Chaos Reading discussion

That's right, it's time for another pop-up Molinaro read.

This time we're mentally grapping with Positions with White Roses.

I know you've all been waiting eagerly (meaning all two of us!). We plan to start discussing it next week (9/23), but if anyone sees this and wants to join in, we'd be glad to delay a bit to include you in the mix.


(This woman is not Molinaro. This image has nothing to do with the book. It does include white roses...)

Those are some fine white roses!

I'm about 10 pages in. Some early impressions.

I first read this about 6 years ago. I mostly remember the tension between the visiting daughter and her parents, and have almost no memory of the colorful, fraught family history overview. Or the use of the narrow columns to separate descriptions of the visit from family history gossip.

I'm so familiar with Molinaro's distinctive voice by now, it's like sitting down with an old friend. It works very well with the cagey narrative so far.

Dad is turning out to be quite the psycho, whew.

I only know the basics about Mary Stuart, but Molinaro contributes a number of interesting biographical details. The parallels between the sisters' troubled lives and the historical women's experiences of abuse are intriguing. Things don't change.

It is really nice to be familiar with her voice and feel like we're settling in together, just me and my pal, Ursule...

I'm not familiar with Mary Stuart at all, so I need to do some Googling.

I like the way the mom uses repetition, sort of constantly regurgitating her bile, especially about her husband's rep for humility and how he used to be a doctor. It occurred to me that I could treat her as an unreliable narrator, but so far I have assumed her husband it the nutjob in the family.

Marc wrote: "I'm not familiar with Mary Stuart at all, so I need to do some Googling."

One of the umm benefits of growing up in the colonies, is reading about various dubious royalty in school.

It occurred to me that I could treat her as an unreliable narrator...

So far I'm trusting her version of the story as well.

Not surprisingly, I'm enjoying the dysfunctional family rituals. And this obsessive analysis of events and motivations, and inability to let go, are traits of many Molinaro characters, as we've found!

That twisted sibling rivalry, (view spoiler)[ with one serving as a sexual proxy for the other (hide spoiler)], wow. And the whole Portuguese sojourn at the gay SM monastery with the murals. How does Molinaro come up with all this?

Finished this over the weekend. A pretty quick and enjoyable read. I was kind of fascinated by how much of it was essentially internal monologue, imagining what it might be like to actually talk to one another in the family. Molinaro kind of takes us from mom's POV to daughter's to father's and then mingles them a bit. At no point do we even get the daughter's name--she's Laura's sister, the "visiting daughter," or the "normal daughter."

The father seems so diminished by his stroke that it's hard to tell whether he really was the monster his wife makes him out to be (like you, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and this seems like the type of character Molinaro would include--a man who is charming to the outside world while being a kind of tyrant in the privacy of the home).

This was a reread for you so did you think much about the title on either read or did your interpretation of it change at all?

I'm with you marveling at how much twisted detail Molinaro weaved in (sibling sexual proxy, SM monastery, abortion, suicide, Christian sects, etc.). The references were pretty layered and wide-ranging too: Montaigne, Mary Stuart, Ninon de Lanclos, Cathari, and so on.

It seems sort of insane to me that you would fall in love with your abortion provider. It just seems incredibly complicated psychologically and then the way she describes Claire's philosophy:
"…if she believed Claire. Who believed that 'procreation was the cruelest act, because it forced a spirit to become body.'
Which had struck the hurting, fault-ferreting robot as a convenient belief, for a gynecologist who performed abortions."

Which Molinaros have you yet to read?

Molinaro kind of takes us from mom's POV to daughter's to father's and then mingles them a bit.

Yeah, it was sometimes hard to tell who's doing the narrating of the 3rd person sections. I assumed they're reliable.

I developed a little more sympathy for the father, with the thoughts about his relationship with the visiting daughter. Doesn't the disappearance of the postcards parallel the earlier disappearance of the mother's diary? Then we get the discussion on abortion between the mother and the daughter. It's almost like Molinaro was switching gears and turning the screws on the mother. At least she didn't have the father institutionalized.

Unless I'm misremembering her other books (which is quite possible), Molinaro seems to be making more explicit feminist statements here. I'm also impressed by her explicitly casual attitude toward sexual fluidity; this was written in 1983.

