Not The Object of My Affection (Kissing the Virgin's Mouth)

I have been lazy with my reading the past couple of weeks. There is a new free newspaper in the afternoons and, sadly, I have been more interested in the news (gossip) in that than Donna Gershten's Kissing the Virgin's Mouth. This probably says more about the novel than it does about me, but then again the saga of Lindsay Lohan losing her bag full of £1million worth of jewellery at Heathrow was pretty gripping.

Anyway, I picked this book out at a charity shop because it had an endorsement by Barbara Kingsolver on the front cover. In fact, Gershten was the first recipient of Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for this novel, and because I consider Kingsolver one of the great female authors of our time--The Poisonwood Bible is an absolute masterpiece--I decided it had to be worth reading.

This fictional memoir of Guadalupe Magdalena Molina Vásquez chronicles a lifetime of feminity, shame, love and family ties in a society dominated by tradition and religion. Set predominately in Mexico, Kissing the Virgin's Mouth explores the culture of double negatives which 'Magda' struggles to overcome. Her strong personality, paired with her ability to use an abuse men, make her an unlikely feminist hero.

The novel is lyrically written, continuously sprinkled with phrases of Spanish and tells a culturally rich (if plotless) story. Nonetheless, I never really connected with the protagonist and found her cold and unattached. Many aspects and situations in the book reminded me of Arundhati Roy's magnificent The God of Small Things, albeit a much inferior Mexican equivalent.

I did not dislike this book--it gave me the opportunity to refresh fragments of my long-forgotten high school Spanish--and I think it created a vivid representation of the extreme poverty vs. extreme wealth society which plagues Mexico. Nonetheless, the fact that I was more inclined to read about Kate Moss and Pete Doherty's on again/off again relationship says a lot.