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Vladimir
A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely debut novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her professor husband by former students—a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own...
“When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.”
And so we are introduced to our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose charismatic husband at the same small liberal arts college is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extra-marital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both. And when our narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with Vladimir, a celebrated, married young novelist who’s just arrived on campus, their tinder box world comes dangerously close to exploding.
With this bold, edgy, and uncommonly assured debut, author Julia May Jonas takes us into charged territory, where the boundaries of morality bump up against the impulses of the human heart. Propulsive, darkly funny, and wildly entertaining, Vladimir perfectly captures the personal and political minefield of our current moment, exposing the nuances and the grey area between power and desire.
“When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.”
And so we are introduced to our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose charismatic husband at the same small liberal arts college is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extra-marital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both. And when our narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with Vladimir, a celebrated, married young novelist who’s just arrived on campus, their tinder box world comes dangerously close to exploding.
With this bold, edgy, and uncommonly assured debut, author Julia May Jonas takes us into charged territory, where the boundaries of morality bump up against the impulses of the human heart. Propulsive, darkly funny, and wildly entertaining, Vladimir perfectly captures the personal and political minefield of our current moment, exposing the nuances and the grey area between power and desire.
238 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 5,239 reviews
March 9, 2022
so to set the scene: you are in my room while i am brushing my teeth in the bathroom next door. you ask me "so, tell me about vladimir, jonathan" to which i roll my eyes (which you can't see) and proceed to go into an unnecessarily long monologue about a book a read a month ago. every once in a while i step out of the bathroom to wildly gesticulate while still having the toothbrush in my mouth. this entire endeavor lasts a good 15 minutes. we both have better things to do.
there will be spoilers because you don't actually care
so action:
*putting toothpaste on my brush*
so this book is about a professor for like literature of whatever. she's so fucking weird, i hate her.
anyway her husband is currently suspended from college - where he is also a professor for literature of whatever - because he is facing allegations from former students because he used to have relationships with them.
those two are in an open marriage but who cares.
and she's all like "yeah blabla but they were all consenting adults so wtf is the colleges problem. also he dated them before the college made it illegal to date students" and it's just like "madame, get it together, he literally abused his position of power"
anyway she's so weird? there's this dude called vladimir who recently moved to town and also is a college professor or whatever and he moved because his wife tried to kill herself and they needed a fresh start and the main character is constantly going on about his dick?
*wildly gesticulating*
they have no chemistry whatsoever and they never find themselves in any remotely sexual scenes and she just keeps going on about his dick in excruciating detail? it's honestly disgusting? this man will accidentally spill a minuscule amount of water on his pants and she will tell you for forty pages straight about how some amount landed on his crotch and it's just - for what? why do you need to tell me how peepeely his peepee is in this situation
she's also like 50 or something, i don't really care, and she just talks like she's going to die soon. it's always about how old she is and how younger women have it so much easier and she keeps going on and on and on about her skin and her teeth and i am just here hoping she will actually die soon because i just can't take this
*accidentally trips over nothing and falls. continued sitting on the floor. still brushing my teeth*
there's this one scene where she is teaching a class and they are reading something and one girl in the class is like "why do we have to keep reading about these women whining" and i think this was a call out post for me specifically because that is also exactly what i was thinking reading this but hear me out - she's too fucking annoying. i have ten pages of notes of just quoting her complaining about her age and shit.
*dramatically throws hands in the air*
even when she finally has sex with vladimir she still keeps going on about her goddamn age!! he starts this weird roleplay being like "oh professor i've been a naughty student punish me." and she gets super upset and not because he is the worst dirty talker any of us have ever heard dirty talk. NO. it's because she is the prof and he is the student and therefore she is the old one in this scenario, like EITHER LIVE OUT YOUR COUGAR FANTASIES PROUDLY OR DON'T FUCK YOUNGER MEN, you know?
*you recoil from my shouting. i nearly throw my toothbrush at you because i'm getting way too into my rant*
then she nearly dies in a fire and only survives because vladimir saves her and he saves her first because and i quote "you are younger than your husband" and she just fixates on this statement. like no shit. YOU KNOW YOU ARE YOUNGER THAN YOUR HUSBAND. she should honestly just have died in the fire
*i stare into the mirror while talking because i am narcissus and this is my show now, it has always been*
and none of the other characters are any better?
she teaches this class and her students drop out and make this huge scene about her still coming to class because they "feel uncomfortable in the presence of a r*pist's wife". what she got to do with it?????????????????? i don't like her but did she r*pe those students??? i don't think so???? what is this????
then she also has a daughter who cheats on her girlfriend and gets upset because her gf breaks up with her because of that and she's like "you have forgiven dad" YOUR PARENTS HAVE AN OPEN RELATIONSHIP YOU TRASH HUMAN
she also gets pregnant by the man she cheated with and her girlfriend actually takes her back because all she wanted was for her to commit to having a family which she has done now.
MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
anyway i hate this entire family
oh also: one time she put drugs in vladimirs drink and gets completely ready to r*pe him so i guess her students were onto something when they didn't want to go to her class now that i think about it
also can we talk about how after she has sex with vladimir her husband comes in and is like "why do you smell like another man's jizz" WHO TALKS LIKE THAT and she responds "i dont like your tone" to which he is like "i dont like you" THEN GET A DIVORCE
*the neighbors yell to make me stop yelling, which seems counterproductive. you ask me whether i liked anything about this book. i look at you weirdly*
the conversations about race, sex and status were very interesting but it all just got ruined by the main character and her excessive self-pity. i also enjoyed the writing and would read more by the author as long as it doesn't feature another MC who goes on a twenty page tangent about how twenty year old women have better teeth
either way it was entertaining enough and i took like twenty pages of notes because of the absolute insanity of everyone involved, so... journaling, yay
*i finally stop brushing my teeth. it's been 20 minutes. you vow to never ask me anything about books ever again*
there will be spoilers because you don't actually care
so action:
*putting toothpaste on my brush*
so this book is about a professor for like literature of whatever. she's so fucking weird, i hate her.
anyway her husband is currently suspended from college - where he is also a professor for literature of whatever - because he is facing allegations from former students because he used to have relationships with them.
those two are in an open marriage but who cares.
and she's all like "yeah blabla but they were all consenting adults so wtf is the colleges problem. also he dated them before the college made it illegal to date students" and it's just like "madame, get it together, he literally abused his position of power"
anyway she's so weird? there's this dude called vladimir who recently moved to town and also is a college professor or whatever and he moved because his wife tried to kill herself and they needed a fresh start and the main character is constantly going on about his dick?
*wildly gesticulating*
they have no chemistry whatsoever and they never find themselves in any remotely sexual scenes and she just keeps going on about his dick in excruciating detail? it's honestly disgusting? this man will accidentally spill a minuscule amount of water on his pants and she will tell you for forty pages straight about how some amount landed on his crotch and it's just - for what? why do you need to tell me how peepeely his peepee is in this situation
she's also like 50 or something, i don't really care, and she just talks like she's going to die soon. it's always about how old she is and how younger women have it so much easier and she keeps going on and on and on about her skin and her teeth and i am just here hoping she will actually die soon because i just can't take this
*accidentally trips over nothing and falls. continued sitting on the floor. still brushing my teeth*
there's this one scene where she is teaching a class and they are reading something and one girl in the class is like "why do we have to keep reading about these women whining" and i think this was a call out post for me specifically because that is also exactly what i was thinking reading this but hear me out - she's too fucking annoying. i have ten pages of notes of just quoting her complaining about her age and shit.
*dramatically throws hands in the air*
even when she finally has sex with vladimir she still keeps going on about her goddamn age!! he starts this weird roleplay being like "oh professor i've been a naughty student punish me." and she gets super upset and not because he is the worst dirty talker any of us have ever heard dirty talk. NO. it's because she is the prof and he is the student and therefore she is the old one in this scenario, like EITHER LIVE OUT YOUR COUGAR FANTASIES PROUDLY OR DON'T FUCK YOUNGER MEN, you know?
*you recoil from my shouting. i nearly throw my toothbrush at you because i'm getting way too into my rant*
then she nearly dies in a fire and only survives because vladimir saves her and he saves her first because and i quote "you are younger than your husband" and she just fixates on this statement. like no shit. YOU KNOW YOU ARE YOUNGER THAN YOUR HUSBAND. she should honestly just have died in the fire
*i stare into the mirror while talking because i am narcissus and this is my show now, it has always been*
and none of the other characters are any better?
she teaches this class and her students drop out and make this huge scene about her still coming to class because they "feel uncomfortable in the presence of a r*pist's wife". what she got to do with it?????????????????? i don't like her but did she r*pe those students??? i don't think so???? what is this????
then she also has a daughter who cheats on her girlfriend and gets upset because her gf breaks up with her because of that and she's like "you have forgiven dad" YOUR PARENTS HAVE AN OPEN RELATIONSHIP YOU TRASH HUMAN
she also gets pregnant by the man she cheated with and her girlfriend actually takes her back because all she wanted was for her to commit to having a family which she has done now.
MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
anyway i hate this entire family
oh also: one time she put drugs in vladimirs drink and gets completely ready to r*pe him so i guess her students were onto something when they didn't want to go to her class now that i think about it
also can we talk about how after she has sex with vladimir her husband comes in and is like "why do you smell like another man's jizz" WHO TALKS LIKE THAT and she responds "i dont like your tone" to which he is like "i dont like you" THEN GET A DIVORCE
*the neighbors yell to make me stop yelling, which seems counterproductive. you ask me whether i liked anything about this book. i look at you weirdly*
the conversations about race, sex and status were very interesting but it all just got ruined by the main character and her excessive self-pity. i also enjoyed the writing and would read more by the author as long as it doesn't feature another MC who goes on a twenty page tangent about how twenty year old women have better teeth
either way it was entertaining enough and i took like twenty pages of notes because of the absolute insanity of everyone involved, so... journaling, yay
*i finally stop brushing my teeth. it's been 20 minutes. you vow to never ask me anything about books ever again*
October 17, 2023
Women just do it better.
