Ruby by Cynthia Bond

I don’t normally stop and take notes when reading a book.  I like to base my opinions on the book’s overall impression.  However I’m changing my style to accommodate an aural-only discussion format. 

I’ve been impressed by three stylistically brilliant passages:

n                                The scene which unfolds in Chapter 4 with the town’s men gathered around a pit fire is a steal from Henry V’s night before Agincourt.  No better complement than to use a scene from Shakespeare.

n                                I love the start of Chapter 5 where Bond switches voices to that of the crow, which turns out to be a continuing theme.

n                                A literal bodice-ripper, this one.  Page 98 has Ruby with the best orgasmic scene that I can remember for sheer thunder.  This is repeated at the end of Chapter 13 with Bond’s equivalent fantasy of a male orgasm.

My two criticisms are:

n   The first is one of timing.  This “Ruby” book is effectively a rewrite of Zora Neale Hurston’s, 1937 “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” which I read this year during Black History Month. 

n   The whole book is a female fantasy novel.  The last quarter of the book was not just predictable, but procedural.  Bond’s depiction of dropping to a new low below low is a script-writer’s wet dream.  There are many books like this one that fall into the lusty lure of film adaptation and forego literacy for lucre.  The script scenes are evocative.  By the end, we have forgotten Shakespeare and Greenwich Village and are wallowing in America’s pig sty of “HBO’s Deadwood – 2004-06”.

 
Not black or white female, it could be Chinese or Muslim, as well, but female.  The homage paid to Hurston wasn’t just in the Black village setting, and the return home and salvation, but most importantly in the eye-opening learning about the world around them, and the striving, against inhuman odds and travesties, of all women, for their rightful place in it.