{"id":110577,"date":"2022-03-18T20:54:04","date_gmt":"2022-03-18T20:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=110577"},"modified":"2024-03-14T17:23:23","modified_gmt":"2024-03-14T17:23:23","slug":"love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/love\/","title":{"rendered":"Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Michal Zechariah.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Love by Maayan Eitan, picture via Penguin Random House<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Maayan Eitan, Love<\/em> (Penguin Press<\/a>, March 2022)<\/p>\n

When I was in high school, I had a boyfriend who was more sexually experienced than me. He said he used to date an older girl from a kibbutz\u2014kibbutzim were communes known for their promiscuity\u2014who taught him everything about sex. He talked about the things they did often. After we finally did it, though, he started crying. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong?\u201d I asked. I was alarmed. Entangled in his duvet, my boyfriend confessed that this was his first time. There was no girl in a kibbutz. The stories he had been coaxing me with for weeks were all fictions, spun in his imagination, and based on porn. Did my boyfriend love me, or was he only eager to try out the things he had seen on his computer monitor behind closed doors? Was I seduced by the honest desire his stories evinced or by their pornographic fictitiousness, so obviously false in hindsight? In Love<\/i>, a radiant debut by Israeli author Maayan Eitan, these possibilities are all inseparable from one another. Love cannot be protected in a world already rife with sexual exploitation.<\/p>\n

Love <\/em>is a phantasmatic prose poem about the life of a teenage prostitute (she uses the pseudonym Libby at work, but that is not her real name). Originally published in Hebrew and translated into English by the author, the slim volume is split into two parts. The first part is titled \u201cWords Are Whores\u201d and is loosely structured around the narrator\u2019s experiences as a sex worker\u2014the hired men that drive her from one apartment to the next throughout the night, her exchanges with the other girls she meets in their cars, her fascination with Assaf, the elusive pimp that hired her, and her grotesque encounters with clients. The second part, \u201cLove,\u201d begins with a romantic relationship later in the narrator\u2019s life but soon becomes unmoored from its starting point, floating in time among her days as a sex worker, her memory lapses, and an unspoken trauma in her childhood. She initially lives with a partner she claims to love and finds a job at a gallery. But these attempts at normalcy fail when she inevitably gravitates toward her old life. Speaking retrospectively, she tells her partner:<\/p>\n

This is how I imagine I\u2019ll show up again at your door: instead of two suitcases, I\u2019ll have a backpack this time. In the backpack there would be a book, in the book it would say, we are free women, said Anna to Molly. Perhaps Molly to Anna. I decided to become a free woman too, I had too much money and I got sick of returning to your bed every night, so free from the chains of this world I called Assaf again and told him, Hey, Assaf, it\u2019s Libby.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eitan\u2019s protagonist cannot imagine a wholehearted reunion with her partner. Her fantasy of returning to him already contains the seed that led to her departure\u2014her desire to be a free woman. The book that instigates this desire is Doris Lessing\u2019s The Golden Notebook<\/em>, where the protagonists Molly and Anna identify themselves as \u201cfree women\u201d because they are unmarried. Freedom, for them, means freedom from men. Love<\/em>\u2019s narrator also comes to see her romantic relationship as a form of bondage, where her financial welfare becomes inseparable from sharing her partner\u2019s bed. Returning to that bed every night feels as undesirable to her as her nightly routine as a sex worker.  But she ends up in the same position as Molly, who admits that it is hard for women to define themselves outside of their relationships with men: Eitan\u2019s protagonist can only alternate between her attachments to her unnamed partner and the pimp Assaf\u2014she never becomes independent from them.<\/p>\n

Love<\/em>\u2019s narrator continuously unwrites the facts of her own account. She creates alternatives to every event and repeatedly confesses to lying. To say that she is unreliable would be an understatement. All the while, she maintains coherence through the distinctiveness of her voice and entangles the reader in an increasing emotional intimacy. When telling her partner how a girl she knew as a sex worker once urged her to \u201crun away from there,\u201d she says:<\/p>\n