Even when the "it" in question is "obsessing over a somewhat age- and power-inappropriate hottie in order to ignore your own impending aging."
I love books about women being sex-obsessed. We are living in the renaissance of literary fiction about women who talk about their vaginas, and we are lucky for it.
Honestly i find any sort of gender role reversion - women who overstep, women who pursue, women who date younger or hotter than they are - very simple and delicious, like junk food. I can't get enough of lit fic about unlikable women, and more so I cannot get enough of talking about my love of lit fic about unlikable women, so reviewing it is like nirvana to me.
Men may be the experts at ignoring their despised aging by creeping on younger romantic partners, but women do it better! It's like we've been training for it for centuries via patriarchal repression and internalized misogyny.
Additionally, this book is a masterclass on shame and humiliation, feelings that all women know intimately, and it's the lines surrounding this I underlined most.
You read that correctly. I've started marking up my own books. I know - how messed up and indulgent, I'm like the Marie Antoinette of the reading community. Anyway, this was the perfect book for that.
Anyway again, we are far past overdue for this kind of book - what of the women who are married to the men of #MeToo? What if they don't play the role we want them to? What if they, maybe, have their own amoral sex politics? What if all of us are just people, whether we like it or not, and that is just as true of the canceled men as it is of their partners (of both definitions) as it is of those who accuse them?
There's so much reckoning we haven't yet done. What a way to start.
Bottom line: Well worth the read, and also inexplicably unliked, so you can read it and feel better than everyone on like 4 levels.
-------------
tbr review
the protagonist of this is called "deliciously incisive," which sounds like a literary way of saying she is a b*tch. which is the best thing for a protagonist to be
Even when the "it" in question is "obsessing over a somewhat age- and power-inappropriate hottie in order to ignore your own impending aging."
I love books about women being sex-obsessed. We are living in the renaissance of literary fiction about women who talk about their vaginas, and we are lucky for it.
Honestly i find any sort of gender role reversion - women who overstep, women who pursue, women who date younger or hotter than they are - very simple and delicious, like junk food. I can't get enough of lit fic about unlikable women, and more so I cannot get enough of talking about my love of lit fic about unlikable women, so reviewing it is like nirvana to me.
Men may be the experts at ignoring their despised aging by creeping on younger romantic partners, but women do it better! It's like we've been training for it for centuries via patriarchal repression and internalized misogyny.
Additionally, this book is a masterclass on shame and humiliation, feelings that all women know intimately, and it's the lines surrounding this I underlined most.
You read that correctly. I've started marking up my own books. I know - how messed up and indulgent, I'm like the Marie Antoinette of the reading community. Anyway, this was the perfect book for that.
Anyway again, we are far past overdue for this kind of book - what of the women who are married to the men of #MeToo? What if they don't play the role we want them to? What if they, maybe, have their own amoral sex politics? What if all of us are just people, whether we like it or not, and that is just as true of the canceled men as it is of their partners (of both definitions) as it is of those who accuse them?
There's so much reckoning we haven't yet done. What a way to start.
Bottom line: Well worth the read, and also inexplicably unliked, so you can read it and feel better than everyone on like 4 levels.
-------------
tbr review
the protagonist of this is called "deliciously incisive," which sounds like a literary way of saying she is a b*tch. which is the best thing for a protagonist to be
October 20, 2021
This was an interesting novel. Fun. Very dark and cynical. The overall premise, that the narrator is obsessed with Vladimir, doesn’t really play out. She says, repeatedly, that she is obsessed with him but we don’t really see that obsession. Still, this is a fun read, especially for academics.
February 12, 2022
"Longing was energizing my muscles and organs and brain. Longing was replacing my blood with fizzy, expansive liquid."
Whee! That was an exhilarating ride! I was super curious about this debut novel, and also a bit skeptical. I mean, look at that cover! I know. I was surprised to be caught with it in my hands, too. All my gal pals at work had a field day with this one. Actually, to be honest, I sort of instigated all the shenanigans that followed after picking up this book. With grand extravagance, I showed it off to all my coworkers before driving home at the start of yet another blizzard. I had big plans to be snowed in with this one. The thing is, friends – this book is not at all what you or I would expect from that odd choice of a cover. Nor does the title exactly portray the contents quite properly. Vladimir does exist, yes. But the reader doesn’t spend the weekend warming up in the arms of this fellow. Instead, he or she spends the entire time in the head of one of the most complex narrators I’ve met in a very long time.
“Vanity has always been my poorest quality. I hate it in myself, and yet am as plagued with it as I am with needing to sleep or eat or breathe.”
The fifty-eight year old, unnamed narrator suffers from what I found to be a whole lot of contradictory feelings as well as actions, which made the reading of this oh so irresistible and propulsive. Her point of view is deliciously unreliable. She’s a professor of English in a small liberal arts college, and her husband, John, has been accused of sexual misconduct with several of his students. The two of them have been in an open marriage for years. A relevant topic indeed, but here it is handled with what I found to be a somewhat unique and intriguing point of view. A refreshingly different take, really. Not that I agree with everything she says. She’s a bit of an enigma. Like many of us. It makes for a very interesting character study. Don’t expect to fall in love with this woman. She just may rankle some readers. I’m starting to realize that as long as a character allows me the opportunity to think about how I would react to certain situations, then I’m on board with reading about him or her, likeable or otherwise. She expresses her rather controversial views throughout. The author doesn’t beg for us to agree with the narrator; rather, she encourages us to think deeply about these issues on our own terms as well.
“My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have – the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little bit of fun. With the general, highly objectionable move toward a populist insistence of morality in art, I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female.”
And the other characters, though we see them from our narrator’s point of view, are equally absorbing - her husband, her daughter, Vladimir’s wife. To be honest, Vladimir himself was probably the least interesting character here; which is odd, given the title. He’s more of a device really, the means by which the narrator can explore her own feelings. She wrote a couple of novels nearly two decades ago but the creative spark basically extinguished. Now Vladimir serves as a muse to ignite the urge to write something more than just academic pieces once again. Who doesn’t like to see what spurs on the writing process?! I gobbled this stuff down.
“The voice I wrote with felt new to me – unrestrained. For years I had been trying to cool down the temperature of my writing, to pull it back... – neutralize it, contain it, make it crisp, clear, and sharp, every word carved out of crystal. This writing was nothing like that – it was drippy, messy, breezy. I was working through a mind frame, not a conceit. I was creating a world, not words on a page.”
There’s so much more all wrapped up in this addictive novel: thoughts about the aging process and its effect on attraction and desirability, the voice of the younger generation, academia (I know, again!), the writing process, the credibility of mixing morality with art, motherhood, marriage and relationships, power and how it’s perceived, trauma and addictions. It is thought provoking and often amusing in an acerbic sort of way. I wouldn’t call this book romantic or sexy. Readers will be disappointed if that’s what they are looking for. Intelligent and provocative are the words that come to mind instead. I could write a whole other page about this one, but then I’d lose your attention. Just know that I’m on my knees, pleading for some more friends to read this and discuss it with me. Especially that last part of the book! It screams for discussion! I was debating between 4 and 5 stars, but I so thoroughly enjoyed this and know that it will be in my head for a long time to come. 5 stars it is. I’ll read whatever Julia May Jonas is (hopefully) madly scribbling away at next!
“Should we only portray the world we wanted to see? Should we consider certain stories “damaging,” and restrict them from a general audience, not trusting them to take in the story without internalizing the messaging? Hadn’t we all agreed that morality in art was bad?... did we all have to see ourselves in the presentations of types? Did I have to feel like every wife and mother was presenting an overarching narrative of Wife and Mother that reinforced or rejected my own experience?”
Whee! That was an exhilarating ride! I was super curious about this debut novel, and also a bit skeptical. I mean, look at that cover! I know. I was surprised to be caught with it in my hands, too. All my gal pals at work had a field day with this one. Actually, to be honest, I sort of instigated all the shenanigans that followed after picking up this book. With grand extravagance, I showed it off to all my coworkers before driving home at the start of yet another blizzard. I had big plans to be snowed in with this one. The thing is, friends – this book is not at all what you or I would expect from that odd choice of a cover. Nor does the title exactly portray the contents quite properly. Vladimir does exist, yes. But the reader doesn’t spend the weekend warming up in the arms of this fellow. Instead, he or she spends the entire time in the head of one of the most complex narrators I’ve met in a very long time.
“Vanity has always been my poorest quality. I hate it in myself, and yet am as plagued with it as I am with needing to sleep or eat or breathe.”
The fifty-eight year old, unnamed narrator suffers from what I found to be a whole lot of contradictory feelings as well as actions, which made the reading of this oh so irresistible and propulsive. Her point of view is deliciously unreliable. She’s a professor of English in a small liberal arts college, and her husband, John, has been accused of sexual misconduct with several of his students. The two of them have been in an open marriage for years. A relevant topic indeed, but here it is handled with what I found to be a somewhat unique and intriguing point of view. A refreshingly different take, really. Not that I agree with everything she says. She’s a bit of an enigma. Like many of us. It makes for a very interesting character study. Don’t expect to fall in love with this woman. She just may rankle some readers. I’m starting to realize that as long as a character allows me the opportunity to think about how I would react to certain situations, then I’m on board with reading about him or her, likeable or otherwise. She expresses her rather controversial views throughout. The author doesn’t beg for us to agree with the narrator; rather, she encourages us to think deeply about these issues on our own terms as well.
