Woman’s World: A Novel

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Graham Rawle

Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, CA, 2008, English

Fiction

ISBN: 9781593761837

From the Publisher. Painstakingly assembled from 40,000 fragments of text snipped from womens magazines, this strange and wonderful novel moves at the breakneck pace of a pulp thriller. A stunning visual tour de force, Woman’s World is also a powerful reflection on society’s definition of what it means to be a woman.

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Warren Lehrer

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This is one of the most surprising, enjoyable, couldn’t-put-it-down books I have read in years. It’s surprising in a number of ways. First, it’s important to know that this book was assembled (written/composed, pick your verb here) from 40,000 fragments of text snipped from 1960s British women’s magazines. (Rawle apparently wrote a draft of this pulp-noir, gender-bending story, then rewrote it like a mosaic using all these found snidbits.) So, the first thing that is surprising is how unfragmented the writing is. The second surprise is how fabulously scrumptious the sentences are, particularly Rawle’s descriptions, in large part because of his peculiar, painstaking process that produces wildly unexpected (and often funny) phrasings that wouldn’t otherwise come to a writer’s mind. The lion’s share of good Dada poems have numerous bizarrely fantastic lines in them, but the poems remain absurd, for the most part. In Woman’s World, every sentence has meaning and helps move the story forward. The third and perhaps most revelatory surprise is how downright breezy a read this book is, considering that nearly every word or phrase-chunk is a different size and typeface, aligned by hand with glue and exacto knife along wobbly baselines—which flies in the face of (probably) every study ever made about legibility. Ph.D. candidates, this is the basis of a doctorate in waiting.

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