I was disturbed by this novel. Sometimes that can be a good thing. I'm not sure whether it is in this case, though.

Ema felt to me throughout, as I read, as a horrific embodiment of a male fantasy. Ema is an ever-youthful, ever-desirable female who is subject to terrible violence (along with her children being subject to it) without her having much of a problem with it. She just passively makes the best of things. Because she is so passive about being carried off with regularity to be raped some more, then she doesn't really come across as a survivor who has agency, and her ultimate successes feel very pasted on, not believable.

The interstitial cuts to a male point of view throughout this novel all objectify Ema and focus on her sexual desirability, in ways where I'm simply not sure what to make of them--because the men raping her seem kind of reasonable and caring. The messages I'm getting from the text are garbled because I'm not confident that Aira is in command of the subtext, that this woman is a victim of serial torture. His writing dovetails too neatly with misogyny and male fantasy for me to trust that he knows what he's doing.

So one way to deal with this objectionable-ness is to separate my feeling about the book from any notion of author intent. If I do that, as an exercise in alternative interpretation, the novel becomes a deliberate farce, I guess, in a Candide-like way, of a character who decides she is in the best of all possible worlds. Or maybe the novel can be read as an indictment of men treating women like animals, or as a tribute to women's strength to overcome horrible abuse. If I try to shoehorn any of these interpretations into my own reaction to the novel, though, I'm still unable to resolve how such a completely passive character could ever survive and prosper.

The novel reminded me of the D.H. Lawrence short story "The Woman Who Road Away," a story of a woman who is as passive as Ema is about her fate, in a South American setting, but whose ultimate fate is a lot more believable, frankly, than Ema's:

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400301h.html#s01 ( )

Beautifully descriptive book about a mans journey into the jungles. Surprising bits of culture and aristocracy to be found where the wildness takes over. ( )