I looked up Cathari history on wikipedia; apparently most of what Molinaro wrote happened (though there was some question of possible embellishment by their Catholic enemies). With all the shit that's flying in the middle east right now, the Cathari doctrine of the two gods seems quite reasonable, argh. The recounting of the Cathari atrocities was just jawdropping. The Cathari cross in the book, which looks like a Kandinsky abstraction, doesn't look anything like what I found online. Wonder what Molinaro had in mind there.

The end sequence was just a whirlwind of traumatic events and revelations. Did the visiting daughter actually tell all about Claire, or was it all happening in her head? That phone call, and the initial false alarm!

Then the revelation (to us) that Laura was trailing the visiting daughter in more ways than one. (Did she also go through the French sailor?) I don't know what to say.

This was a reread for you so did you think much about the title on either read or did your interpretation of it change at all?

I'll admit I usually forget about titles when I read a novel. Umm, I guess "positions" has sexual connotations. But it wasn't on my mind. I frankly don't remember the details from my first reading, other than the overall "family visit that turned out horribly" arc. Maybe my mind was somewhat blown after I finished and I forgot.

Which Molinaros have you yet to read?

I'll skip the poems and astrology. Probably these (a lot of my Molinaro reading predates goodreads; also the wikipedia entry is not consistent with goodreads):
Green Lights Are Blue: A Pornosophic Novel
The New Moon With the Old Moon in Her Arms: A True Story Assembled from Scholarly Hearsay
The Borrower: An alchemical novel
Bastards: Footnotes to History
Power Dreamers: The Jocasta Complex
Demons & Divas: Three Novels
Top Stories #16: Analects of Self-Contempt & Sweet Cheat of Freedom
Remnants of an Unknown Woman

I would probably put everything after Encores for a Dilettante ('77) high on my list. Happy also to revisit (say) Fat Skeletons.

I keep forgetting that she was close friends with Bruce Benderson, whom I met a few months ago. I should look up Bruce's essay on her, and contact him with questions.

Apologies for the delayed response. GR no longer gives me any discussion notifications, but I did figure out last week if I click on the little discussion speech bubbles up near my avatar, I can see which discussions had activity last!

"I developed a little more sympathy for the father... "
It was hard not to, especially after Molinaro starts us off with such a sharp portrait of him from the mother's POV in the beginning. I was still left wavering between seeing him as a former-monster-rendered-sympathetic-by-age-&-stroke or just a bad dude. Certainly, he doesn't seem like a bad father. And come to think of it, as Molinaro marriages go, he's about what you'd expect from a husband no matter which version you accept as true! :D

Unless I'm misremembering her other books (which is quite possible), Molinaro seems to be making more explicit feminist statements here. I'm also impressed by her explicitly casual attitude toward sexual fluidity; this was written in 1983."
No, I think you're exactly right. This is the most directly feminist she's been in what I've read so far. Seems ahead of its time in terms of sexual fluidity and freedom.

The end sequence was just a whirlwind of traumatic events and revelations.
It was like the narrative was just walking along and then jumped off a bridge. I think all of the revelations about Clare were just in the daughter's head (at least, that was my initial reaction). You certainly get an entirely different perspective on Laura. She's like some sort of puppet master in all this. It was something like 12 years the two sisters hadn't talked--do I have that right? I was about to call that bizarre, but my in-laws have a family member who cut off all ties so what do I know?!!

Thanks for the Benderson essay--I plan to read it this week (had a bunch of overdue library stuff I needed to wrap up; I ended up canceling all my holds too as I went way overboard on what I thought I was going to read and would actually have time for)!

Yeah it's really annoying that I've stopped getting email notifications from goodreads. I still get their promotions, argh. I've poked around settings and couldn't get the email updates to return.

It's a bit strange that Laura is revealed as such a manipulator. There was a hint of with the normal daughter's sexual partners, so I guess we were set up somewhat. Another fascinating Molinaro character with bizarre obsessions and motivations; that's why we love her work!

Canceling all your holds is pretty drastic! I'm eyeing my only hold, the doorstop Two Tone ska history, and am a bit worried I won't be able to finish it before I leave town.

I can't say I was too excited about the holds. Quite a few I couldn't even remember why I wanted to read them (I had set up a cascading set of holds, so some were 6 months old).

Molinaro's characters never disappoint!

(Not only do I not get the e-mails, but even the little notifications drop down menu only shows if someone liked or commented on a review. Bizarre.)