title: Animal by: Taddeo, Lisa published: 2021-06-24 read: 2021-08 preview

For me it is a rare thing when a book is a straight page turner. For this book, when cycling through the park, one day I stopped and sat down to read for half an hour. Or once, waking up in the middle of the night from some noise, I did not go back to sleep but back to this book.

I still don’t understand why. Yes, I am reading another book by this wonderful author, and I love it, too. But still?

Please read another review, e.g. this Guardian one and then perhaps back here, if at all.

Animal describes the silent, slow revenge a young (or not so young; she describes herself younger than she is) woman on men. All men in her life, her boyfriends, her lovers, her acquaintances, and foremost her father. And, she does it in such a way that I feel bad about what other men did to her. Or what she let other men do to her. And at the same time, how this is normal, in a way. She relates her past and present only through sexual experiences, and that sort of leaves little place for the rest of life.

I tried to seem flippant when I said that I was there every day. I watched her get into her car. It was a light green Prius. It felt so good to talk to her. I saw her arm out the window with a cigarette as she pulled onto the boulevard. The purple bougainvillea along the fences was washed blond by the sunlight. Happiness had come easily to her. She was a person who never had to make a haunting choice. Everything was laid out for her. She only fucked men with perceptibly clean dicks.

It’s not a book about #metoo. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a book about relationships, about sex, about how some things must be as they are (or not?) Perhaps about, how we must be conscious about our choices or so. And then, at the same time, she’s upset when men react, like when Lenny says:

“…Rage at myself, but also at her—like a real damned dog, I was angry at my bride for showing me the extent of my futility. Then further down it went, the boiling anger, down my hips and into my shaft. I wonder if you know how rage can stiffen the shaft. It’s like a war cry. I left the house, engorged. I drove up the canyon to Sandstone. I didn’t check in at the main house but sneaked to the yard at the back where the trampoline was. There was a tall American Indian girl laughing and jumping up and down, her tits like turkey wattles, shaking. Two men were watching, and two other women, a couple of pale whore blondes. All of them naked and slim as snakes. Nothing looked human to me. I was the stiffest I’d ever been. I climbed the trampoline and tackled the American Indian girl like a wolf. I stripped down and knelt her on all fours and got behind her like an animal. Look at me, I’m built like a rich man, not like a beast, but that day I was a beast, and none of them stopped me. After all, they’d built that place to act like animals and here was a man dispensing with the formality. I was full of rage because I was being denied the one right of all humans. The one reason we are on this earth. To procreate. So I fucked the American Indian girl with my rage and then the two blondes as the two men looked on. They stroked their cocks and watched me take what I was owed.”
I shook my head in revulsion. I thought I’d expended all my disgust on hearing from men about what they were owed.

I can’t describe it. I’d need to be a writer to do so correctly. Read it and tell me, I got it all wrong. I’d appreciate that.

Until then, I love this book.