Sandra Newman - Blog Posts

JULIA by SANDRA NEWMAN (A REVIEW)

quickly: a woman’s daring sex life in a totalitarian regime leads to confinement and freedom (this is a man’s world / cameras and monitors everywhere / facetime before Facetime™ / overalls and soot / a boot in the face / thought control / see nothing, say nothing / “no touching” / people disappear / yes means no / hate means love / Big Brother becoming Big Father / cheese like rubber, bread like leather / child spies / handsome airmen in handsome uniforms / dark windowless underground prisons / government-sponsored torture / nightmares turned reality / all regimes are the same).

This is a retelling of George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984, from the perspective of the character Julia. Though the landscape was familiar it felt like there were so many new elements to explore, thanks to Newman’s refocusing of the story’s lens. The gray days, civil self-censoring, and grand governmental illusions are still there, but what Newman highlights is a world that is not just anti-women, but anti-Feminine. The daily assault on women and the collective feminine (those faculties we need dearly for introspection, intuition, reception, caretaking, community, and creativity) is relayed to us through Julia’s own story of growing up watched (and touched and used and forgotten). No women’s rights, but no poetry, thinking, feeling, remembering, loving, or caring either, says Big Brother, always watching. 

With this new view of the story, the smell of blood is sharper (on the street after a bomb tears off a child’s arm, or in the dungeons where they torture pregnant women and the elderly). The design of Big Brother’s Love (Hate) is clearer (double, triple, and quadruplethink… every relationship is a set-up). The heartbreakers are the moments when the wizard’s curtain is pulled back and the evil isn’t anything special… just a man. Made of flesh and feelings just like any other living thing. Subject to thirst, hunger, pain, aging, and death. How despairingly bleak it is to realize that the causes of your and the world’s tragedies are men who make decisions like kids fighting over toys on the playground. 

★★★★