Influential Ukrainian, Argentinian, and Taiwanese Women Writers

This is considered to be thee most successful Ukrainian novel of the ’90s. Zabuzhko is a poet, foremost, and tells the story of another poet in a winding stream of conscious style. The narrator visits Harvard as a professor of Slavic studies and is forever changed. Suddenly, being back in Ukraine feels stifling and she beings to question her culture’s conventions. A parallel is drawn between her own subjugation at the hands of her lover and her country’s through history. There was a lot of controversy when this book came out, but that helped keep it on the bestseller’s list for more than ten years.

Book Club Bonus: Zabuzhko contends with her attraction to a domineering lover. Discuss what drew her to this subjugation.

Side note: I just wanted to say that the author did not have to call me out so early in the book on the subject of house plants: “Now both plants have the appearance of having been watered with sulfuric acid for the last three weeks.” Ma’am.

Argentinian Ocampo has had everyone from Jorge Luis Borges to Helen Oyeyemi singing her praises on her skill with short stories and novellas. Her stories tend to include the unsettling and grotesque, like a house of sugar that leads to possession, talking horse statues, and children locking away their mothers. She studied painting and other various forms of surrealist art, which no doubt had influence on her very original stories.

Book Club Bonus: Borges was friends with Ocampo’s husband and a great admirer of her work. He once made observations on her “strange taste for a certain kind of an innocent and oblique cruelty. I attribute this to the interest, the astonished interest, that evil inspires in a noble soul.” She grew up in a privileged household, and was, as a result, a “lady.” Discuss this need of Borges to define her often dark stories. Do you think he’s on to something, or is this an unwillingness on his part to fully identify someone like Ocampo with her stories?

Miaojin was Taiwan’s first openly lesbian writer, being active in the late ’80s/early ’90s. She was studying clinical psychology and feminism with French philosopher Hélène Cixous when she met a tragic end at 26. The award-winning Notes of a Crocodile was released at the height of Taiwanese media’s unhealthy obsession with lesbians. It’s about a group of queer students at a prestigious college after Taiwan came out of martial-law. The narrator Lazi (which is a slang term for “lesbian”) details the goings-on of her crew who do everything but studying with a mix of vignettes and observations on life. She’s attracted to an older women who is ambivalent towards her, but is still reveling in her new freedom and romantic ideals.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss the analogies contained within Miaojin’s crocodile fable where, once it got back from work, the crocodile “removed the sweat-soaked human suit clinging to its body.”