“My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have – the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little bit of fun. With the general, highly objectionable move toward a populist insistence of morality in art, I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female.”
And the other characters, though we see them from our narrator’s point of view, are equally absorbing - her husband, her daughter, Vladimir’s wife. To be honest, Vladimir himself was probably the least interesting character here; which is odd, given the title. He’s more of a device really, the means by which the narrator can explore her own feelings. She wrote a couple of novels nearly two decades ago but the creative spark basically extinguished. Now Vladimir serves as a muse to ignite the urge to write something more than just academic pieces once again. Who doesn’t like to see what spurs on the writing process?! I gobbled this stuff down.
“The voice I wrote with felt new to me – unrestrained. For years I had been trying to cool down the temperature of my writing, to pull it back... – neutralize it, contain it, make it crisp, clear, and sharp, every word carved out of crystal. This writing was nothing like that – it was drippy, messy, breezy. I was working through a mind frame, not a conceit. I was creating a world, not words on a page.”
There’s so much more all wrapped up in this addictive novel: thoughts about the aging process and its effect on attraction and desirability, the voice of the younger generation, academia (I know, again!), the writing process, the credibility of mixing morality with art, motherhood, marriage and relationships, power and how it’s perceived, trauma and addictions. It is thought provoking and often amusing in an acerbic sort of way. I wouldn’t call this book romantic or sexy. Readers will be disappointed if that’s what they are looking for. Intelligent and provocative are the words that come to mind instead. I could write a whole other page about this one, but then I’d lose your attention. Just know that I’m on my knees, pleading for some more friends to read this and discuss it with me. Especially that last part of the book! It screams for discussion! I was debating between 4 and 5 stars, but I so thoroughly enjoyed this and know that it will be in my head for a long time to come. 5 stars it is. I’ll read whatever Julia May Jonas is (hopefully) madly scribbling away at next!
“Should we only portray the world we wanted to see? Should we consider certain stories “damaging,” and restrict them from a general audience, not trusting them to take in the story without internalizing the messaging? Hadn’t we all agreed that morality in art was bad?... did we all have to see ourselves in the presentations of types? Did I have to feel like every wife and mother was presenting an overarching narrative of Wife and Mother that reinforced or rejected my own experience?”
April 14, 2022
Julia May Jonas said 'gimme ten' and wrote the last 20 pages.
March 18, 2022
*mild spoilers*
I want the names of every BotM employee who okay-ed this as a March selection.
The main character is a rape apologist/defender and also a psycho as it turns out. At first you think she’s just obsessive and shockingly dull but things turn Annie Wilkes REAL fast.
Her and her husband are both professors at a college. She knows he’s a “cad” so long ago told him it was okay for him to sleep with other women because she is so deeply insecure (seriously she talks about her body every single damn page) that she doesn’t think she could keep him otherwise. So she knows damn well that he is sleeping with his 19 year old students. But she justifies it by saying that she would have wanted to sleep with her professors. So why take that away from the youth?
When 28 girls come forward with rape allegations, our main character (who is never named by the way 🙄) says that the girls should be more sexually liberated and basically to stop complaining.
She becomes obsessed with a new young hot teacher and when I say obsessed…Y’all, let’s just say zip ties are involved. This book completely lost me at the mention of roofies. I could not fathom someone reading this and getting enjoyment out of it. Also, the ending? Trash. Well and truly trash.
I want the names of every BotM employee who okay-ed this as a March selection.
The main character is a rape apologist/defender and also a psycho as it turns out. At first you think she’s just obsessive and shockingly dull but things turn Annie Wilkes REAL fast.
Her and her husband are both professors at a college. She knows he’s a “cad” so long ago told him it was okay for him to sleep with other women because she is so deeply insecure (seriously she talks about her body every single damn page) that she doesn’t think she could keep him otherwise. So she knows damn well that he is sleeping with his 19 year old students. But she justifies it by saying that she would have wanted to sleep with her professors. So why take that away from the youth?
When 28 girls come forward with rape allegations, our main character (who is never named by the way 🙄) says that the girls should be more sexually liberated and basically to stop complaining.
She becomes obsessed with a new young hot teacher and when I say obsessed…Y’all, let’s just say zip ties are involved. This book completely lost me at the mention of roofies. I could not fathom someone reading this and getting enjoyment out of it. Also, the ending? Trash. Well and truly trash.
February 2, 2022
“I’ve always felt the the origin of anger in my vagina, and am surprised it is not mentioned more often in literature”.
Wow…..what a debut!
A little hokey….and amusing ….. until it’s more than that…..
This literary beseechingly academic ameliorated apropos to “Fifty Shades of Gray”…..
and antidote to “My Dark Vanessa’s” psychological examination of naïve young precocious women obsessed with a professor….
is more ritzier, ostentatious, and classier by comparison.
We meet our unnamed narrator who quickly tells us that even when she was a child, she loved old men, and could tell they loved her.
At fifty-eight-years old, she had been teaching English literature for thirty years.
She was aware of her students romantic entanglements, their grudges, hatred, obsessions, all vibrating at a frequency she would never feel again.
She tells us that she had been messy and distended twenty-seven-year-old with yellow teeth and bad clothing is smoked incessantly.
She became energized in the academic setting and had gotten herself into a well regarded graduate program….
where she met her future husband. John.
She had known about John’s affairs with students, but she hadn’t known the details about his behavior. As details got revealed, it was all much more unsettling than she cared to admit.
“The tide had been shifting away from his behavior being acceptable since even before he received our PhD‘s.
There were always whispers about him, and occasionally a new and drunk colleague would, with righteousness confess to me that they knew about one of his indiscretions. She would have to explain their arrangement”.
“When the accusations came against John, when the petitions started, suddenly everybody knew she was the wife of the disgraced chair”.
There was a sexual misconduct college campus scandal….
……a married couple with one daughter ….
We are taken on a journey…..examining psychological perspectives on sex, power, in the academic literature world…..
……excessive preoccupation with sexual behaviors….causing distress on other parts of one’s life, mixed with interesting side-plots: a mother’s relationship with her lesbian daughter Sidney, fascinating literary references, foods, appearances, vanity, and youthfulness…..
The unpredictability of the explosive climax was fitting….
bringing together feelings of sadness, loneliness, and happiness all wrapped together…..
……making this novel satire ‘seriously-serious’ and ‘comic-hilarious’.
“Cigarettes are best when they are accompanied by intense moods—happiness, anger, defeat. No cigarette is better than the one that follows a torrential cry”.
“I ask this one thing:
let me go mad in my own way”
—Sophokles, Elektra
4 + …..rating up.
Wow…..what a debut!
A little hokey….and amusing ….. until it’s more than that…..
This literary beseechingly academic ameliorated apropos to “Fifty Shades of Gray”…..
and antidote to “My Dark Vanessa’s” psychological examination of naïve young precocious women obsessed with a professor….
is more ritzier, ostentatious, and classier by comparison.
We meet our unnamed narrator who quickly tells us that even when she was a child, she loved old men, and could tell they loved her.
At fifty-eight-years old, she had been teaching English literature for thirty years.
She was aware of her students romantic entanglements, their grudges, hatred, obsessions, all vibrating at a frequency she would never feel again.
She tells us that she had been messy and distended twenty-seven-year-old with yellow teeth and bad clothing is smoked incessantly.
She became energized in the academic setting and had gotten herself into a well regarded graduate program….
where she met her future husband. John.
She had known about John’s affairs with students, but she hadn’t known the details about his behavior. As details got revealed, it was all much more unsettling than she cared to admit.
“The tide had been shifting away from his behavior being acceptable since even before he received our PhD‘s.
There were always whispers about him, and occasionally a new and drunk colleague would, with righteousness confess to me that they knew about one of his indiscretions. She would have to explain their arrangement”.
“When the accusations came against John, when the petitions started, suddenly everybody knew she was the wife of the disgraced chair”.
There was a sexual misconduct college campus scandal….
……a married couple with one daughter ….
We are taken on a journey…..examining psychological perspectives on sex, power, in the academic literature world…..
……excessive preoccupation with sexual behaviors….causing distress on other parts of one’s life, mixed with interesting side-plots: a mother’s relationship with her lesbian daughter Sidney, fascinating literary references, foods, appearances, vanity, and youthfulness…..
The unpredictability of the explosive climax was fitting….
bringing together feelings of sadness, loneliness, and happiness all wrapped together…..
……making this novel satire ‘seriously-serious’ and ‘comic-hilarious’.
“Cigarettes are best when they are accompanied by intense moods—happiness, anger, defeat. No cigarette is better than the one that follows a torrential cry”.
“I ask this one thing:
let me go mad in my own way”
—Sophokles, Elektra
4 + …..rating up.
December 8, 2022
"Vladimir" by Julia May Jonas is a creative and artfully written debut novel!
Wow! Is this book a 'character study' on steroids or what?
Our nameless protagonist, is a fifty-eight year old female professor of literature who is well-liked by her students. She has an open marriage with her professor husband, John, who's also the chair of the English department. He's currently in a bit of 'hot water' for having relationships with female students in the past.
Our protagonist leads us through this story sharing her commentary on her age, how she looks, her marriage, her family, her past affairs, and her current desires. What she desires most right now is Vladimir and in the worst way!
Vladimir, husband to wife, Cynthia, and father to three-year-old daughter, Phee, is a recently hired junior professor of literature. He has a newly published novel and offers a copy to John and our protagonist to read and critique. Our protagonist is completely overjoyed!
