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Baise-Moi (Rape Me)
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Baise-Moi (Rape Me) Customer Reviews
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What Losing Means...
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As Stephen Colbert would say, "It's French, B*tch!" This book is kind of a parallel version of Thelma and Louise, only more explicit and less sympathetic. The two main characters, Manu, a down-and-out working-class woman who is brutally gang-raped along with a friend who is slain for cursing her assailants, and Nadine, a prostitute whose best friend is murdered, seemingly snap under the stress and injustices of their working-class city life and go on a maniacal killing and robbery spree, holding up strangers and killing anyone who gets in their path. They also have plenty of sex along the way.
The book is billed as a feminist response to violent literature, much of which is male-dominated, yet I think there's more to the story. In fact, I question whether it's really feminist at all. Interestingly, the first person Nadine kills is her uppity roommate, a woman, while Manu slays the thug who beat up her small-time pot-dealing friend/boyfriend and then the parole officer suspected of murdering her neighbor, along with his wife. In essence, the conflict is about class more than gender. The women only kill one of the men they have sex with, and the climax of the book is not when Nadine, the more restrained of the shooters, guns down a five year-old child, but rather when they kill a bourgeoisie architect in his own home after robbing him, despite the fact that he attempts to psychologically outwit them and get them to spare his life. "We just came to teach you what losing means," Manu tells him (p. 220).
This book was interesting, but it could have been better. The prose was a bit uneven, though to be fair I was reading a translation, so that may not be Despentes' fault. However, I also think the book read like a rough-draft. The writer revels in describing gore, guts, and sex, but never gives us a sense of where/who the characters are. Space that should have been devoted to explaining why the characters do what they do is instead lavished on the characters' talking about how cool it is that they are actually doing it and how they ought to come up with better lines to say before killing people, as though they are in a movie. It just seemed tasteless and tawdry, and while some have said that was part of the point, it just didn't work for me. A subplot about a side character who had an incestuous relationship with a parent should have been a chance for Despentes to comment on a serious problem faced by women (as well as men) when they have no power, instead becomes absurd and unrealistic when Manu says something to the effect of, 'That must be so cool to do it with your father'. All-in-all, this is a good blueprint for a book, but it's not a finished product. I'm not one to obsess over excessive drafting and redrafting of novels, but this book could have used more work. There's a lot to analyze here, but it could have been a better one and that's just frustrating.
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