Reviews for Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M.

The average rating for Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M. based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-03 00:00:00 Derek Ferrari It is said that the future narrows once we cease to believe it is eternal…___Catherine Millet I am over fifty pages into my new read by Catherine Millet titled Jealousy and I have to say that this memoir is far more cerebral than The Sexual Life of Catherine M.. There is plenty of hard core sexual intelligence on the pages of her first graphic memoir, but this particular book hasn't even offered a hint of decadent indulgences as yet. In her opening she is obviously leading up to why she wrote this book and she is taking her sweet time about it. Not that it isn't worth reading. The book reminds me of a sort of text book as she drops the names of pertinent philosophers and film makers whose influences were made on what she is writing, and at some point it is hoped she begins to feel something besides her own thinking about it. She is analyzing everything. I feel the letter she found regarding her husband's romantic involvement with somebody other than herself, the letter that we were previously warned about in the commercial hype of blurbs and jacket notes, is beginning to be revealed, and the dealings to follow are why we are reading her again in the first place. That, and to get a few more erotic details regarding her sexual escapades, if truth be told. And why not? Why not tell the truth as she so boldly and bravely did in the first book, unsettling the nerves and relaxed muscles now poised in my chair and ready to do battle with distractions everywhere. The travel that is still necessary to her business causes Catherine to delay her direct dealings with her husband over this matter. Far away she is left to her own devices, her mind dredging up old memories, crafting scenarios in which she sees her husband having sex in several positions in different rooms of special houses. All a fabrication in the mind of Catherine M., but there is no denying the trysts did take place without her knowledge of them. What was previously taboo in the couple's relationship is now front and center on the stove, and the telephone blazes long distance with the truth and lies still to be told and believed in. The discovery of a new Catherine M. involves the old one as well as every man she ever put herself in intimate company with. Everything has changed for Catherine upon learning of her husband's love for another woman than herself. What once was just in her mind a sexual act has become something more dangerous and frighteningly defenseless. I see perhaps where this memoir is going. In her first book Catherine maintained she had sex with a thousand others simply to have sex and be willingly taken across taboos she would never choose by her own doing. She allowed herself to be led into these sexual adventures in order to feel freed and less prejudiced. There was never any emotional link to any of the strangers she let physically inside her. But her husband, Jacques, on the other hand, had developed emotional ties to a young pregnant woman, and Catherine discovered this secret relationship after viewing nude photographs her husband had taken of the girl with her legs splayed open and clearly pregnant, something Catherine could no longer become, I assume, after having already had three abortions during her active past. The other relationships she discovered in his journals and love letters were also obviously emotional attachments he had kept from her. It was their mutual taboo, their understanding and agreement as a couple, that the lovers they each would take for sex would be kept private from each other, and through the years Catherine had no problem with that arrangement. Jacques claimed he wanted no longer to hear any more of the stories she willingly would tell him when they had first met. But when she discovered the letters, photographs, and journals her husband kept and realized these women were more than just sex partners her imaginings became devastating to her. Left to her own fantastical world she habitually inhabited, even at work or play, Catherine M. was feeling herself crazy and completely out of sorts. Her obsession with Jacques grew until not only was she climbing up the stairs to his studio almost every day to further her investigative work, but she was beginning to remove items and keep them in her own drawer for the purpose of dealing with her grief, at least for the moments she looked at them, more straight on. That did not prevent her thinking of vengeance, feeling like an extra in his new film, or fantasizing now about Jacques and his lovers having sex, instead of her own fantasies she had employed for many years that no longer worked for her. She was feeling her life becoming undone. Catherine still had not confronted Jacques about these lovers, he had no knowledge of her spying on him, and I am certain all this will have to be dealt with by book's end. But so far I am half way through and there is still much ground to cover. The writing is so good. The book reads like a novel almost. I find similarities to my favorite philosopher Gilles Deleuze as she lets the writing discover for itself where she is going. There is no hurry and the rhythm is so enjoyable. I am not wanting this book to end. I feel in matters of intimate relationships, sexual experimentation, and the subsequent discovery that nothing really does ever end, that each answer creates a new question if one is willing to go deeper and deeper into the object of their personal desire. I feel this is an important book and somehow it has been discounted because it came on the heels of a somewhat pornographic sex memoir. This is an important academic textbook in many ways. It is most definitely a serious social study of our human condition. Another page torn from one of Jacques' journal and stuffed into the pocket of a robe