This is a very intriguing story that reeks of entitlement and female versus male everything! Our protagonist is content with her marriage arrangement and feels if her husband can do it, why can't she? She doesn't understand all the fuss about John's relationships with his students. They were all consulting adults, after all, and it happened in the past before the college banned this type of behavior.
Our protagonist's obsession with Vladimir escalates as the story progresses but I never wanted to stop reading and I fully enjoyed the ride. It was engaging, thought provoking, and thick with hints of underlying meaning. I love that in a book! What I don't love is the cover and the ending felt like there should have been just a bit more...
So many characters and groups of characters in this book are part of this character study. It's absolutely brimming with them. What a creative and artfully written debut novel. I will be looking to see what this author comes up with next. I highly recommend!
Thank you to NetGalley, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, and Julia May Jones for a free ARC of this book. It has been an honor to give my honest and voluntary review.
Wow! Is this book a 'character study' on steroids or what?
Our nameless protagonist, is a fifty-eight year old female professor of literature who is well-liked by her students. She has an open marriage with her professor husband, John, who's also the chair of the English department. He's currently in a bit of 'hot water' for having relationships with female students in the past.
Our protagonist leads us through this story sharing her commentary on her age, how she looks, her marriage, her family, her past affairs, and her current desires. What she desires most right now is Vladimir and in the worst way!
Vladimir, husband to wife, Cynthia, and father to three-year-old daughter, Phee, is a recently hired junior professor of literature. He has a newly published novel and offers a copy to John and our protagonist to read and critique. Our protagonist is completely overjoyed!
This is a very intriguing story that reeks of entitlement and female versus male everything! Our protagonist is content with her marriage arrangement and feels if her husband can do it, why can't she? She doesn't understand all the fuss about John's relationships with his students. They were all consulting adults, after all, and it happened in the past before the college banned this type of behavior.
Our protagonist's obsession with Vladimir escalates as the story progresses but I never wanted to stop reading and I fully enjoyed the ride. It was engaging, thought provoking, and thick with hints of underlying meaning. I love that in a book! What I don't love is the cover and the ending felt like there should have been just a bit more...
So many characters and groups of characters in this book are part of this character study. It's absolutely brimming with them. What a creative and artfully written debut novel. I will be looking to see what this author comes up with next. I highly recommend!
Thank you to NetGalley, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, and Julia May Jones for a free ARC of this book. It has been an honor to give my honest and voluntary review.
January 20, 2022
I'm impressed!!!
Now I should mention that I am a person that enjoys character studies. You will spend the entire book within the head of our protagonist. She is cunning and cruel but also intelligent and caring in her own ways making her an incredibly interesting character. If you don't like character studies then this is NOT a book for you. There are no thrills or suspense. It's a straight up story, what you see is what you get, but I found it riveting.
Our protagonist is a 58 year old college professor who is at a point in her life where she is questioning everything about herself. Her looks, her career, and her marriage in particular. Her husband, also a college professor, has been accused of sleeping with multiple students.
What makes this book different than other #METOO movement books that are currently flooding the market is that they had an open marriage. She was well aware of his extramarital relations. She actively encouraged it so she too could enjoy her own interests and activities which also included affairs of her own. She balks at the word rape as she knows these were consensual trysts and she makes a point of clarifying that the women, while students, were all of age. Certainly nothing illegal but still frowned upon and now his career is left in question and how will that affect her position within the same university walls.
All the while a new adjunct professor, Vladamir Vladinski, has arrived on campus with his wife and daughter in tow and our narrator begins to obsess over Vladamir. She can't determine whether she has fallen in love or if it is pure unadulterated lust but she will do anything to stay within his orbit. As the story proceeds we begin to see how our narrators mental health begins to deteriorate as her obsession with Vladamir grows stronger.
As we near the final 1/3 of the book things seem to be heading down a dark road but I feel like Jonas hit the brakes before actually going there. Part of me was hoping for something a bit darker but that doesn't mean the ending is terrible. Not at all. It just wasn't what this reader was expecting. All in all I enjoyed this book. My biggest complaint is that the cover is very unappealing so I was thankful to have a digital arc. 4 stars!
Thank you to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for my complimentary copy.
Now I should mention that I am a person that enjoys character studies. You will spend the entire book within the head of our protagonist. She is cunning and cruel but also intelligent and caring in her own ways making her an incredibly interesting character. If you don't like character studies then this is NOT a book for you. There are no thrills or suspense. It's a straight up story, what you see is what you get, but I found it riveting.
Our protagonist is a 58 year old college professor who is at a point in her life where she is questioning everything about herself. Her looks, her career, and her marriage in particular. Her husband, also a college professor, has been accused of sleeping with multiple students.
What makes this book different than other #METOO movement books that are currently flooding the market is that they had an open marriage. She was well aware of his extramarital relations. She actively encouraged it so she too could enjoy her own interests and activities which also included affairs of her own. She balks at the word rape as she knows these were consensual trysts and she makes a point of clarifying that the women, while students, were all of age. Certainly nothing illegal but still frowned upon and now his career is left in question and how will that affect her position within the same university walls.
All the while a new adjunct professor, Vladamir Vladinski, has arrived on campus with his wife and daughter in tow and our narrator begins to obsess over Vladamir. She can't determine whether she has fallen in love or if it is pure unadulterated lust but she will do anything to stay within his orbit. As the story proceeds we begin to see how our narrators mental health begins to deteriorate as her obsession with Vladamir grows stronger.
As we near the final 1/3 of the book things seem to be heading down a dark road but I feel like Jonas hit the brakes before actually going there. Part of me was hoping for something a bit darker but that doesn't mean the ending is terrible. Not at all. It just wasn't what this reader was expecting. All in all I enjoyed this book. My biggest complaint is that the cover is very unappealing so I was thankful to have a digital arc. 4 stars!
Thank you to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for my complimentary copy.
April 21, 2022
I'm not sure why such a talented author would spend time writing and perfecting such a vapid and meaningless story. The writing is flawless. The narrator is very smart and incredibly interesting and she is totally wasted in these pages because the story is pointless. Is the point the story its pointlessness? Well, then. This novel nailed it.
March 20, 2022
I was drawn to this book because it sounded interesting and way different than anything I’ve read before. This was my first character study book and it will be my last too. I’ve learned this style of book is just not for me. Vladimir is not a bad book by any means, it’s very creative. The author did a fantastic job developing the characters and what is happening. This book is very descriptive and a great debut novel. It is just slow moving and doesn’t have enough of a plot for me to keep me super drawn in. Overall, I think this would be a wonderful book for people who enjoy character studies, it just was not a good fit for me personally.
Thank you Net Galley and Avid Reader Press for a gifted copy in return for my honest review.
Thank you Net Galley and Avid Reader Press for a gifted copy in return for my honest review.
April 13, 2022
I have whiplash after reading “Vladimir” by Julia May Jonas. Jonas has created an interesting narrator who begins as likeable, moving into unlikeable, and landing on human. The first page of chapter 1 includes a sentence which I believe is a forewarning: “I’ve always felt the origins of anger in my vagina and am surprised it is not mentioned more in literature.” Well ladies, I can’t say I have found my anger emanating from my vagina; actually, I can see Jada Pinkett Smith in the narrator’s anger camp. That sentence is very revealing for the tone of the novel.
Jonas’ unnamed narrator begins by informing the reader that her husband, John, chair of the English Department in their liberal arts college, is accused of sexual misconduct. He had “mutually consenting sex” with students at the time that it was not illegal to pursue such activities. Now that the “me too” movement is in full swing, these students who are now in their 40’s, have reassessed their college sexual activities and are now accusing him of using his power illegally.
What I found to be very interesting is the clashing of the waves of feminism. For, the unnamed narrator and her husband John entered an open marriage when they determined to be wed. At the time, the narrator was exercising her sexual liberation in enjoying a marriage that allowed her to explore her own sexuality with other partners. This open marriage is what led to John being accused of sexual misdeeds.
Where the story turned me, in narration, was the entrance of Vladimir, an up-and-coming poet, to the university. The narrator becomes besotted with the man, with some crazy internal narration.
Everyone seems to be getting different things out of this story. I found it to be an interesting story of the clash of feminism. It is also an incredible affirmation of women’s desire. Very little literature involves the raw sexual desire of a woman in her 60’s. Kudos to author Julia May Jonas, who is a youngster to our narrator, for putting to pen a mature woman’s thoughts.
Jonas’ unnamed narrator begins by informing the reader that her husband, John, chair of the English Department in their liberal arts college, is accused of sexual misconduct. He had “mutually consenting sex” with students at the time that it was not illegal to pursue such activities. Now that the “me too” movement is in full swing, these students who are now in their 40’s, have reassessed their college sexual activities and are now accusing him of using his power illegally.
What I found to be very interesting is the clashing of the waves of feminism. For, the unnamed narrator and her husband John entered an open marriage when they determined to be wed. At the time, the narrator was exercising her sexual liberation in enjoying a marriage that allowed her to explore her own sexuality with other partners. This open marriage is what led to John being accused of sexual misdeeds.
Where the story turned me, in narration, was the entrance of Vladimir, an up-and-coming poet, to the university. The narrator becomes besotted with the man, with some crazy internal narration.
Everyone seems to be getting different things out of this story. I found it to be an interesting story of the clash of feminism. It is also an incredible affirmation of women’s desire. Very little literature involves the raw sexual desire of a woman in her 60’s. Kudos to author Julia May Jonas, who is a youngster to our narrator, for putting to pen a mature woman’s thoughts.
