And
not just a throw-back to the good old days of the 90s, when people freely
travelled, jetting between New York, Paris, London, and a fictitious place in
Bulgaria. A respected academic, Kristeva knows how to hang her feminist ideas
on a crime story a la Agatha Christie. Gloria is found dead – raped (?),
stabbed to the heart, and decapitated. One of the people in the house must have
done it, right? Spoiler alert: More than one did it. I don’t mind spoiling the
ending for you because solving the crime isn’t the point of the book. Learning
about life is. Here are some of Kristeva’s insights:
Self-denial
is a delusion of grandeur, disguising trauma.
Art
encourages the apotheosis of the self…it is a secular religion and the
conversion of civilization to museums.
Translation:
the problematical effort to shift the meaning of words adequately from one
language to another.
Music
as character-builder: It is concerned with tempo and measure and helps to
make feelings “keep time”.
Journalists:
the modern equivalent of priests. They manipulate everything and understand
nothing.
Some
people talk because they need an audience. Their message: I am not
asking you to say what you think of what I say. I’m merely asking the
impossible, that you should bear witness to my being and to my being okay.
