In Il giovane Holden c'è una frase che è diventata ormai un must tra i lettori: “Quelli che mi lasciano proprio senza fiato sono i libri che quando li hai finiti di leggere e tutto quel che segue vorresti che l'autore fosse tuo amico per la pelle e poterlo chiamare al telefono tutte le volte che ti gira”. Sono sicura che tutti voi che state leggendo questa recensione l'avete letta almeno una volta nella vita.
Ecco, dopo aver finito questo libro, desidero immensamente Erica Jong come mia migliore amica e poterle telefonare o mandarle un messaggio ogni volta che ho un problema e fare con lei lunghe chiacchierate sincere e divertenti sugli uomini, bevendo vino frizzante.
Per quanto Paura di volare sia uscito nel 1973, quindi ben sei anni prima che io nascessi, è incredibilmente moderno. Tantissime parti del libro, quelle in cui Isadora riflette sulla situazione delle donne e come una donna viene ancora vista dagli uomini, potrebbero benissimo essere riprese da qualunque conversazione sui social in cui si parla per esempio di catcalling o di molestie sessuali.
Il libro racconta le vicende sentimentali e i primi due matrimoni di Isadora Wing, alter ego della scrittrice i cui due primi matrimoni sono qui ripresi, romanzandoli.
Lo stile della narratrice è semplice e d'effetto, mai noioso, mai scontato e di sicuro, Erica Jong è sempre sincera.
Pur essendo un libro di 48 anni fa, mi sono ritrovata moltissimo nelle sue riflessioni sul sesso e sull'amore, pur con le differenze tra la mia vita e quella di Isadora. Ma viene da pensare che davvero certe cose non cambiano mai. Fortunatamente, dall'altro lato, qualcosa nei miei anni devo averlo imparato perché sapevo benissimo da quando si sono incontrati come sarebbe finita la storia con Adrian Goodlove ed esattamente anche il motivo. Peccato che molto spesso queste conoscenze si rivelano sempre quando non si è parte in causa...
Sicuramente continuerò la storia di Isadora e inizierò Come salvarsi la vita, sequel di questo romanzo.

The musings of Isadora are an absolute trip. She’s spunky and hilarious. Not feminist literature for everyone— I would not recommend this book to most people despite my love for it.

It's been a long time, but I will try. I remember that I enjoyed it, but leafing through it again I am not sure why. I think it must have been the time that I read it. I was still angry about my first marriage even though I was happily embarking on another (much better and going strong, I might add, 20-odd years later), and Jong's rants rang true. Now I just see them as rants and wonder why I didn't say 'enough already, I got it.'

The John Updike quote on the cover I don't get at all: "The most uninhibited, delicious, erotic novel a woman ever wrote..." Did he actually read the book?! Or did he just flip through to the sex scenes? Did all the vitriol spewing out against men just pass him by? I wonder what the rest of his review look like.

Having said that, I went and looked it up (kudos to Google). Guess what? At least in the New Yorker review, John Updike didn't say that! He said a lot of other things which makes me suspect he did read the book and found it worth his time in spite of the poor way men are portrayed. I quote the review below in case anyone is interested:

Erica Jong’s first novel, “Fear of Flying,” feels like a winner. It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her soufflé rises with a poet’s afflatus. She sprinkles on the four-letter words as if women had invented them; her cheerful sexual frankness brings a new flavor to female prose. Mrs. Jong’s heroine, Isadora Wing, surveying the “shy, shrinking, schizoid” array of women writers in English, asks, “Where was the female Chaucer?,” and the Wife of Bath, were she young and gorgeous, neurotic and Jewish, urban and contemporary, might have written like this. “Fear of Flying” not only stands as a notably luxuriant and glowing bloom in the sometimes thistly garden of “raised” feminine consciousness but belongs to, and hilariously extends, the tradition of “Catcher in the Rye” and “Portnoy’s Complaint”—that of the New York voice on the couch, the smart kid’s lament.

„Problem ze mną polegał na tym, że zawsze pragnęłam we wszystkim być „naj”. Najwspanialsza kochanka. Najbardziej pożądliwa. Najżarliwsza cierpiętnica. Największa z ofiar, najgłupsza… Jeśli cały czas pakowałam się w kłopoty, to z własnej cholernej winy, dlatego że zawsze chciałam być „naj”.”

Isadora wyjeżdża z mężem-psychoanalitykiem do Austrii na służbową delegację. Jest znudzona i przytłoczona swoim życiem, nie wie czy pasuje do roli żony, a wszystko dookoła sprawia, że czuje się ograniczana. Postanawia więc poszukać tego, czego jej brakuje. Wplątuje się w romans, odkrywa swoją cielesność, opowiada o wyzwoleniu i wolności, chce być i żyć według własnych zasad. Autorka pisze o tym z lekkością, obśmiewa kogo trzeba, szuka sensu i bardzo, bardzo dużo myśli. I no cóż, było to dobre. Dobra historia, dobry język, dobry żart, dobre, dobre, dobre, ale to tyle. Nie porwało, nie bujało, brakło czegoś, co by mnie z tą historią związało. Ja sobie, książka sobie.
Lubię takie pamiętniki kobiet, lubię obserwować ich drogę, ale tu jednak za dużo było wszystkiego dookoła, a za mało samych przeżyć. I wyszło tak trochę bardziej jęcząco, niż odkrywczo.