February 10, 2022
I made it a goal to try and read more literary fiction this year, but this is making me rethink that goal bc this entire experience was just... unpleasant????? Very very much not the book for me.
![Profile Image for ©hrissie ❁ [1st week on campus-somewhat run-down].](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1610034740i/49071166._UX200_CR0,20,200,200_.jpg)
March 30, 2022
Incoming Review-Backstory,
because I read this debut novel here – I still get physically jittery with excitement when I think about it – in the first week of February, and had this strong compulsion to review it professionally (LRB-style, for those who are into this stuff) for an MA class (results are not out yet! But I am deeply grateful to have this beyond-brilliant professor who gives wonderful feedback, and seems to have found the review to his liking in many respects 🤞🏻). (UPDATE: I got 82% - YAY! 🎉)
This is to say that this review will have to be a little bit different in scope and execution. Many of us, in any case, know by now that the narrative is filtered though the labyrinthine mind-ride of a 58-year old, eccentric English Literature professor. Whose husband John (she, conversely, remains unnamed – by choice, it seems, as the author herself claims), also professor and chair at the same American college, is accused of being a ‘lecherous pervert’, having acted upon his desire to engage in sexual relations with his students.
That would seem to be the plot of the narration, were it not for the fact that the narrator demands to impose her at times deliciously delirious voice at every turn-of-the-page: more often than not, this highly troubling circumstance – which at the surface does not bother her, not really and truly, but it affects her own position within the department – is cast into oblivion. This is where Vladimir comes in: an obsession – made palpable, exhilarating, yet self-draining all in one (so much exciting Nabokov in this!) – for this forty-year old newly appointed lecturer slash experimental novelist, whose comparative youth (she is, indeed, ‘plagued’ by vanity) and comparative prudishness (versus the sexual views she outwardly advocates) seem to be the antidote for her inly harboured despair.
There is much to absolutely love about this novel: the wry, irreverent, and self-ironising tone, the complex treatment of (self-)awareness and (self-)righteousness that arises from a sharp, clear-eyed deconstruction of lust, power, sexual politics, and academia. But most of all, I would say, it is the levels of vulnerability the novel allows for, through the absence-presence of Vladimir, and through the narrator’s erratic, immersive, contradictory narration. Its consideration of moral questions, in this respect, result prismatic and non-conclusive, rather than simplistic. This is no cautionary tale, as some are wanting to suggest, but rather a messy – because it cannot be otherwise – immersion into the intricacies of human desire and the ache of the self to be someone, in an ever-annihilating world.
Vladimir, it cannot be denied, is heavily engaged with the political context of the (post-)sexual revolution, and frames the hot debate around the various waves of feminism accordingly. The following is the narrator’s main tirade, that points to a deep desire for the female to be what she needs to be:
Now, however, young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements. Now my husband was abusing his power, never mind that power is the reason they desired him in the first place. Whatever the current state of my marriage may be, I still can’t think about it all without my blood boiling. My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have—the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little bit of fun. With the general, highly objectionable move toward a populist insistence of morality in art, I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female. I am depressed that they feel so guilty about their encounters with my husband that they have decided he was taking advantage of them. I want to throw them all a Slut Walk and let them know that when they’re sad, it’s probably not because of the sex they had, and more because they spend too much time on the internet, wondering what people think of them.
(let’s take a moment to admit that it is indeed funny, too.)
However (and wanting to probe the underlying seriousness of the matter), this bold and brutal viewpoint is immeasurably nuanced throughout the narrative. The vision certainly persists, but at its highest level, it carries out the true purpose of its project: questioning and overturning assumptions, thus submitting itself, too, to scrutiny.
Brilliant self-reflexivity on Jonas’s part here, assisted to be sure by her expertise in the theatrical, which is here reinvented in intelligent means and ways. It is all-too-clear to me that Jonas spent much time with her musings on writing. No coincidence in having all characters be failed, aspiring, experimental, or bestselling writers themselves. I personally found this very striking, and it does marvellously tally with the character-formation of academics who work in the humanities whilst dabbling in writing themselves, and trying to also survive in the process. There is this profound, ‘orgasmic’ yearning for writing to happen, that extends the theme of obsession epitomised by Vladimir. Between the slippery quality of insight, and the chaotic magma that their life is made of, writing is what these characters turn to. Writing itself, possibly, constituting that transitional space in which they are able to unpack the conditionings of the world they inhabit as well as their own self-fabricated illusions, such that their own individuality can be allowed to occupy centre stage.
Bearing all this in mind, I found that the end evocation of the Jane Eyre ending did not quite work for a knowing novel that is far more complex and layered than I could here begin to convey. There must have been some conflicts of interest, in any case: the cover, for one thing, is absolutely detestable and misleading. (I was fortunate enough to be granted access to the beautiful and powerful cover-version that will be published on the 22nd of May.)
That being said, ‘let me go mad in my own way’ (the epigraph, taken from Sophocles’s Elektra) is all the narrator asks for. And we will leave her to it. Because this is one Top Novel of the year.
A note to Julia May Jonas: we stand here, waiting – fairly impatiently, probably, but please do take all the time you need – to be compelled, captivated, drawn in by your next (when? how? what?) narrative.
4.5 stars, rounded up.
Thanks go to Net Galley and publisher for giving me the opportunity to read and review this brilliant book. All thoughts expressed here are my own.
because I read this debut novel here – I still get physically jittery with excitement when I think about it – in the first week of February, and had this strong compulsion to review it professionally (LRB-style, for those who are into this stuff) for an MA class (results are not out yet! But I am deeply grateful to have this beyond-brilliant professor who gives wonderful feedback, and seems to have found the review to his liking in many respects 🤞🏻). (UPDATE: I got 82% - YAY! 🎉)
This is to say that this review will have to be a little bit different in scope and execution. Many of us, in any case, know by now that the narrative is filtered though the labyrinthine mind-ride of a 58-year old, eccentric English Literature professor. Whose husband John (she, conversely, remains unnamed – by choice, it seems, as the author herself claims), also professor and chair at the same American college, is accused of being a ‘lecherous pervert’, having acted upon his desire to engage in sexual relations with his students.
That would seem to be the plot of the narration, were it not for the fact that the narrator demands to impose her at times deliciously delirious voice at every turn-of-the-page: more often than not, this highly troubling circumstance – which at the surface does not bother her, not really and truly, but it affects her own position within the department – is cast into oblivion. This is where Vladimir comes in: an obsession – made palpable, exhilarating, yet self-draining all in one (so much exciting Nabokov in this!) – for this forty-year old newly appointed lecturer slash experimental novelist, whose comparative youth (she is, indeed, ‘plagued’ by vanity) and comparative prudishness (versus the sexual views she outwardly advocates) seem to be the antidote for her inly harboured despair.
There is much to absolutely love about this novel: the wry, irreverent, and self-ironising tone, the complex treatment of (self-)awareness and (self-)righteousness that arises from a sharp, clear-eyed deconstruction of lust, power, sexual politics, and academia. But most of all, I would say, it is the levels of vulnerability the novel allows for, through the absence-presence of Vladimir, and through the narrator’s erratic, immersive, contradictory narration. Its consideration of moral questions, in this respect, result prismatic and non-conclusive, rather than simplistic. This is no cautionary tale, as some are wanting to suggest, but rather a messy – because it cannot be otherwise – immersion into the intricacies of human desire and the ache of the self to be someone, in an ever-annihilating world.
Vladimir, it cannot be denied, is heavily engaged with the political context of the (post-)sexual revolution, and frames the hot debate around the various waves of feminism accordingly. The following is the narrator’s main tirade, that points to a deep desire for the female to be what she needs to be:
Now, however, young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements. Now my husband was abusing his power, never mind that power is the reason they desired him in the first place. Whatever the current state of my marriage may be, I still can’t think about it all without my blood boiling. My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have—the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little bit of fun. With the general, highly objectionable move toward a populist insistence of morality in art, I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female. I am depressed that they feel so guilty about their encounters with my husband that they have decided he was taking advantage of them. I want to throw them all a Slut Walk and let them know that when they’re sad, it’s probably not because of the sex they had, and more because they spend too much time on the internet, wondering what people think of them.
(let’s take a moment to admit that it is indeed funny, too.)
However (and wanting to probe the underlying seriousness of the matter), this bold and brutal viewpoint is immeasurably nuanced throughout the narrative. The vision certainly persists, but at its highest level, it carries out the true purpose of its project: questioning and overturning assumptions, thus submitting itself, too, to scrutiny.
Brilliant self-reflexivity on Jonas’s part here, assisted to be sure by her expertise in the theatrical, which is here reinvented in intelligent means and ways. It is all-too-clear to me that Jonas spent much time with her musings on writing. No coincidence in having all characters be failed, aspiring, experimental, or bestselling writers themselves. I personally found this very striking, and it does marvellously tally with the character-formation of academics who work in the humanities whilst dabbling in writing themselves, and trying to also survive in the process. There is this profound, ‘orgasmic’ yearning for writing to happen, that extends the theme of obsession epitomised by Vladimir. Between the slippery quality of insight, and the chaotic magma that their life is made of, writing is what these characters turn to. Writing itself, possibly, constituting that transitional space in which they are able to unpack the conditionings of the world they inhabit as well as their own self-fabricated illusions, such that their own individuality can be allowed to occupy centre stage.
Bearing all this in mind, I found that the end evocation of the Jane Eyre ending did not quite work for a knowing novel that is far more complex and layered than I could here begin to convey. There must have been some conflicts of interest, in any case: the cover, for one thing, is absolutely detestable and misleading. (I was fortunate enough to be granted access to the beautiful and powerful cover-version that will be published on the 22nd of May.)
