Our Lady Of Babylon [Hardcover]

John Rechy, whose previous novels include 4th Angel, City of Night and The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez: A Novel, is back with this retelling of the stories of the fallen women of history. When an 18th-century French noblewoman has vivid dreams of the lives of Eve, the whore of Babylon, Medea and Mary Magdalene, she comes to realize that they are more than just somnambulant imaginings. Rather, they are actual memories. With the help of Madame Bernice, a friend and mystic, she sets out to tell the true stories of their lives.

With a colorful ribbon of feminist revisionism festooning its New Age wrapping, Rechy's latest novel indulges in past-life grandiosity and some scandalous speculation about the erotic lives of Adam, Medea and Jesus, among others. An unnamed countess in a decaying 18th-century European city flees to the country after being unjustly accused of having killed her husband, the count. She temporarily escapes a wily plot spun by the count's evil sister and?naturally?the pope, finding sanctuary in the chateau of Madame Bernice, a mystic who helps the countess recall that her "essence" is to be on a "journey of redemption" to vindicate the lives of all unjustly blamed women. In a succession of afternoon teas, the narrator tells the mystic of her incarnations as Eve, Mary Magdalene, Delilah, Salome, Helen of Troy, Medea and La Malinche, Cortes's lover. But the villainous pope is on to them. Rechy (The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez) does capture some of the breathless Perils-of-Pauline pacing of a good 18th-century novel, but some of the incarnations are related with so little verve that they become one-liners. The Trojan War, we learn, was fought because Paris suffered from penis envy. None of the principals?the countess, the mystic, Lucifer, God, Adam, Jesus, Judas or John the Baptist?comes to life. Rechy's spectacle of maligned Woman pursued through the annals of history by a vengeful and petty Holy Father (God, the pope) strives for the power of liberating myth but attains?and only in its best moments?a comic, and cosmic, absurdity.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rechy (The Miraculous Day of Amelia Gomez, LJ 8/91) starts with an intriguing premise: retelling and redeeming the stories of maligned women. Unfortunately, his surreal treatment of the tales of Eve, Helen of Troy, Salome, Mary Magdalene, Medea, Madame Du Barry, and others falls flat. Two women meet daily for tea. One recounts her dreams/memories of previous lives as scorned women; the other probes and challenges these stories in preparation for a series of interviews intended to expose the truth of history. The stories all seem to involve 15-year-old beauties with wondrous breasts, hard nipples, and thighs rippling in silver light, who fall instantly in love, have great sex, and are soon betrayed and condemned for all time. The great resolution of the novel and the puzzle of why these women have been branded whores relies on God as a bored tyrant who never intended to create an Eve at all. Rechy is capable of creating engaging ideas, including Cassandra and Lucifer as an angelic brother-and-sister team, but the overall effect disappoints more than delights. Not recommended.?Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll., N.C.,
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rechy's latest novel was five years in the making, and it's obviously a labor of love. Set in the late eighteenth century, the story begins with the protagonist, an unnamed lady who has been framed for her husband's murder, now on the lam in an unspecified countryside. There she meets one Madame Bernie, to whom she recounts a series of troubling dreams. Bernie becomes convinced that these dreams are in fact memories of an astonishing kind. Our lady is a material reembodiment of the essence of St. John the Baptist's Whore of Babylon, who has lived throughout history and myth in the incarnations of Eve, Helen of Troy, Mary Magdalene, Medea, and Madame DuBarry. Most of Rechy's novel comprises these stories, which are subversive and quite funny. For example, we get "the real story" concerning the actual cause of the Trojan War (Paris wasn't well endowed). A fictional absolution of women known historically as "whores," this novel is a funny, sexy, stylistically elegant, tongue-in-cheek rewriting of history, framed by a deadly serious look at erotic history and a formidable exploration of the power of words and their interpretation to alter our existence. Greg Burkman

Episodic, mock-religious meditation on an eternal whore, by the author of The Miraculous Day of Amalia G¢mez (1991), etc. Like the eternal soldier, this whore appears through the ages at pivotal moments of history to expiate and revisit her sins--her original sins, in fact, since she was Eve. She was Delilah; she was Mary Magdalene. She was Helen of Troy, Madame de Pompadour, Salome, and Medea. As the novel begins, she is the Countess du Muir, who flees the cathedral in which her husband is murdered to seek refuge at his chƒteau. It seems the Pope himself, in league with the countess's treacherous sister, Elena, wants to frame her for the murder, exposing her as a calculating ``whore'' rather than a loving wife. In a series of teas with a dowdy mystic, the grieving widow recounts the lurid dreams she's been having, all of them centering on great men of history who were betrayed by women. Not dreams but memories, says the mystic, and the women were but scapegoats: The label ``whore'' is a hoax perpetrated by organized religion to obscure its own perfidy. At the same time, a scurrilous account of the eternal whore circulates, allowing Rechy to add some pornography to his contrived mix; the widow counterpoints with the truth. The press gathers as the mystic and the countess turn over history, and thus the pretext of the countess's narration is to practice for her interview. She will set the record straight about the bad rap she's suffered for eons: that a sensual woman must needs also be treacherous. There are some compelling scenes, based on nothing but Rechy's imagination, between the teenagers Mary Magdalene, Judas Iscariot, and Jesus. Otherwise: an artificial, weak performance full of sexual encounters that don't ring true. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

An eighteenth-century lady haunted by dreams of infamous fallen women and their lovers realizes that these women's lives bear a remarkable resemblance to her own and is told by a mystic that her dreams are memories of past lives and that she must face the public to vindicate all women falsely accused of crimes.