Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

Normally here at Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost Book Circle we don’t review more “racy,” “sexually explicit,” “orgiastic,” “Dionysian,” “explicitly mentioning vagina-feelings” books, but I had to make an exception for Florinn Danderhall’s latest memoir (2014). Yes, we agree, it is strange for one person to have written seven memoirs all purportedly of her own life in as many years. But there is something to it – this literary suicide and rebirth that mirrors not a phoenix, nor the turning of the seasons, but the way communist leaders continually edit their own reputation – that we simply must, if not record accurately then observe. Observe with all our lusting eyeballs’ might. This time, as in her third memoir “The Land of Broken Toys,” she tells us the tale of a sex life in turmoil. This time she tells us the future.

Using the rather crude devise of a “crystal ball” (her late husband’s “right family jewel, if memory serves”) Danderhall names her next seven lovers and then her own shuffling off this mortal coil. This is, she stresses, only one version of the future and the layman understanding of time travel suggests that telling the future changes it, but Danderhall sees in herself a Cassandra. As evidence, she names a few sex moves that will be heavy in use by 2018. They all have too ridiculous names to even contemplate or investigate: “the door-to-door salesman,” “the lecture on biochemistry,” “the rumption gumption”. This is ludicrous and not sexy, in this reviewer’s opinion.

There is dispute among scholars over exactly how many times a person dies. Jean Rhys wrote that there are two deaths, the real one and then the one everyone knows about, but that’s a conservative amount. Popular wisdom suggests three (when your heart stops, when they put your body in the ground, and the last time someone says your name). Other mysticalists say seven, or seventeen, or another large prime number, but according to our preliminary research no-one has stated it so boldly and largely as Danderhall before:

“I have one hundred and twenty one deaths left and I intend to make them count.”

The obvious interpretation of this statement, which opens the book, is that it’s a periphatic way of mentioning her orgasms, and indeed if you count them in the book they add up to 120. However, 120 orgasms is a very sad amount of orgasms to have left in you. The other way of reading it, which truly opens the book, is as a continuation of what I mentioned above: the way her books keep rewriting her history. Is Danderhall planning an oeuvre that spans over a hundred books? It’s not unbelievable. Sure, this eccentric author tries to distract us with “delicious sexuffration” and “dead leaves and the wet slippery unbearableness of an autumn storm all over Sylvia Plath’s face,” there is a cry for help in these pages. And I am not referring to the literal cry for help on page 152.

But like that cry, it’s easy to miss among all the sex. I strongly believe that there is a kernel of truth inside even the most beat-up and weird and mendacious autobiography. I believe a pattern is emerging, and I cannot see all the implications of it yet. But if you read this book, don’t just take the load at face value, so to speak. Swallow it, ruminate. There is a person in pain behind these words.

To end with something positive, this reviewer thought it rather lovely how the book was dedicated to Sanel Seton, the inventor of sextropy, sexual entropy.