That being said, ‘let me go mad in my own way’ (the epigraph, taken from Sophocles’s Elektra) is all the narrator asks for. And we will leave her to it. Because this is one Top Novel of the year.
A note to Julia May Jonas: we stand here, waiting – fairly impatiently, probably, but please do take all the time you need – to be compelled, captivated, drawn in by your next (when? how? what?) narrative.
4.5 stars, rounded up.
Thanks go to Net Galley and publisher for giving me the opportunity to read and review this brilliant book. All thoughts expressed here are my own.
March 4, 2022
More than anything, this unruly debut is great fun to read: Our 58-year-old protagonist is a professor for English literature at a mildly prestigious, small liberal arts college. Her slightly older husband with whom she has an open relationship is the head of the department, but he is now facing disciplinary measures as seven former students have come forward, claiming that they had a relationship with him - a consensual one, mind you, but one with an obvious power imbalance. Meanwhile, the protagonist develops an obsession with 40-year-old junior professor Vladimir and reminisces about her own former exploits as well as her husbands affairs. To her, generation snowflake is acting anti-feminist.
Sure, there are some parallels to Lolita, and both the protagonist and her husband sometimes play the role of Humbert Humbert, but sometimes, in the flashbacks, also that of Lolita (as seen by Humbert!). Feminist questions take the center stage though: Is the protagonist an enabler? Is she oppressed? Is the husband an abuser or the victim of new standards that didn't apply when the deeds in question happened? And what's the dynamic between Vladimir and his wife? In the background, we also learn about the power dynamics in the lesbian relationship of the protagonist's daughter.
Other issues arise as well: Does the protagonist dream of being Vladimir? He's a promising author, she is a failed one, he is still relatively young, well trained (aaaaaabs) and groomed, she is (and has always been) very harsh on her now aging body. The generational disparities, especially when it comes to communication standards, between the professor and students become apparent, and the evil side of woke culture (people being socially sentenced without trial) is on full display.
When it comes to further reading that reflects the latest moral contemplations regarding relationships between professors and students, I recommend Amia Srinivasan who, in The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, offers an essay about just that topic: “On Not Sleeping with Your Students”, and the title already suggests her position - her reasoning is well-worth checking out.
The last third of Jonas' novel is unrealistic and over-the-top and the ending is slightly anti-climatic, but this is a wonderful debut that shines with an absorbing narrative voice and a downright terrible, but highly interesting protagonist.
And hey, people who designed the German translation: How could you not pick this amazing cover, and instead decided on a photo that rips of the cover concept of A Little Life? *argh*
Sure, there are some parallels to Lolita, and both the protagonist and her husband sometimes play the role of Humbert Humbert, but sometimes, in the flashbacks, also that of Lolita (as seen by Humbert!). Feminist questions take the center stage though: Is the protagonist an enabler? Is she oppressed? Is the husband an abuser or the victim of new standards that didn't apply when the deeds in question happened? And what's the dynamic between Vladimir and his wife? In the background, we also learn about the power dynamics in the lesbian relationship of the protagonist's daughter.
Other issues arise as well: Does the protagonist dream of being Vladimir? He's a promising author, she is a failed one, he is still relatively young, well trained (aaaaaabs) and groomed, she is (and has always been) very harsh on her now aging body. The generational disparities, especially when it comes to communication standards, between the professor and students become apparent, and the evil side of woke culture (people being socially sentenced without trial) is on full display.
When it comes to further reading that reflects the latest moral contemplations regarding relationships between professors and students, I recommend Amia Srinivasan who, in The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, offers an essay about just that topic: “On Not Sleeping with Your Students”, and the title already suggests her position - her reasoning is well-worth checking out.
The last third of Jonas' novel is unrealistic and over-the-top and the ending is slightly anti-climatic, but this is a wonderful debut that shines with an absorbing narrative voice and a downright terrible, but highly interesting protagonist.
And hey, people who designed the German translation: How could you not pick this amazing cover, and instead decided on a photo that rips of the cover concept of A Little Life? *argh*
June 6, 2022
a quote from entertainment weekly asserts that this book is a mix of ‘netflix’s the chair, Lisa Taddeo's Three Women, and Ottessa Moshfegh’, and i can’t think of anything else that describes it so aptly.
Vladimir follows an unnamed narrator, a 58 year old english professor whose husband, john, is also an english professor at the same college, a man who is currently suspended from teaching due to accusations of sexual misconduct by several female students. amidst all of this, a new professor has just been hired at the university: a handsome and celebrated young novelist, vladimir, who our narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with.
what makes this situation unique is the fact that the narrator and her husband have operated within an open marriage for years. due to this, her husband’s actions spark less of an affair scandal than a moral reckoning on campus. on the one hand, john has been suspended pending a hearing, with many students outraged and some even calling for the dismissal of our narrator due to her alleged complicity. on the other, our narrator asserts that female students lusting after older male professors is a tale as old as time, and that the growing cultural contempt of these relationships is prudish and infantilising, denying the women any agency or power in the situation.
what follows is a razor-sharp, post-#metoo novel which shines a light onto some of the grey areas of the #metoo movement, before shifting into rather compelling thriller-esque territory towards the end. along with a provocative exploration of power dynamics and the intersection of power and desire (especially how much desire is permitted with age), jonas also provides some commentary on the ongoing, and seemingly unanswerable, conundrum of the place of mortality in art, or whether it even has a place at all. while the narrator is not always ‘likeable’ nor agreeable, her internal monologue is incredibly incisive, littered with wit and dry, dark humour - right up until the last line.
Vladimir follows an unnamed narrator, a 58 year old english professor whose husband, john, is also an english professor at the same college, a man who is currently suspended from teaching due to accusations of sexual misconduct by several female students. amidst all of this, a new professor has just been hired at the university: a handsome and celebrated young novelist, vladimir, who our narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with.
what makes this situation unique is the fact that the narrator and her husband have operated within an open marriage for years. due to this, her husband’s actions spark less of an affair scandal than a moral reckoning on campus. on the one hand, john has been suspended pending a hearing, with many students outraged and some even calling for the dismissal of our narrator due to her alleged complicity. on the other, our narrator asserts that female students lusting after older male professors is a tale as old as time, and that the growing cultural contempt of these relationships is prudish and infantilising, denying the women any agency or power in the situation.
what follows is a razor-sharp, post-#metoo novel which shines a light onto some of the grey areas of the #metoo movement, before shifting into rather compelling thriller-esque territory towards the end. along with a provocative exploration of power dynamics and the intersection of power and desire (especially how much desire is permitted with age), jonas also provides some commentary on the ongoing, and seemingly unanswerable, conundrum of the place of mortality in art, or whether it even has a place at all. while the narrator is not always ‘likeable’ nor agreeable, her internal monologue is incredibly incisive, littered with wit and dry, dark humour - right up until the last line.
February 26, 2023
Quick, hide that cover!
No way! You wouldn’t catch me sitting in the doc’s office reading a paperback copy of this book. The trashy cover would make me squirm in total embarrassment! What you see is a guy’s buff chest, his shirt wide open with a "I know you want me” invisible sign hanging across his chiseled bod. And you must admit, his hand is dangerously close to his crotch. (Who am I kidding? It looks like his hand is right ON his crotch!) So instead, he he he, I sat complacently and sneakily with my Kindle, my trashy-looking book invisible to nosy people. Inquiring minds in the chairs around me no doubt would have thought I was reading Jane Austen, maybe Sense and Sensibility. Had they seen the cover, they would have thought I was a dirty old lady.
Well, they would have been wrong! It’s a miracle that I decided to read this, and of course it was only because a lot of Goodreads friends were raving about it and assuring me that the cover is misleading (I’ll say!!!). But I’m sooo glad I believed them, and not the cover, because this was one exciting and fascinating novel. Of course, in my many huffs, I’ve written letters (in my head) to the marketers about how stupid the cover is. Won’t it chase away the intended audience? But the important thing is I read the book and I loved it—so who cares anymore about the damn cover.
The book is about a 50-something literature professor whose philandering husband is in deep do-do for sleeping with a string of young students, all of age and all consenting. We don’t get to hear all the sordid details of his missteps, and I liked that. He plays a minor role. Instead, the book is focused on the wife and her obsession with Vladimir, a hot younger professor candidate. She’s the narrator and she isn’t always reliable. (I rub my hands in glee.) It’s not like she is the clueless wife who has been wronged—they were in an open marriage and she had affairs, too. I didn’t like her much—she seemed cold and aloof most of the time, but I never stopped wanting to find out what she was up to in her head. The people at the university have a lot of opinions about her husband, and some think she is guilty by association, some think she should leave him, many think both of them should leave the university. Oh, the academic politics are brutal, but she can’t help but keep her eyes on her own private prize, Vladimir. She turns out to be crazier than she appears, and that notches up the fun. There are some dandy plot twists at the end. The story is dark and intriguing; it definitely doesn’t go where you think it’s going to go.
This is a heady book, but still accessible. I didn’t have to stop and try to deconstruct philosophical murmurings, I didn’t have to undo twisty philosophical knots, yet the story is provocative. The style is intellectual, but there is still emotion mixed in, and there are no lectures—only interesting self-reflections and questions. I completely loved it. The book is about obsession, aging, motherhood, power, university politics, writing, art, morality—all big stuff that is handled with care and compassion.
I made a ton of highlights, and I’m having a hard time picking some favorite quotes.