he wore on vacation finally offers the tipping point for Catherine and Jacques after one year enmeshed in their crisis together. Whereas previous arguments, discussions, and graphic emotional upheavals between the two allowed nothing sympathetic or even empathetic to issue from Jacques, arriving home to see the torn journal page and a note from Catherine finally makes its mark on him. Suddenly he is remorseful and wanting to make things right with her as she is shivering, frightfully coiled in the fetus position in the back bedroom. Jacques becomes everything she was hoping for each time she had pressed him for details throughout the running year of her suffering. But it is almost too late as Catherine is finally pushed over the line of her grief, feeling as she did when she learned her mother had committed suicide. Her memory holding what remained of that day when she identified the body and witnessed the open window her mother had jumped from and the stool in front of it she used to climb in order to fling herself out. I am gratefully prescient to the fact that Catherine must eventually recover somewhat enough from her demented crisis in order to write this intelligent book, but at this point in the memoir she is suffering in savage proportions. I have only four more pages to go in my reading of Catherine Millet's Jealousy. I am deeply saddened and seemingly feeling adrift in a new tumbling and vacant sea she has made for me. My despair at not having another book of Millet's to read is tempting me to look for her book on Salvador Dali who she mentions briefly twice in Jealousy. Dali is one iconic art figure who said he could live without anyone, and now she has perked my curiosity for what she may have discovered for herself while writing her book on Dali. I am aware of Dali's rather rich existence in his personal world of fantasy. I know about Millet's. I am being honest about my own in light of what I know now. I prefer my virtual world over a reality that hurts too much, that is so lacking in meeting my needs. I understand why these fantasizers do it, why they embrace a world of their own making. I have done it often enough in my poetry. It is not as easy as it looks. Millet's fantasies were well-developed, but still not strong enough to take on the reality of her relationship with Jacques. But she found a way to incorporate the real lovers in his life into her own masturbatory imaginations. She embraced her pain with feelings of ecstasy. People like Catherine Millet are easily tossed to the side, discounted for their perverted and deviant ideas, especially if they are of a sexual nature and extremely promiscuous as hers are. But a writer like Millet cannot be discounted. She is too good, too fine, to operative in her compositions of excellence to be denied. There is truth in every thing she says. I cannot believe I found her. What a lucky fortune I have made by delving into my own obsessions and fantasies. It can only be hoped we still hear more from Catherine Millet and I, for one, will be looking for her. A most important sentence I found within the last few pages of this fine book is revealed within the light of herself as she was writing this memoir. The sentence could not be more true or better written. It is worth studying completely as if understanding it potentially becomes a part of your final grade: The distance we set between ourselves and the events of our past life, which reduces their scale, the backlog of things we failed to notice at the time, the logic which connects them, which back then was invisible, the light shed on them by the epoch they belong to, which mankind already considers a moribund piece of history, their ultimate strangeness, which makes us look back on the person we were as though they were a different being, all these things conspire to turn our past into a dream.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-03-06 00:00:00 Steven Davis Good lord is this book pretentious. File this one under French sluts who think they're Plato. The nonchalant sexual libertinism that marked Millet's attitude in her previous book, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., has given way to jealousy in this sequel memoir, in the wake of her discovery of the side amours of her lover, Jacques, with whom she is having a relatively monogamous relationship. She realizes her reactions are hypocritical and complex, and her attempts to sort through and hash out these feelings and their sources make up the contents of the book. Millet is thoughtful and meticulous in the process, probably too much so, and the result becomes wearisome and exhausting very quickly. The Sexual Life of Catherine M. had a little something for everyone: dirty sex interwoven with thoughtful musings about same. This time we get mostly the philosophy; her rambles are often so long-winded that it's no surprise that she had the stamina to give good blowjobs. This is one of those books where words like "onanism" and "anodyne" are used repeatedly instead of words like "masturbation" and "soothing." In fact, there should be a drinking game for every time "anodyne" is used in this book; it would make for a welcome anodyne for the painful reading. To her credit, Millet admits on page 77: "I am not always as acute as my eye is sharp -- as you can see from this book." Millet continually goes off on analytic rambles and in the course of them I often wondered how she got from point A to point Z. Or, by the time I got to point Z I'd forgotten what the hell point A had been. Several times she'll write something overanalytically, then repeat it more directly with the preface: "In other words," which makes you wonder why she just didn't go the more direct route to begin with. I honestly don't think there's enough here for a whole book. Millet beats a dead horse so as to to see what a dead horse looks like at various stages of tenderizing and decay. So, it's off to find a book better suited to my onanism and anodyne relief.