Nie chcę też odbierać tej książce siły, bo na pewno w latach siedemdziesiątych było to coś, co wzbudzić mogło kontrowersje, odkryć nowe możliwości, ale teraz, z perspektywy czasu ciężko się tu odnaleźć.

Tłumaczenie Anna Dzierzgowska

If you know anything about this classic of 70s feminist “dirty” lit, it’s the “zipless fuck”—Jong’s famous phrase for the consequence-free, potentially anonymous sex her main character Isadora craves.

I couldn’t wait to tell you how much I HATED this book. I wanted to tell you that erotic poet Isadora and her analyst husband Bennett go to Vienna for a psychoanalysts convention. Isadora spots Adrian, another analyst, and immediately decides she wants him. If this is the zipless fuck, I thought, I hope it’s out of the way soon, because Adrian is disgusting. How am I supposed to relate to this woman when she can’t wait to fuck a sandal-wearing, dirty-toenail-having, farting, impotent, ginger chest haired, ass grabbing dickhead who calls her a cunt and makes her go tent camping?

And then it goes on and on, and she just flagrantly ditches Bennett at every given opportunity, although to be fair, he seems to be a bit humorless, but with Isadora as the narrator, who can say how true that is, because she works very hard to make Adrian “impish” by comparison. Isadora herself is whiny, vulgar, hypochondriacal, insecure, racist (all Egyptians are greasy, she tells us, before saying countless rude things about the Lebanese), and just generally insufferable.

When Adrian finally reveals his previously arranged plans to meet up with his baby mama and their kids, Isadora leaves him and goes to London to try to find Bennett, first stopping in Paris and staying in a small, seedy hotel room wherein she gets her period, graphically and gushingly and tells us all about it for pages, because she doesn’t have any pads or tampons with her. Because she’s finally alone for more than five minutes, she does some half hearted soul searching, but no real conclusions are reached.

I’ve certainly read a handful of 70s feminist fiction—Sheila Levine, Mr. Goodbar, etc. so I’m not unfamiliar with the genre, and I’ve watched many more movies from the time period. I can see why this was revolutionary for the time, but it just doesn’t have a lot to offer today, and I don’t see that it would have then, either. Outside of breaking ground for depicting a woman as horny as a man usually is, the characters are pretty much across the board unlikeable, the plot is slight. It isn’t trashy enough to be fun, or deep enough to be truly “literary.” It should be mentioned that the edition I read was released to coincide with the 40th anniversary of publication, and includes an introduction by 2000s “chick lit” author Jennifer Weiner. First, the introduction has plot spoilers, so it should be an afterward (pet peeve of mine—most people are reading for plot, not scholarship, so why are you giving away the plot in the beginning of the goddamn book, publishers?). Second, the thrust of her introduction is that women authors are ghettoized (like I just did when I deliberately called her “chick lit”) and not given the literary respect that men authors are. She brings some damning statistics to back herself up, but it comes off as “no one takes MY books seriously” more than “no one takes Erica Jong seriously.” Quite frankly, I think Erica Jong’s place in the pantheon is pretty much right as it should be, maybe a little high.

I found myself walking round this book and poking it nervously instead of reading it. This went on for days. Fear of Flying - famously feisty, fearless, feminist and full of fucking. Also well known to be zipless. It was like having a landmine on the table, if I opened it I could lose a leg, or some other fleshly part. I’d have to learn to type with my ear.

When I did summon up the courage I was a little bit – well, deflated. As opposed to being flated, which I had been. It was like pages of stand up comedy of a very middling sort but with buckets of f words and c words. Let’s make fun of being f-word Jewish American and finding yourself in c-word Germany. Let’s make fun of being married. Let’s make fun of having sex with your husband but thinking about another man. Ah, look, a clitoris. What is this, a feminist version of The Lucille Ball Show? It’s all a bit obvious these days. Actually it sort of sounds like it was pretty obvious those days too - let’s see, what do you think of when I say the words Jewish American? Psychoanalysis! And complicated family history involving Nazis! And problematic religion! Jewish mothers! And kvetching. A whole lot of that. But there’s no doubt Fear of Flying was a sensation in 1973.

When it wasn’t mild stand up comedy it was that old boring thinly-disguised-autobiography so let me tell you about all my old boyfriends and former masturbation techniques and two really crap marriages and I must not forget to disgorge pages and pages about how I always wanted to be a writer of pages and pages about being a writer. Novels about novelists should all be deleted, removed from shelves, pulped, unpublished, unwritten, obliterated. Along with films about film-making, songs about songwriting, paintings of the painter painting and sculptures of the sculptor having sculpted. This arse-gazing must stop. Memo to artists : you are not alone in the universe. If you were, you wouldn’t be able to be despised, alienated and misunderstood, and what a horror would that be, not being despised, alienated and misunderstood.

