Our first book club. We’re excited, I hope you are too!
Get some snacks and a glass of wine, and ready yourselves for a little reading <3
Margery Kempe by Robert Glück
“Can I interpret Love’s cancelled flights with only the language of cancelled flights, his arrival with the language of delay?”
In this opening line, Glück is speaking of his lover L., an elusive younger man, an American aristocrat, evasive of commitment; a fleeting romance that cannot contain Glück’s obsession. Is it an obsession? Or the response of a middle-aged man afraid that this is his last chance to find his person.
It’s rather peculiar. Margery Kempe is a novel that intertwines a failed autobiographical contemporary romance (if the 90s are still considered contemporary) with that of a failed saint and Christian mystic of the 15th century. It shifts in time and tone when least expected, connecting pain and pleasure through the senses, as if Margery’s life is a blueprint for what Glück comes to experience with L., his own personal Jesus.
“I kept Margery on my mind for twenty-five years, but couldn’t enter her love until I also loved a young man who was above me.”
At the heart of the novel, Glück constantly questions the extent at which love can inspire - be it a religious fervor, creative expression, ideal beauty, an escape from ourselves and our own misery.
Jesus visits Margery in the flesh, and in her devotion to his spirit, to his salvation, she abandons her life – nine children and husband – and sets out on a series of misadventures that some may call pilgrimages. She travels around Europe and far away to the Holy Land and back again, all in the hopes of realizing her (supposed) calling as a saint. In the process, she gives her body wholly to her savior, “Jesus was the world and Margery rode panting on top.”
The novel is filled with the lush imagery of the body in which religious experience goes beyond prayer and sacrament and into a realm of unlimited pleasurable possibilities that can come from devotion and giving the body to a higher, more powerful force. Jesus comes to earth in the form of pure sex appeal, a total fuckboy that wants Margery to follow his every word, but is withholding, and abandons her when she needs him most.
It is with physicality that these two disparate stories blend and it is through the senses where the appeal of the spiritual comes to force. But in the end, there are only visions, daydreams, pure fantasy of confusion and passion, of unmet expectations and dissolution, and of wonder.
The twinned narratives in Margery Kempe reach their twinned relative climaxes: Margery, abandoned by Jesus, goes on alone, and Glück, having offered an ultimatum to L.—asking him to move in, or part ways—finds he must give L. up.
This is a book we highly recommend.
Sensuous Quotes:
We eat yellow pepper soup, mushroom salad and a chocolate pine nut cake. People in the restaurant look at him. Later he strips and blindfolds me. He runs a finger across my cock creating and deny expectation till I float in a cosmos of emptiness and touch.
Jesus perched naked on a banquette, eating a pear tart, rejoicing in bland fragrant sweetness. He offered a slice to Margery, who never refused pastry. He tucked his cock between his legs and wore a flushed, mocking face. He crossed his legs tighter, displaying only sparse brown hair. The ground slid away; Margery’s dirty laugh hovered over an empty space because the joke was against her.
Satan ordered her to come; flames jumped up and down her groin and thighs and through her asshole; she wriggled and jerked against her will like a manic puppet, her muscles tugging the man’s cock so hard it passed the point of no return. When his straining body also reached the breaking point, his helpless cries began and Satan made her moan, “It’s heaven!”
All we know of the external; world is our own shit, piss, tears, spit, snot, come, pus, babies, and sometimes blood. Margery said, “For your love I would be chopped up as stew meat for the pot.” Her lips parted in sexual hunger. Flesh was not all flesh but partly appetite.