B Ook Review Danger to Society Camille Morino

Laurens explores the seductive danger of a digital fountain of youth in this novel about women'due south identity and agency in midlife.

Technology and gender standards collide in Camille Laurens'southward new novel, Who Yous Think I Am (Other Press, 2017), a harrowing and challenging book that questions the nature of control in an historic period of digital obsession.

Claire Millecam is nearing fifty and going through something of an identity crisis. She'due south a divorced lecturer conveying on a taxing affair with a younger man named Joe, whose cruel manipulations get out her both wanting more than from him and trying to gain the upper mitt. To do so, she creates a false online profile for a twentysomething Portuguese woman named Claire Antunes. As this younger woman, she strikes up a friendship with Joe'southward friend Chris, who once told the real Claire to "Go dice." But what begins equally a means to keep tabs on Joe apace evolves into a complex real and digital relationship—a pseudo-ménage-à-trois between Claire, Chris, and this digital zero. Over time, Claire struggles to discern where the real her merges and breaks with the false her. She slowly unravels as she strives to detect a balance between the recklessness she finds in Chris in reality and the kindness she finds in his online presence.

Told through assorted primary sources (a police interview, a psychiatric transcript, and a letter of the alphabet, amongst others), the story of Claire's buildup and breakdown is virtually entirely relayed through her phonation. Professorial and intellectually engaged with the nature of what it ways to be a heart-anile woman in a society that favors youth, Claire's observations are precipitous, comparative, and at times biting. But the book's richness comes in office from the idea that she's responding or speaking to someone—some human being, in all cases—and that the male person gaze is in some sense shaping her responses. The fact that she'due south reflecting on her own mistakes and her own adoption of a digital identity adds a defensive edge to many of her more than pointed remarks; she'south parrying with an unseen adversary and trying to gain the upper manus. Just she needs something from them, leaving her on her heels almost all the time.

The alternate contour is at once a means for her to gain some semblance of control and for her to re-create herself in a more desirable fashion—to utilize the trappings of youth to win the dearest she desperately wants.

The juxtaposition of rage and desire is deep for Claire. She both wants to be wanted and resents the steps she feels are necessary to gain attention from men; she sees clearly the malice both Joe and Chris seem to feel for her simply can't go by her demand to be seen by them. The alternating profile is at one time a means for her to gain some semblance of control and for her to copy herself in a more desirable way—to use the trappings of youth to win the dear she desperately wants.

She returns again and again to the nature of "decease" for women, both literal death and the expiry of desirability. Claire obsesses over Chris having told her to "go dice," in a coincidental moment of thoughtless cruelty that seems to encapsulate, for her, what it means to be a woman. She says early on, "It'due south a tragedy being a adult female. Wherever you lot are. Always. Everywhere. Information technology's a fight, if you similar. Simply because we lose information technology's a tragedy. . . .Women are condemned—by force or by contempt—to die. That'south a fact, everywhere, all the time: men teach women to die." In this light, her fake profile could exist a ghost and, in some ways, is—she uses a picture of a niece who died years earlier, creating an intergenerational confusion that is at one time exploitative and haunting.

Laurens, as translated from French into English language by Adriana Hunter, excels at creating an at one time expansive and hyperfocused narrative. The reader gets the sense they are watching a caged animal, both observing and forcing her to be observed. The line between willingly giving upwards her story and being forced to is sparse, and as Claire vacillates betwixt reveling in the opportunity to explain and feeling cornered, the reader's part shifts from audience to antagonist. Combined with the plot's twists and turns, the net effect is a circuitous interrogation of the identify of women in society—and the part of social media in giving united states the illusion of control.

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Source: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/book-reviews/losing-battle-social-identity-camille-laurenss-who-you-think-i-am-bridey-heing

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