Aftermath : Violence and the Remaking of a Self

Rating:
Summary: outstanding
Review: Brison's book is a beautifully written and extremely thoughtful account of surviving sexual violence. It raises and explores questions that would not even occur to people unacquainted with trauma. As a result, it is immensely helpful not only for her fellow survivors but also for their supporters.

Rating:
Summary: Admirable character does not entail admirable writing
Review: No doubt Professor Brison is a remarkable person, and one cannot read of her experience without heartbreak for her trauma and awe and joy for how she has comes to terms with it. Nonetheless, this is a mess of a book.

To start with, Brison has hardly anything original to say on her subject. The book resembles a long term paper--the author has done her research, made her note cards, and assembled all of it in a more or less conceptually coherent order. If you already know the literature on trauma and recovery, this book is of no use intellectually.

Unfortunately, it's strength as a a memoir is limited. This book simply does not do what a memoir does: evoke the experience. If you read it, you're not going to find yourself riven with terror from powerful literary alcemy.

And it really needed to be rewritten. To justify leaving it in its hodge-podge state, including a fair amount of repetition (in a 125 page book!), Brison quotes Ursula la Guin to the effect that heavy revision is wrong because it "hides the evidence that one had to go there to get here." But a book is a commodity, not a diary. Readers pay money for it and give their time to it. The question is not where you had to go, but whether you provide your readers with an effective, insightful work that is worth their investments in time and money. Authors have responsibilities to readers--responsibilities to produce something worth the readers' investments--and leading the reader through the confusion, overstatement, understatement, or confusion you had to go through before getting to coherent insight is not one of them.

I am deeply disappointed in this book and wish I had not wasted my money. There is nothing about it that is in error, in any significant way--but there's just not reason for it to exist as a book.

If you don't know anything about the professional literature on trauma, this book will be serviceable. But there are much better professional books on trauma and--very sad to say--much better memoirs of rape, as well.

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful and important book
Review: Susan Brison's Aftermath is a beautiful and important book. A professional philosopher, Brison was the victim of a near fatal assault. Aftermath details her attempts to recover from this experience, to put her self back together, and to make sense of it according to her philosophical training. The book seems to me unique in the way in which it combines the personal and the intellectual. Brison describes in moving detail not only her own reaction to trauma, her searching for ways to come to terms with what has happened, but also the experiences of other survivors. Hopefully few of her readers will suffer directly from such violence but almost all of us will have to grapple with some kind of acute loss in our own lives or those of the people we love. This wise and absorbing book offers no easy solutions but the best kind of companionship in such endeavours.