Alice Sebold - Lucky

Sebold fulfills a promise that she made to herself in the very tunnel where she was raped: someday she would write a book about her experience. With Lucky she delivers on that promise with mordant wit and an eye for life's absurdities, as she describes what she was like both as a young girl before the rape and how that rape changed but did not sink the woman she later became.

It is Alice's indomitable spirit that we come to know in these pages. The same young woman who sets her sights on becoming an Ethel Merman-style diva one day (despite her braces, bad complexion, and extra weight) encounters what is still thought of today as the crime from which no woman can ever really recover. In an account that is at once heartrending and hilarious, we see Alice's spirit prevail as she struggles to have a normal college experience in the aftermath of this harrowing, life-changing event.

Alice Sebold Komfortos mennyország című regénye az egyik kedvenc könyvem, innen tájékozódtam arról, hogy az írónőnek megjelentek más könyvei is. Amikor elolvastam a fülszöveget, teljesen ledöbbentem, mert nem is gondoltam volna, hogy ez a könyv igaz történet, ráadásul az írónő története. Dióhéjban a könyv egy memoár arról, amikor tinikorában az írónőt megerőszakolta egy ismeretlen férfi. 

Ez a könyv rettentően megindító volt. Nagyon együtt érzek Sebold-dal, el sem lehet képzelni, hogy miken mehetett keresztül. Szerintem jó, hogy leírta az "élményét", mert ezzel rengeteg nőnek adott erőt, és fog még adni. Azoknak, akik hasonló esettől rettegnek, és azoknak is, akikkel sajnos megtörtént már ilyen. Szerintem ilyennek nem szabadna megtörténni. De sajnos megtörténik, nap mint nap, és azzal, ha a homokba dugjuk a fejünket, és úgy teszünk, mintha a nemi erőszak egy olyan dolog lenne, amiről csak a hírekből vagy az internetről értesülünk, nem érünk el semmit. Mert ez egy létező probléma, és Alice Sebold fantasztikus nő, hogy felemelte a szavát. Hogy megírta ezt a könyvet, és hogy reményt adott nők millióinak: hogy igenis van élet egy ilyen borzalom után, és igenis túl lehet élni még a legrosszabbakat is. Minden tiszteletem az övé.

Azért vonok le egy pontot, mert az én ízlésemnek túlságosan kitért más dolgokra, a gyermekkorára, apró részletekre, amik szerintem nem illettek a könyvbe, csak töltelékszövegnek voltak jók.

Kedvenc idézetek

"They had no idea, because I had not told them, what had happened to me in that tunnel – what the particulars were. They were fitting together the horrors of imagination and nightmare and trying to fashion what had been their sister's or child's reality. I knew exactly what had happened. But can you speak those sentences to the people you love? Tell them you were urinated on or that you kissed back because you did not want to die?"

"Knowing a victim is like knowing a celebrity. Particularly when the crime is clouded in taboo. When I was doing research for this book, back in Syracuse, I met a woman like this. Without recognizing me at first, only knowing I was writing a book on Alice Sebold's rape case, she hurried in from another room and told me and those assisting me that „the victim in that case was my best friend.” I had no idea who she was."

"I saw my face in the mirror. I reached my hand up to touch the marks and cuts. That was me. It was also an undeniable truth: No shower would wipe the traces of the rape away."

"I couldn't see Valium as the benign drug the doctor made it out to be. I told him this but he pooh-poohed it. When he left the room I did what I knew I would do almost immediately, and crumpled up the prescription to throw it into the waste bin. It felt good to do it. A sort of „fuck you” to the idea that anyone could sweep this thing I'd suffered under the carpet.."

"He called me bitch. He told me I was dry.

„I'm sorry,” I said—I never stopped apologizing. „I'm a virgin,” I said.

(…)

He began to knead his fist against the opening of my vagina. Inserted his fingers into it, three or four at a time. Something tore. I began to bleed there. I was wet now."

"Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times."

"In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky."

★★★★★★★★★☆ (9/10)