Vladimir: 'Favourite Book of the Year' Vogue

Body image, beauty, ageing, me too, generational gaps, the complexity of relationships, parenting, the creative mind and spirit, professional jealousy, substance abuse, sexual desire, fantasising, and more. A very full read that is expertly written and offers much more than the cover suggests. Great for your next book club.

The opening scene -with Vladimir bound and restrained by the protagonist was exciting, well written and intriguing. Unfortunately, the story ran out of steam along the way, with repeated and excessive descriptions of, well, anything really, a lot of extraneous detail and mixed messages.The core setting and premise were excellent. The setting - a New England college campus awash with cultural politics - and the premise - a professor in her late 50s, mourning her youth while trying to reconcile her diminishing sexual appeal with her rampant sexual appetite (evidenced by the fact she masturbates a lot). It is this conundrum that stokes her desire for Vladimir, a handsome young colleague whom she lusts after to the point of obsession. I won't bore you with all the details, but eventually she sort of kidnaps and drugs him, chaining him to a chair and then going to bed on her own. The plot - in as much as there is one - becomes faintly ridiculous here. She wants him, she doesn't want him, she wants him......etc It's difficult to write more without spoilers, but suffice to say, unlike their eventual coupling, the denouement was not at all satisfying.At this point campus cultural politics rears its head again. Basically, the professor's husband is being forced to resign because of historic affairs with students. His wife's view is that since everything was consensual there is no case to answer (they had an open marriage and she had her affairs too). I liked her internal monologue about how, in the MeToo era, women are encouraged to recast their experiences through the lens of victimhood. She makes a clear distinction between, on the one hand, coercion, sexual abuse and rape, and on the other, relationships freely entered into and enjoyed. In this regard she feels her husband is being treated very unfairly - tried for previous crimes within the current fevered milieu - and that she, by association, is tainted. Indeed, her female students gang up on her, demanding to know why she isn't divorcing him. It makes her seem weak, they claim. Privately it is them who are weak, she believes, for failing to understand how the world works, how relationships work, and for seeing sex between unequal partners as inherently and inevitably abusive. Being of a different generation, she has a much more straightforward view, namely, men are drawn to beautiful women and women are drawn to powerful men. I felt the author made this case well, so when, at the very end of the book, it was upended and the professor is forced to see that her husband was a predator after all (at least I think that was the message - it was all a bit confusing by that point) it jarred somewhat. As did the glaring double standard. The older, higher status female professor was not called to account in any way (again, a bit confusing, but I think that's right) for the kidnapping, chaining, drugging and sex with her younger colleague. Is that message that women can do what they want but men better watch out? I was confused.In summary, this is a complicated book - a bit of a curates egg. Interesting and boring, insightful and cliched, clear and confusing. For that reason it would make a good book club choice as there is much to discuss.

Having read a few excerpts from the fiction of Bret Easton Ellis, and viewing several YouTube book dicussions, this novel's name kept cropping up. Each time I heard it, I couldn't get the name of somebody rather contentious out of my head. When Amazon offered the eBook on a deal, I decided to go for it. I romped through the first half, fascinated by the life of a US PhD tutor in English, two novels under her belt, and still interacting with her lit students. At least one reviewer preferred this novel over BEE's Shards (which I have yet to read). There was also a warning that the contents are controversial. I like my fiction edgy, yet am aware that writers have to be so careful these days, so with writing, it's kind of like walking on a highwire, trying to get the balance right without ruining the whole show.I almost awarded the book five stars, it just missed the full marks because I detected some padding in the middle with the recipes and wine guzzling. Moving the feast aside, I did so want to know what the protagonist was going to do with you-know-who, and what the outcome would be. I didn't really care too much about the husband, and by the second half of the book, I just wished he would leave the room and never come back.

this first person confessional, saturated with references of literature by women authors, comes with a post-gothic tone of edgar allen poe. the reader is introduced in the early pages to vladimir, for whom this document is written—whether vladimir will ever see the text is left to the reader to decide. vladimir is bound with zip ties, chained to a chair in a cabin. that introduction made, the narrator unfolds her story, of a woman in her fifties, perceived by herself no longer physically attractive, a university professor of literature, two published books of some promise during her younger days, nothing followed. married, she and her husband, also a writer and literary professor, had an open marriage—his permission to engage in sexual activities with other women, mostly his students. seven of his students accuse him of taking advantage of them sexually.contemplating the power dynamics of sexual behavior, reciprocity can become moot, the tacit contract of mutual agreement can be rescinded by the person with the least power or lacking in power at any moment, youth, employee, student disclosure within certain institutions and situations is a matter of impropriety. this is the situation in which the husband of the narrator is in, legal counsel hired and the advice of his daughter and her lover, both young women lawyers.the self-absorbed narrator, accused of being her husband’s enabler, like most fabled workers in the fields of literature is a heavy drinker, caught up in the anxiety of her own fading opportunities of sexual encounters, being less desirable and attractive than the young women on campus and her husband, sets her sites on the new young sexy professor, author of an acclaimed, first novel. vladimir, like the narrator, is married and the parent of a daughter. from a conversation with vladimir’s wife and her perceptions, more false than true, of other events, the narrator is emboldened to go ahead with her plan to seduce vladimir by kidnapping.in an interview, julia may jonas, a playwright, said that her novel started out as a play that, during the height of the covid pandemic, she turned into a novel. the pages of the book set in the cabin read like stage scenes, the narrator and vladimir in action and conversation wrestled with the attempt to upset role reversals within the power dynamics of sexual behavior, questioning female sexual desire as contrasted with male sexual desire, coming up with female power losing. rather disturbingly, jonas perceives women at whatever age as messy and lacking sexual agency. no wonder the need for gothic trappings.

I enjoyed the premise of this novel and bought into it for about 75%. I felt the novel needed better editing - the text was verbose. And then the final chapters, each no more than a paragraph in length flew by, as though the author was just trying to get to the end