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S'està carregant… Double Teenage (edició 2016)de Joni Murphy (Autor)
Informació de l'obraDouble Teenage de Joni Murphy
Cap No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra.   ) subabat | Mar 19, 2018 |  Joni Murphy Double TeenageThey trade L.M. Montgomery's girlhood classics for "Law and Order" and Our Bodies, Ourselves, while readers follow in their footsteps in narratives which alternately focus on one girl, then the other. Double Teenage is divided into four parts (delightful wordplay in their naming, alluding to some of the novel's themes and motifs), the first three presented chronologically and the last restarting the numbering and taking a more objective view. It's as though the final section of the work is taking measurements and performing calculations based on some of the sensory and cultural details shared in the narratives of the girls' growing years, studies and analyses taking over where the imagery and emotions left off. (There are some lovely bits early on, like, "I carry you around in my mind like it’s a pocket.") In the novel's early pages, readers have an eye on the girls' experiences, which Joni Murphy presents in such a way that, even if readers have not grown up in a small town, near the U.S./Mexico border, some aspects are familiar (for instance, classic novels, and TV shows with hundreds of episodes). "The books were classic girl fiction: Alice in Wonderland and Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon and all the Little House books and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. As if she had been there, Celine’s mother spoke about prairie fires and scarlet fevers, initiation rituals and torrential downpours, family betrayals and corset-induced fainting spells. Her voice moved like a wagon. It moved like feet in leather moccasins padding through dust and starvation. Her voice lost children to fever." Celine's mother reads aloud, often stories that she thinks might ease her daughter's passage through girlhood. But other than the Little House books, which are clearly tales of survival against the elements (filled with natural disasters and the trials of pioneer life), these stories feature girls who learn that care-giving is the ultimate achievement. The men and boys they meet? On the page and in the world? Their stories are epic, only pretending to hold little substance; they are inherently worthwhile. "He told the myth of his family like a flat but colorful film." Not until they are older, starring in their own features, do Celine and Julie begin to tell stories in their own voices. "At eighteen they finally felt like performers rather than audience." Not until they are older, do they recognize that the risks they face are an integral part of the narratives they inhabit, the stories told about their kind. "They modeled new lives. Both Celine and Julie put deserts behind them, convincing themselves it was just a corrupted cowboy land – a myth world cast in violet light – which they were now safely out of. The real world felt brutal, yes, but also so beautifully visible, and they were finally in it." Double Teenage considers the desire to consume stories, to transform experiences into types, dreams into expectations. "The people in the auditorium, classmates and teachers, trafficked in this material. They refined, packaged, traded, cut, and consumed these kind of ideas." It's not only material which is treated in this matter-of-fact manner. What else is refined, packaged, traded, cut, and consumed? Celine and Julie have so many questions, seemingly endless questions when they are girls, when they expect to feel aswim, and later even more questions, but the potential to give voice to them is diminished. It's as though these questions should not be asked, as though the asking of them violates a code. "Who do dead bodies belong to? Who do women’s bodies belong to? Are women beings or objects? Is there something between?" Joni Murphy's narrative straddles the line between a character-driven story and a treatise to be discussed, something living and breathing and something only understood from afar. There is more than one way to look at it, more than one valid formula. "What grips their insides is knowledge of their value, their worthlessness. They flee because, in their world, existence hinges on a litany of imperatives. Be pretty, charm, adapt to threat. The lessons might be summarizde as Be good or else." What happens when "or else" is the only answer? This review was originally published on BuriedInPrint. (  ) buriedinprint | Jun 30, 2016 |
Double Teenage is about the two lives of young white American girls growing up in the desert in New Mexico. The horizon stretches out for Celine and Julie; a hazy, dusty landscape where their parents had come to build new lives. Joni Murphy’s book is attuned to the politics of race and class, and from the beginning her assured, controlled style situates us within the nexus of capitalism and class, white privilege, and gender violence.
Double Teenage tells the story of two young teenagers (best friends, Celine and Julie) who are coming of age in the 1990s along the US-Mexico border--a place where nothing seems to happen, but only because what counts as ''something'' is defined by far-off centres of power. In their small, desert town and small-scale life, they become a twin pair. Through their love of theatre, they find their way into a wider world, rich with opportunity, but at the same time, dense with situations of peril and violence. This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on the paradoxes of Western culture--obsessed with depictions of fantasy sexual violence, while at the same time, willfully blind to the many ways in which desire and hurt twine together in real life; where angry, emotional, and loving girls have been told time and again that they overthink things; where survival goes hand-in-hand with trauma and witnessing; where art, books, movies, TV, and plays work to both shield us from reality and also help us to face it, and powerful healing rituals can be made out of everyday material goods--hoodie sweatshirts, homemade alcoholic punch, joints, and blood pacts. In this way, Double Teenage ultimately offers a way through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the trap of girlhood. Informed and influenced by the films of David Lynch, Agnes Varda, Chris Marker, Jacques Rivette, Murphy has developed an emotional dialogue in Double Teenage, one that wrestles with the borders of our bodies, our countries, and our realities. The borderlands (the US/Mexican and the Canadian/US) in this novel become gendered, performative spaces that are hard and soft, depending on who is trying to cross. Though the girls move away from the Southwest to Vancouver and Chicago, and gain entry into rarified academic and artistic circles, they discover that the violence and solitude of the borderlands are still stuck within them. In drawing comparisons to Sheila Heti''s How Should a Person Be and Chris Kraus''s Summer of Hate, the harrowing narrative in Double Teenage will speak particularly to an audience of ''Under 40'' women who are radical, possibly over-educated, if perhaps precariously employed. Art audiences, as well as people interested in literary fiction and criticism, will also be drawn to this novel''s integration of books, theatre, and performance. "Like the Celine and Julie of Jacques Rivette''s film, Joni Murphy''s protagonists are highly attuned to magical forces. But, growing up Las Cruces, New Mexico, a town that they separately flee for points north, the magic they see is infused with unfathomable violence. From the micro-inflictions of ''self harm'' to the criminal and systemic violence that surrounds them, they struggle to make sense of their surroundings by whatever means are available to them: sex, romance and drugs; literature and fashion; art, theater, and critical theory. DOUBLE TEENAGE is the definitive book of The Young Girl. It''s also a definitive book about NAFTA, the Ciudad Juarez femicides, spectacular serial killings, culture and class, and the comforting media-lull of repetition. In an effort to understand, if not everything, at least those things that surround her protagonists, Murphy writes with an unforced and calm beauty. DOUBLE TEENAGE is a stunning first novel, moving with stealth and intelligence against the North American landscape.'' --Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick "Joni Murphy speaks to us directly. She speaks to us from a place of borders, of countries, and of languages that are strange to her and in need of reinvention. Through her ear and her eye, through her transmissions from these dusklands, we recognize something actual, an event or place, but cross-examined, rendered and remixed. Sometimes theatrical, sometimes cinematic, always urgent and painted on a broad canvas, unafraid of the depth of each landscape, of the mountains that we cannot see that lie beyond the mountains that we can. Her monologues follow the flow of thought--visual, critical, poetic, nostalgic. She speaks to where we are now--when the ''we'' is the individual and the body politic, in this historical moment, where this marginal place, through the thought of her writing, becomes the centre." --Matthew Goulish, founding member of the performance groups Goat Island and Every House Has a Door No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
Debats actualsCapCobertes populars  
 Google Books — S'està carregant…GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana: (4.3)
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