Writing about Life

[bibliogramma]

Life, Gwyneth Jones

This is a novel about a life – the life of Anna Senoz as a woman, a student, a lover, a friend, a scientist, a mother, a partner, a worker, and to a lesser extent, the lives of the people whose lives entwine with hers.

It is a novel about life as it is experienced by human beings, all the things that go into the making of a life, the ups and downs and highs and lows and plans and dreams and fears and failures and triumphs and unexpected turns of fate and things that just don’t work out, and things that somehow manage to muddle along, not the way you hoped they’d be, but close enough that you can deal.

It is also a novel about life as it is lived by a woman who is all of those things and has all of those experiences in a time and place that seems to be much life our own, struggling though the assumptions and prejudices not just of ordinary life as a woman, but also life as a woman who is working in a field that is thought of as a man’s world, where the rules are made by and for men.

And it is a novel that considers the definitions of life – starting from the basic biological building blocks of organic life as we know it and how they are constructed and combined and recombined, and ending with the rarefied questions of life as a created, disembodied, artificial intelligence.

It is a profoundly feminist novel, in the sense that it examines what it is like to be a woman in a world where the assumptions, expectations, rules and rewards are set largely by men. It also challenges the reader to think about what the simple categories of man and woman mean, not just as one reads the book, but after one has finished reading about the life (so far) of Anna Senoz. Because it is when one begins to contemplate what the scientific discovery that Anna Senoz makes in this book would mean if it were real, that the truth of the book hits the reader upside the head: it doesn’t matter if this discovery could ever really happen or not, it’s the thinking about it that matters.

I know I’m still thinking.