oiled their way into schools and clubs. They actually believed that this made them worthy–they confused their privilege with intellect.

I pride myself on my powers of observation. However misguided I am as to my potency in this regard, I can assure you that I take myself seriously on this. My observations are always wrong, but I am amusing to myself when all is done. The one thing I can count on is that I am always wrong when it comes to judging character, especially the characters of the people closest to me.

There are so many witty lines and so much insight in this book that I don’t think my review has done justice to the book.