Читать книгу Lover - Bertha Harris - Страница 13

I’ve read somewhere lately that what the real-life (the biblical) Salome wanted cut off from the body of John the Baptist (“Jokanaan” in the opera) was not his head.

In the late sixties, the women’s liberation movement felt a rush of manhating. So did I. It was a heady, Dionysian sensation. We went up on the mountain and stomped. Sensation led to daring suggestion, which Valerie Solanas elegantly dealt with in her publication the S.C.U.M Manifesto; the acronym stands for Society for Cutting Up Men. I chose to deal with the daring suggestion with less than daring. In Lover, from time to time, I recount, sometimes word for word, stories women were telling me about what men, sometimes their men, had done to them. Toward the novel’s conclusion, I wheel in the body of a murdered man. Think of the corpse as Lover’s revenge motif. The character of Veronica hides the corpse by hastily turning it into fiction. Lover’s author loves murder mysteries.