It seems like I should have listened to her, but I stayed inside, this was what I imagined Assaf wanted me to do. Perhaps I didn\u2019t imagine. Perhaps, in the end, I met him. I think I fell in love with him, I think, in the end, that I fell in love with him. Or perhaps it was someone else. Who opened the door for me and wrapped his arms around me and pressed me to his chest. Who waited for me on a bench next to my building when I was delayed and asked, is everything all right? Everything\u2019s fine. Do you remember that I told you what we did? I lied. I made it all up for you. So that you love me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this brief passage, Assaf transforms from an absent but commanding figure whom the protagonist must obey to a love interest, to the main character in the protagonist\u2019s fantasy about loving care. At the end of this sequence, the narrator faces her present partner again and reassures him that the entire story has been a lie\u2014she was never a sex worker. The book\u2019s intense anti-realism and refusal to commit to a single set of facts respond to the horror of its central insight: that love, the thing that people yearn for the most, is already implicated in the violence of sexual exploitation. In the narrator\u2019s experience, sex work and heterosexual monogamy have more in common than we may like to admit. Faced with love\u2019s false promises of care and safety, lying is the only way that she can distance herself from her attachments to men.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Eitan is a controlled author who is acutely aware of the possibilities of fiction. Before the Hebrew version of Love <\/em>came out in the spring of 2020, she regularly published short stories in Hebrew literary magazines and popular media. She was a graduate student at the University of Michigan\u2013Ann Arbor and is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on Hebrew literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba. When her book arrived after six years of work it became an immediate \u201cliterary sensation,\u201d as declared by the blurb on the English edition dust jacket. The Israeli literary community celebrated Eitan\u2019s ingenuity, and the attention she received seemed unprecedented for a debut writer of innovative literary fiction. Leading publications such as Haaretz<\/em> and the Hebrew edition of Granta<\/em> covered the book, and prominent critics, editors, and authors\u2014including Tehila Hakimi and Dan Miron\u2014praised her prose. But alongside the general enthusiasm about Eitan\u2019s literary talent, others raised concerns about her book\u2019s noncommittal relation to facts. Ayellet Ben Ner, co-founder of Argaman, an organization advocating for sex workers\u2019 rights, confronted Eitan on social media and demanded to know whether or not she had been a sex worker herself. If not, what right did she have to write about sex workers\u2019 lives? Was she not appropriating their voices for her own purposes?<\/p>\n

Eitan replied that it was none of Ben Ner\u2019s business. In an interview to Haaretz<\/em> shortly after the confrontation, she argued back: \u201cMiranda July has said that women authors are denied the liberty to write fiction, and anything we write is perceived as autobiographical . . . I should have the liberty to write even when discussing my characters\u2019 deepest pains, which are not disconnected from reality. The demand for autobiography is irrelevant to literature as far as I\u2019m concerned. It\u2019s an essentially patriarchal question.\u201d Eitan is a powerful interpreter of her own writing, and her public interviews offer accounts of her book that are as persuasive as the book itself. For her, the freedom to write fiction is not only a freedom to lie. It\u2019s a freedom to tell the kinds of truth that only fiction can discover. With its fundamentally undetermined relation to facts, Love<\/em> manipulates readers\u2019 expectations from fiction\u2014a followable plot, a character arc\u2014to express the radical incoherence of experience in the face of sexual violence. The violation of the body sunders narratives that make sense of the pursuit of love and renders everyday language inadequate for describing it. When the narrator is committed to a psychiatric institution, she defies the therapists\u2019 attempts to analyze her: \u201cI laughed loudly when they asked if I felt any pain, where did it feel painful. What else could I do?\u201d The character\u2019s pain, as Eitan says in her interview, is \u201cnot disconnected from reality.\u201d It is the pain of yearning for love, but only being able to experience it as exploitation. But straightforward propositions such as this are insufficient for conveying the quality of this pain. If it can be conveyed by words at all, they need to be the circular, evasive, and variegated words offered by  Love <\/em>itself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Although Eitan is the book\u2019s translator as well as its author, you wouldn\u2019t know it from the copyright page. Nowhere is she credited for the translation. In a social media post about self-translation, Eitan acknowledges the commercial reasons for this choice. Despite translators\u2019 increasing visibility in the literary industry, the English-speaking book market is still heavily biased in favor of original English titles. Only 3% of the books published in the United States are translations. By translating their own work, authors can perform a miracle\u2014they can create a second yet original copy of their book.<\/p>\n

