A celestial overseer observesโand is continually confounded byโa young womanโs path into adulthood in this uncanny and darkly humorous novel, unpublished until now and accompanied by a selection of the authorโs stories.
Susan Taubesโs novella โLament for Juliaโ is the story of a young woman coming of age in the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of a sexless spirit who supposes himself to be charged with her oversight.
What is this spirit? An operator from on high (though hardly holy), a narrative I, and a guiding presence that is more than a bit of a voyeur, who remains entirely unknown to Julia herself. About her, the spirit knows both a good deal and very little, since Juliaโs emotional and physical and sexual being are all baffling, if also fascinating, to an entity that is pure mind.
The I and Julia are a mismatched couple, set up for failure from the start, it seems, even if they do somehow manage to deal in their different ways with childhood and Mother and Father Klopps and ugly pink outfits and dances and crushes for a while. After which come love and marriage, not necessarily in that order, at which point things really start to go wrong.
Unpublished during Taubesโs lifetime, โLament for Juliaโ appears here with a selection of her stories. A brilliant metaphorical exploration of a womanโs double consciousness that is also a masterpiece of the grotesque, it is a novel like no other, a book, as Samuel Beckett wrote to his French publisher, โfull of erotic touches of an emphatic sort [and] raw language,โ the product of an โauthentic talent,โ adding, โI shall reread it.โ