Let me add this one because I would have uttered the quote, in a much less eloquent way, if I had been asked to describe what I think about typing. I’ve loved beating a conga and also caressing piano keys, but with both of those, I had to make noises, and noises meant noisy, discordant mistakes. The typewriter and laptops, on the other hand, just purr! And from a young age, my instrument of choice and practicality has been typewriters. I always wondered whether typing was like music to others, and lo and behold, the narrator here feels the same way:
“I love and have always loved typing—my fingers traveling and pressing like a musician’s, first against the big, resistant keys of the typewriter, then the light, bulky plastic of the word processor, and eventually the smooth, soft clicks of a laptop.”
And on aging (the quote is not funny, but it’s fun in a creative-writer’s sort of way):
“I didn’t picture my upper arm aloft, flesh hanging like a Ziploc bag half-filled with pudding.”
And on not liking nature, uttered by a 10-year-old (hallelujah, I’m not the only one):
“I don’t like nature because everyone is always screaming at you to look at things. “Look at this deer! Look at that bird!”
And a great quote about writing:
“For years I had been trying to cool down the temperature of my writing, to pull it back, pull it back, pull it back—neutralize it, contain it, make it crisp, clear, and sharp, every word carved out of crystal. This writing was nothing like that—it was drippy, messy, breezy. I was working through a mind frame, not a conceit. I was creating a world, not words on a page.”
I’ve already made this review too long, so I’ll just end by saying, Read This! It’s a sophisticated, intriguing debut not to be missed. I’m anxiously waiting for what the writer does next. Meanwhile, avoid reading this paperback in the doctor’s office. You’ll want to hide under a chair.
UPDATE ON PORN COVER:
Candi gave me a link to a YouTube video where the publisher explains why they chose the cover, and they show you the rejects, too. (Thank you, Candi!) Go to YouTube and search "How 2022’s Hottest Book Cover Was Created.” It’s a kick. Meanwhile, the book is out in paperback now and the cover is plain old black! Damn, they went overboard in the opposite direction (I would have preferred some artsy image), but at least we can now read it in the dentist’s office without freaking out about what people are thinking. I just bought it to go on my Favorites bookcase! And now I’ll have no ‘splainin’ to do!! I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m sort of sad to see the cover go. I miss the shock value, and I’ll sorely miss the giggly conversations we all had about it!
No way! You wouldn’t catch me sitting in the doc’s office reading a paperback copy of this book. The trashy cover would make me squirm in total embarrassment! What you see is a guy’s buff chest, his shirt wide open with a "I know you want me” invisible sign hanging across his chiseled bod. And you must admit, his hand is dangerously close to his crotch. (Who am I kidding? It looks like his hand is right ON his crotch!) So instead, he he he, I sat complacently and sneakily with my Kindle, my trashy-looking book invisible to nosy people. Inquiring minds in the chairs around me no doubt would have thought I was reading Jane Austen, maybe Sense and Sensibility. Had they seen the cover, they would have thought I was a dirty old lady.
Well, they would have been wrong! It’s a miracle that I decided to read this, and of course it was only because a lot of Goodreads friends were raving about it and assuring me that the cover is misleading (I’ll say!!!). But I’m sooo glad I believed them, and not the cover, because this was one exciting and fascinating novel. Of course, in my many huffs, I’ve written letters (in my head) to the marketers about how stupid the cover is. Won’t it chase away the intended audience? But the important thing is I read the book and I loved it—so who cares anymore about the damn cover.
The book is about a 50-something literature professor whose philandering husband is in deep do-do for sleeping with a string of young students, all of age and all consenting. We don’t get to hear all the sordid details of his missteps, and I liked that. He plays a minor role. Instead, the book is focused on the wife and her obsession with Vladimir, a hot younger professor candidate. She’s the narrator and she isn’t always reliable. (I rub my hands in glee.) It’s not like she is the clueless wife who has been wronged—they were in an open marriage and she had affairs, too. I didn’t like her much—she seemed cold and aloof most of the time, but I never stopped wanting to find out what she was up to in her head. The people at the university have a lot of opinions about her husband, and some think she is guilty by association, some think she should leave him, many think both of them should leave the university. Oh, the academic politics are brutal, but she can’t help but keep her eyes on her own private prize, Vladimir. She turns out to be crazier than she appears, and that notches up the fun. There are some dandy plot twists at the end. The story is dark and intriguing; it definitely doesn’t go where you think it’s going to go.
This is a heady book, but still accessible. I didn’t have to stop and try to deconstruct philosophical murmurings, I didn’t have to undo twisty philosophical knots, yet the story is provocative. The style is intellectual, but there is still emotion mixed in, and there are no lectures—only interesting self-reflections and questions. I completely loved it. The book is about obsession, aging, motherhood, power, university politics, writing, art, morality—all big stuff that is handled with care and compassion.
I made a ton of highlights, and I’m having a hard time picking some favorite quotes.
Let me add this one because I would have uttered the quote, in a much less eloquent way, if I had been asked to describe what I think about typing. I’ve loved beating a conga and also caressing piano keys, but with both of those, I had to make noises, and noises meant noisy, discordant mistakes. The typewriter and laptops, on the other hand, just purr! And from a young age, my instrument of choice and practicality has been typewriters. I always wondered whether typing was like music to others, and lo and behold, the narrator here feels the same way:
“I love and have always loved typing—my fingers traveling and pressing like a musician’s, first against the big, resistant keys of the typewriter, then the light, bulky plastic of the word processor, and eventually the smooth, soft clicks of a laptop.”
And on aging (the quote is not funny, but it’s fun in a creative-writer’s sort of way):
“I didn’t picture my upper arm aloft, flesh hanging like a Ziploc bag half-filled with pudding.”
And on not liking nature, uttered by a 10-year-old (hallelujah, I’m not the only one):
“I don’t like nature because everyone is always screaming at you to look at things. “Look at this deer! Look at that bird!”
And a great quote about writing:
“For years I had been trying to cool down the temperature of my writing, to pull it back, pull it back, pull it back—neutralize it, contain it, make it crisp, clear, and sharp, every word carved out of crystal. This writing was nothing like that—it was drippy, messy, breezy. I was working through a mind frame, not a conceit. I was creating a world, not words on a page.”
I’ve already made this review too long, so I’ll just end by saying, Read This! It’s a sophisticated, intriguing debut not to be missed. I’m anxiously waiting for what the writer does next. Meanwhile, avoid reading this paperback in the doctor’s office. You’ll want to hide under a chair.
UPDATE ON PORN COVER:
Candi gave me a link to a YouTube video where the publisher explains why they chose the cover, and they show you the rejects, too. (Thank you, Candi!) Go to YouTube and search "How 2022’s Hottest Book Cover Was Created.” It’s a kick. Meanwhile, the book is out in paperback now and the cover is plain old black! Damn, they went overboard in the opposite direction (I would have preferred some artsy image), but at least we can now read it in the dentist’s office without freaking out about what people are thinking. I just bought it to go on my Favorites bookcase! And now I’ll have no ‘splainin’ to do!! I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m sort of sad to see the cover go. I miss the shock value, and I’ll sorely miss the giggly conversations we all had about it!
April 5, 2023
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DNF @ p.62
Once someone sent me a message saying that they went out of their way to five star all the books I don't like and one star all the books I love. Regardless, the author is in luck because it sounds like she has another five star forthcoming then, because I'm giving this book a one.
I found VLADIMIR in a Little Free Library. I'd been thinking about buying it for a while so finding it for free felt like kismet. It had been getting mixed reviews from some of my friends and the idea of a morally grey unlikable heroine who is bitched out about her old age and an apologist for her rapist husband seemed... interesting. If you've been following for a while, you know I have a soft spot for literary fiction that doesn't quite find its niche. I always feel really bad for books with low average ratings. Sometimes it's because they were marketed badly or didn't find their target audience.
I went into this book expecting something like Alissa Nutting's TAMPA. And I sort of got that. But also not. Because at least TAMPA was kind of an exploration of female sex predators and how the same sexism that traps women in a loop of infrastructural sexism also allows such predators to get away scot-free since seeing women as weaker means not seeing women as capable of real harm. But I'm not sure that was the point of VLADIMIR, because the heroine doesn't really do anything. The heroine is what happens when pick mes grow up. She literally opens the book talking about how old men loved her when she was young, and how she basked in their attention because it validated her so much as a sexual an intellectual being. When I washed the taste of vomit from the back of my mouth, I was like, "Okay, interesting. Where is she going with this?"
The narrator/heroine and her husband are both academics. Her husband has gotten in big trouble for sleeping with his students and is in the middle of an investigation. The heroine stands by her man, resentfully but loyally, even as her wandering eye falls on the newest faculty member at the college, Vladimir, who is twenty years her junior. She talks about how gross she is now that she's an old lady (almost sixty), and we watch her convince some well-meaning students who come into her office hours that standing by her husband is a "feminist" choice because feminism is about choice, all the while she's seething with rage, hating on them for being young and pretty and dressing in revealing clothes.
And I thought, "Okay, interesting. WHERE is she going with THIS?"
And then she drugs Vladimir and, like, ties him up in a beach house?
WHAT????
Officially, I stopped reading at page sixty-two but I skipped to the end because I wanted to see how this ended and where the author was going with things. I read about fifty pages of the ending and skimmed the middle, just so I could get a holistic view of the book. Now that I've read it, I'm annoyed. Because I'm not sure that there was a point to this book at all. Maybe not having a point was the point, but that feels like cheating, because while life may be open-ended, books themselves are complete.
Just like how this book was complete. Complete bullshit.
