Pure Poetry: A Novel - Softcover

Kirshenbaum, Binnie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743241827 ISBN 13: 9780743241823

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2002

Synopsis

Meet Lila Moscowitz, a smart-mouthed, Jewish American beauty with a voracious appetite for sex, a remarkable talent for outrageous lies, and an unerring knack for screwing up her life. An accomplished poet, renowned for writing "smut and filth in terza rima," she goes about her life in Pure Poetry with enough attitude and verve to win your heart forever. But since fleeing the all-consuming passion of her marriage to Max, the sexy German, she can no longer compose so much as a couplet; ghosts have taken over her Greenwich Village apartment, and the contrast between her feelings for her present lover and her former husband is breaking her heart. And neither her best friend, Carmen, nor her cross-dressing analyst, Leon, is able to soothe her angst over her impending thirty eighth birthday, an occasion fraught with a thirty-seven year tradition of emotional devastation. But time waits for no woman, and the dreaded birthday does bring insight: Love can be undone by the same desires that nurture it. Lila knows that she has got to take action, and in doing so she comes to realize some startling truths about herself, her capacity for love, and the nature of true freedom.

Binnie Kirshenbaum's voice has been acclaimed by critics and readers alike. Already a bestselling author in Germany, Kirshenbaum demonstrates a brilliant maturity in Pure Poetry. Not since Erica Jong's Fear of Flying has a novel so captured a woman's heart and desires. Readers will cheer Pure Poetry for its heady mix of humor and sadness, and for its slyly unsettling visions of modern life.

About this title

Review:

Lila Moscowitz, the Jewish-American heroine of Binnie Kirshenbaum's novel Pure Poetry, is a witty mess. She lies her head off, bribes little kids with candy, writes smutty poems in highly rigid forms, and advises students in her poetry class not to read books. She overdramatizes everything that happens to her, avoids her true feelings, and whips up a frenzy of neuroses at the drop of a zipper. In other words, she's like most people you know.

As her 35th birthday approaches, Lila begins to miss her ex-husband, a German cartographer whose parents were Nazis (Albert Speer was his uncle). What she misses most about Max is the great sex, which was unpredictable and ferociously exciting--especially rousing because of rassenschande, or the taboo mingling of the races. This makes her new relationship with blue-blooded Henry seem all the more stifling. She's getting tired of Henry's fastidiously protective attitude toward his silverware and soup tureens, not to mention his contention "that he does not have fantasies, that he is perfectly content with average sex, whatever that is." But she tries to stay with him, because at a certain age the bohemian lifestyle turns into something irresponsible, even pathetic, particularly in New York City. Lila herself understands that this is the source of her irony: "I mock feelings," she says blithely. "I make jokes to deflect the sorry truths about myself, and I use snide comments to camouflage hurt, and I'm good at it."

Lila wants to live freely in a world that favors discipline and orderly existence, especially for women approaching the end of their childbearing years. Her quest to balance freedom and form, or freedom within form, plays out metaphorically in Pure Poetry's structure: each chapter is headed by a definition of a poetic term that is somehow related ("fabliau" before a sex scene, "elegy" before a funeral, and so on). Certain readers might appreciate Kirshenbaum's attempt to impose some order on her narrative. The rest of us can race past these epigraphs (they're short) in favor of the narrative itself--wild, silly, and uncompromisingly fun, it's no more grown-up than Lila. --John Ponyicsanyi

About the Author:

Binnie Kirshenbaum is a professor in the Writing Division of the Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the author of several highly acclaimed novels and has received a Critics' Choice Award and a Granta Best young American Novelist Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743241827
• ISBN 13: 9780743241823
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208