“Every man, deep down, knows he's a worthless piece of shit” joked Valerie Solanis in The SCUM Manifesto in 1968. Ha ha, she was only joking, right….? No, wait, she wasn’t, she shot Andy Warhol! Now that’s what I call feminism. No mucking around. I know, it ill behooves me to make pronouncements on this stuff. But I think I can say that some books don’t really travel through time very well, you have to have been there, and this is one. I thought it was going to be plenty sexy stuff but nah, Erica just talks the talk, she doesn’t shag the shag. Not in any great absorbing detail. And the constant moaning and griping about Erica’s sorry her protagonist’s rich privileged highly educated upper middle class poetry writing and publishing psychoanalytical conference attending Europe a-travelling life becomes a bit grating after a while.

Also, many of the long conversations between Erica sorry Isadora and her boyfriend are like many conversations you may remember in your own tortured yet banal existence. Which is why some women jumped on this novel and said yes! This is what life is like! I’m not saying I don’t wanna read about what life is like, but I don’t wanna read about what my life was like especially. It wasn’t very interesting. (It also wasn’t Jewish or American but there were striking similarities, mainly in the rubbishness of the actual conversations.) But then, if your middle class privileged life and its vast angst has always heretofore been rigorously excluded from the pages of The Novel then maybe that is why F of F was a good thing and is now suffering from the Citizen Kane effect which is where the great originator in some art form or another now looks rather tacky and tedious and tiresome because everyone has stolen all its ideas blind and copied it for ever after it appeared.

A deeply unfair 2.5 stars

I swear if I have to take another page of this rich, uppity bitch's incessant whinings and first world problems, I'll rip all my hair out.

Isadora Wing sooooo envies the fact that German streets are cleaner than those in the US. She won all her college poetry writing contests, edited the literary magazine, got published, kept receiving communication from publishers and yet remains soooo insecure about her writing prowess. Her equally rich, married and annoying sisters have procreated and produced cute little blue-eyed 'Aryan' cherubs who make the remaining population of American kids look like they belong in the third world. Oh the horror of white kids looking like kids in the third world! Oh how will she compete in the 'whose-baby-is-more-Aryan-looking' contest when she doesn't even want to use her womb? What a poor, little darling!

All she can think about is how she will screw the brains out of the next handsome stranger she meets while wallowing in self-pity and cribbing about ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends and therapists. She will cheat on her husband but expect him to treat her well despite being aware of her infidelities.

Stay away from this pseudo-feminist, offensive, crudely written autobiography masquerading as a novel.

I read this shortly after it came out in paperback (probably 1974ish). I probably should reread it when I'm old and gray. Wait, I am old and gray.

Speed dating with books 1/6
Since I am moving my books from one room to another and building a new bookcase I realized (again) that I have way too many unread books. I decided to choose 6 (for the beginning) of the ones waiting on my shelves for a long time or that I do not know if I would like, read 50 pages and decide if I want to continue with them or send them away. This week and the next I will share with you the results.

I bought this novel almost 10 years ago because, well, I was afraid of flying and I thought I might resonate with the character. I didn’t.

The Fear Of Flying goes. It was written in 1973 when women’s emancipation was not that accomplished .The book wants to be sexy and liberating, a sort of feminist erotic fiction with lots and lots of shrinks. Instead, for me, it was vulgar and only looking for the shocking factor. I can’t even count how many times I read cunt/pussy and fuck in the first 50 pages. I am not a prude but I felt the language was not sexy at all and it did not warm me to the characters.

Instantly, became one of my favorite books. I loved every part of this book. Whether you're a feminist or not, pick this book up and watch your life be changed! Definitely a book that should be on everyone's TBR

أحب أعتذر لنفسي ..
فقد أسأت اختيار كتاب السفر .. !
.
الكتاب عباره عن " هلوسات جنسيه " للكاتبه فقط !!
وبالنسبه للمترجم .. كان أكثر بذاءة من الكاتبه نفسها !
.
.
نفسيا .. كنت مهيأة جدًا للقراءه ..
لكن للأسف .. جرعات البذاءه المتزايدة صفحة وراء اخرى
حرمتني متعة القراءه !!
.
.
توقفت عن القراءة تماما عند الفصل الذي عنونته
بـ " العرب وحيوانات أخرى " !!
يعني تحمَّلت هلوسات هذه الكاتبه اليهوديه طوال صفحات
الكتاب الاولى ..
لعلِّي أَجِد في نهايته مايشفع لها ..
لكن .. لحد هنا وخلص !

For a book touted as being a great feminist read, the main character spends the whole book being obsessed with men, with being loved by them, and giving herself over to them. I can appreciate the impact it had when first published for having a character who fully embraced sex and talked frankly about it, but she's a little too obsessed with it to the point of nearly losing her creativity and identity over it. At least, in the end, she finally achieves something worth touting over: loving and accepting herself as she is.