Marble Skin

A sculptor carves a statue out of ice-cold, smooth, glittering marble and calls it "My Mother's Body." Her mother sees the sculpture, recognizes in it all the pain and frustration of their relationship over the years, and tries to take her own life. Forced together by this near tragedy, the daughter sits at her mother's bedside and relives her childhood years, confronting the specter of sexual conflict that haunts their pasts. Remembering this remote and beautiful woman, she must also remember the man who invaded their lives long ago, who insinuated and seduced his way first into her mother's affections and then, unforgiveably, into her own.... Creating a scandal when it was first published in the former Yugoslavia, this provocative and immensely readable novel explodes one of the last taboos in our western culture - the image of the sexual mother. Marble Skin explores the darkest recesses of the female psyche and exposes the destructive power of sexual desire when forced to compete with the bonds of maternal love. A worthy successor to her previous novel Holograms of Fear, Marble Skin should guarantee Slavenka Drakulic her position as one of the most influential women writing in Europe today.

Publishers Weekly

Drakulic, a Croatian feminist who may be best known here for her essays ( The Balkan Express ; How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed ), trains her formidable intelligence on a daring, worthy theme: the reconciliation of female sexuality with maternity. Her narrator is a sculptor whose latest work, a rendering of a sexually aroused woman which is titled ``My Mother's Body,'' triggers her mother's attempted suicide. Rushing to her mother's bedside, the sculptor reviews her feelings about her mother and her sense of her own femininity. She ponders the pivotal moment in her relationship with her mother, describing how, when she was in late adolescence and her mother was a young and beautiful widow, her mother's lover seduced her and her mother chose not to believe her account of the incident. Rarely, however, does Drakulic communicate to the reader her narrator's sense of urgency: methodically analyzing and reanalyzing the sculptor's memories and her impressions, she also drains them of vitality. Awkward phrasing and diction, however, cast doubts upon the translation, which is based on the French and not the original edition. (Feb.)