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On Emma Donoghue's Hood
Dec. 17th, 2018 11:35 amMission Actually Finish Some Books 3/9:
Hood, by Emma Donoghue
What I most deeply appreciated about this novel, apart from its exquisite prose, is that it is a story about a queer woman dealing with tragedy, but it is not a story about a Tragic Queer.
Neither Pen nor Cara are milked for pathos (a lot of the time they’re both fairly unlikeable, in fact, though I found them broadly sympathetic); they are not plot devices to further someone else’s character arc; Pen’s story doesn’t end with her lover’s death. Hood is a meditation on mortality, not because there is something fetishizably doomed or tragic about queer people in particular, but because death touches everyone, every struggling normal human, and we are part of that universal truth.
And this: that even a life so recently touched by grief is full of the mundane; of moments that are hilarious, or boring, or petty, or horny, or surreal; and one can never quite predict when one will feel one thing or the other, or all at once. Donoghue captures that beautifully, I think. A feat worthy of admiration.
Hood, by Emma Donoghue
What I most deeply appreciated about this novel, apart from its exquisite prose, is that it is a story about a queer woman dealing with tragedy, but it is not a story about a Tragic Queer.
Neither Pen nor Cara are milked for pathos (a lot of the time they’re both fairly unlikeable, in fact, though I found them broadly sympathetic); they are not plot devices to further someone else’s character arc; Pen’s story doesn’t end with her lover’s death. Hood is a meditation on mortality, not because there is something fetishizably doomed or tragic about queer people in particular, but because death touches everyone, every struggling normal human, and we are part of that universal truth.
And this: that even a life so recently touched by grief is full of the mundane; of moments that are hilarious, or boring, or petty, or horny, or surreal; and one can never quite predict when one will feel one thing or the other, or all at once. Donoghue captures that beautifully, I think. A feat worthy of admiration.
Then Sinéad read an Adrienne Rich poem, rather gruffly; she kept her dark head low. I thought I recognized it; probably Cara had read it to me once while I was chopping onions. I didn’t really listen to the words this time. I thought they might either irritate me—since a cheapo hike around the Greek isles was hardly comparable to the death-defying climbing expedition described in the poem—or move me. I didn’t want to be moved in front of all these strangers. I knew that if I cried they would not even have the decency to ignore me.