Eitan\u2019s translation preserves the rhythms of the Hebrew original as well as its lyrical seductiveness, even as it occasionally stumbles over grammar or idiom. And then there are instances in which different languages cannot replicate each other. Love<\/em>\u2019s opening scene provides an example of this limitation. In that passage, the narrator goes through a catalog of possible local life stories:<\/p>\n

You didn\u2019t have any friends<\/p>\n

You had a terrific laugh. You had long legs, big tits, a flat belly. No, you were fat. You came from ruined homes, well-off families, your parents were madly in love with each other. Your father was an accountant, a kibbutz member, homeless, a linguistics professor at a university. He loved you like his youngest daughter. You were an only child. You were born to a large family, after years of treatments, you were adopted . . . You were born in Saint Petersburg. No no: your parents came from America, you were born in the suburbs, you replied to them in Hebrew when they talked to you in a jumble of foreign languages. You spoke Russian until you were seven then you forgot it, the snow too. You knew no other language but Hebrew. You refused to answer your grandparents when they spoke Amharic to you. You pretended not to understand them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The English pronoun you<\/em> obscures the number and gender of the narrator\u2019s audience, which the Hebrew makes explicit: plural, feminine. Here, the ungendered and unnumbered second person in English diminishes the effect of the Hebrew text. Only the plural nouns and the proliferation of possibilities give the impression that the narrator is addressing multiple people.<\/p>\n

The second person feminine plural is important for the interpretive possibilities it allows: Is the narrator speaking to the other sex workers she meets every night, pointing to the prevalence of her situation across all demographics? If so, why does she sometimes stop the cumulative torrent in order to correct herself, choosing between alternatives rather than adding them to the string of possibilities? Could the plural you <\/em>refer to the narrator herself, in the same way that Dante on the brink of hell speaks about his life as nostra vita<\/em>? In this case, the protagonist may be an Everywoman of sorts, standing in for all sex workers, or all women. Whether Eitan intends her protagonist to address fellow sex workers, herself as a representative for women at large, or even the readers, the implied audience of this passage shows that Love <\/em>is not only telling a personal story. This is not the psychological account of how one woman\u2019s sexual trauma caused her to lose faith in love. Although Love <\/em>gradually spirals toward greater intimacy, the image of multiple women at the beginning of the book frames its dark conception of love as a wide-ranging, transcultural problem. Sexual violence cannot be excluded from love, even if we are not always faced with its worst iterations. If Eitan\u2019s protagonist is trapped in a world where love is contaminated with violence, then we must be trapped in it with her.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong><\/p>\n

Michal Zechariah<\/strong> is a literary scholar working on ethics and emotions in early modern British literature. She teaches at the University of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus<\/i>, Psyche<\/i>, <\/i>and various Hebrew literary publications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With its fundamentally undetermined relation to facts, Love manipulates readers\u2019 expectations from fiction\u2014a followable plot, a character arc\u2014to express the radical incoherence of experience in the face of sexual violence. The violation of the body sunders narratives that make sense of the pursuit of love and renders everyday language inadequate for describing it. When the narrator is committed to a psychiatric institution, she defies the therapists\u2019 attempts to analyze her: \u201cI laughed loudly when they asked if I felt any pain, where did it feel painful. What else could I do?\u201d The character\u2019s pain, as Eitan says in her interview, is \u201cnot disconnected from reality.\u201d It is the pain of yearning for love, but only being able to experience it as exploitation. But straightforward propositions such as this are insufficient for conveying the quality of this pain. If it can be conveyed by words at all, they need to be the circular, evasive, and variegated words offered by\u00a0Love<\/em> itself.<\/p>\n

Michal Zechariah<\/strong> reviews Maayan Eitan<\/strong>‘s Love<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":110580,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110577"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114687,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110577\/revisions\/114687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}