1 star
February 4, 2022
[4+] A novel set on a college campus narrated by a 58-year old female English literature professor is catnip to me. She is struggling with doubts about her writing, her career, her aging body and her marriage to her husband who is under investigation for past sexual relationships with students. She is perplexing, vulnerable, narcissistic and generous. Add in her sexual fantasies about a new professor, shake it up with brainy, propulsive writing and the result is an incredible reading ride that has left me giddy.
Thank you to Avid Reader Press for sending me the ARC.
Thank you to Avid Reader Press for sending me the ARC.
May 28, 2022
4.5 stars! I’m going to get the physical copy! I listened to the audio book through the library
Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾
Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾
January 22, 2022
Let’s talk about the cover. I don’t like romance and I don’t read romance but, at first glance, this cover looks like a romance. Take a second look. I can’t recall any covers of any romance novels neatly slicing off the head of the beefcake. Now let’s talk about the main characters and setting. Although all are academics and the novel takes place at a college this is not a campus novel. So, what is it? The title VLADIMIR might give you a clue. Vladimir Vladinsky is the jokey name and the object of obsession by an older woman. Reverse shades of LOLITA, I think, except Vlad is not underage. The older woman’s husband has been accused of misconduct by female students. What follows is a funny, entertaining, and beguiling read about obsession and objectification.
April 3, 2024
???????????????????????? the last 30% of this was a wild ride what did i just read
February 25, 2022
This is a difficult book to rate, but I think it will land at 2 stars. The more I think about it, the less I like it, so there's that. VLADIMIR wasn't at all what I was expecting. With the blurb and title, I assumed it would be a suspenseful homage to LOLITA with the roles reversed. Nope. Instead, we got lots of meandering thoughts from an unnamed narrator. Little dialogue, unfortunately. I never quite understood or was convinced of her fixation with Vladimir. Weird ending.
July 28, 2023
2.5 stars
Well written with some interesting insights, but tiring in the protagonist's fixation on aging and her looks. I don't know what point this book was trying to make other than: 'Vladimir hot'.
Well written with some interesting insights, but tiring in the protagonist's fixation on aging and her looks. I don't know what point this book was trying to make other than: 'Vladimir hot'.
February 7, 2022
Bold, smart and provocative
It's quite hard to review this book because the story doesn't have the usual shape and boundaries - it spills out in different directions and can't be effectively neatened. All of which are good things. There's definitely a Nabokov/Lolita allusion, though there are no 'nymphets', nothing underage, though there are age-gap and power-gap relationships.
What really makes the book is the voice of the narrator: a clever, acute English literature professor dealing with aging, tensions with her daughter, her professor husband's hearing for unprofessional affairs with students, and her own sudden lust for a 40-year old adjunct called, yes, Vladimir.
This reminded me of early Lionel Shriver for the probing intelligence of the character and writing, and the spiky characterisation of our narrator. She asks those uncomfortable questions about consent vs. coercion, victimhood vs. agency, fidelity and open relationships. And I loved the authentic portrayal of academic life and that strange - and strangely satisfying... when it doesn't go wrong - relationship between lecturers and their students.
The final third heads off into a surreal Nabokovian direction and feels a little uncontrolled. So not quite as polished as it could be but Jonas is a writer to watch, for sure.
Thanks to Pan Macmillan/Picador for an ARC via NetGalley
It's quite hard to review this book because the story doesn't have the usual shape and boundaries - it spills out in different directions and can't be effectively neatened. All of which are good things. There's definitely a Nabokov/Lolita allusion, though there are no 'nymphets', nothing underage, though there are age-gap and power-gap relationships.
What really makes the book is the voice of the narrator: a clever, acute English literature professor dealing with aging, tensions with her daughter, her professor husband's hearing for unprofessional affairs with students, and her own sudden lust for a 40-year old adjunct called, yes, Vladimir.
This reminded me of early Lionel Shriver for the probing intelligence of the character and writing, and the spiky characterisation of our narrator. She asks those uncomfortable questions about consent vs. coercion, victimhood vs. agency, fidelity and open relationships. And I loved the authentic portrayal of academic life and that strange - and strangely satisfying... when it doesn't go wrong - relationship between lecturers and their students.
The final third heads off into a surreal Nabokovian direction and feels a little uncontrolled. So not quite as polished as it could be but Jonas is a writer to watch, for sure.
Thanks to Pan Macmillan/Picador for an ARC via NetGalley
February 23, 2023
I almost DNF’d this so many times. And I’m glad I didn’t, because if I had my 2 stars would have been 1.
Maybe I missed the point or maybe the point just wasn’t for me, but this book frustrated the hell out of me. I understand imperfect characters having imperfect arcs but I hated how hypocritical she could be. I didn’t understand the give and take between feminist ideas and still trying to steal another woman’s husband. I didn’t like the manner in which she went about it. The constant back and forth in her mind of “maybe my plan isn’t entirely necessary” and then her proceeding with it. I didn’t like the narcissistic quality of our narrator assuming the students her husband slept with all should be as unaffected as she would be. I just- didn’t like it. And like I said, maybe i missed the point, or maybe the point was to be as uncomfortable as it ultimately made me, but in either case it didn’t work for me.
Maybe I missed the point or maybe the point just wasn’t for me, but this book frustrated the hell out of me. I understand imperfect characters having imperfect arcs but I hated how hypocritical she could be. I didn’t understand the give and take between feminist ideas and still trying to steal another woman’s husband. I didn’t like the manner in which she went about it. The constant back and forth in her mind of “maybe my plan isn’t entirely necessary” and then her proceeding with it. I didn’t like the narcissistic quality of our narrator assuming the students her husband slept with all should be as unaffected as she would be. I just- didn’t like it. And like I said, maybe i missed the point, or maybe the point was to be as uncomfortable as it ultimately made me, but in either case it didn’t work for me.
June 21, 2023
this was an interesting, character study type book that followed our unnamed narrator as she navigated her life and workplace after her husband is accused of non-consensual relationships with multiple students at the college they both work at as english professors.
i was obsessed - character driven novels are always my favourite, but the writing style took vladimir to the next level. it felt like i was a part of the narrator's stream of consciousness or internal dialogue the entire time and i loved it. i also thought the ending was nuts, but like in a good way?
i’m shocked with how low the goodreads rating for this is too. i know who the audience for this book is and those girlies must not be reading it! if you like the bell jar, my year of rest and relaxation, the new me, etc, try vladimir!
i was obsessed - character driven novels are always my favourite, but the writing style took vladimir to the next level. it felt like i was a part of the narrator's stream of consciousness or internal dialogue the entire time and i loved it. i also thought the ending was nuts, but like in a good way?
i’m shocked with how low the goodreads rating for this is too. i know who the audience for this book is and those girlies must not be reading it! if you like the bell jar, my year of rest and relaxation, the new me, etc, try vladimir!
May 2, 2022
As per usual, a low Goodreads rating + a complicated, “unlikeable” female protagonist = a stellar read for me. I especially enjoyed Jonas’ skewering of the minefield that is higher education these days. An excellent and perceptive debut for Jonas; can’t wait to read what she does next!
September 15, 2022
Well damn.
I picked up “Vladimir” not really knowing what to expect, even if I read a bunch of reviews before getting a copy (thank you for putting it on my radar, Candi!). The topic of sex and power in academia in a post #metoo world is rich with potential, but is also an absolute minefield. Julia May Jonas walked through that minefield with incredible skill and guts and I am quite stunned by the result. While this book is certainly self-aware, it doesn’t have the self-consciousness I have often found in debuts. If anything, the writing is so strong and self-assured that I would not have believed it was a first novel. Jonas is unafraid of being provocative and nuanced, in ways that I am certain ruffled a few feathers, but I personally enjoy it when I look up from a book slightly disheveled.
I’m not even sure how to summarize this book. It is about a writing professor in her mid-fifties; her husband, who is chair of the department she works for, has been accused of having inappropriate relations with some former students in the past. She knew of his affairs and as per their understanding, did not mind, especially as the girls were all over the age of consent at the time of the trysts - but it takes less than that to get fired in academia now a days. While this is happening, a brilliant young novelist and his wife start teaching in the department, and our narrator becomes obsessively infatuated with the younger (in his early forties) man.
This is a fantastic character study that dives so deep beneath the narrator’s skin. Unlikable as she may be, she is drawn superbly: incredibly intelligent, but insecure and often cold, not because she doesn’t feel, but because her feelings have had a way of punishing her in the past and now they stay wrapped up. There is a carefully layered commentary of current sexual politics, the theme of agency and accountability, female competitiveness and paranoia, and mental health woven through the inner monologue, and I loved it. The prose is elegant and strong, the pacing had me gobbling up the book in big chunks like a glutton, and I couldn’t wait to see how this would all unravel. The book lost a star because while the last quarter of the book was well executed, it took me strangely off-guard: this was not at all where I thought or expected this to go, and I had hoped for something a little darker.
This is a very, very impressive novel, and I look forward to whatever Ms. Jonas comes up with next!
I picked up “Vladimir” not really knowing what to expect, even if I read a bunch of reviews before getting a copy (thank you for putting it on my radar, Candi!). The topic of sex and power in academia in a post #metoo world is rich with potential, but is also an absolute minefield. Julia May Jonas walked through that minefield with incredible skill and guts and I am quite stunned by the result. While this book is certainly self-aware, it doesn’t have the self-consciousness I have often found in debuts. If anything, the writing is so strong and self-assured that I would not have believed it was a first novel. Jonas is unafraid of being provocative and nuanced, in ways that I am certain ruffled a few feathers, but I personally enjoy it when I look up from a book slightly disheveled.
I’m not even sure how to summarize this book. It is about a writing professor in her mid-fifties; her husband, who is chair of the department she works for, has been accused of having inappropriate relations with some former students in the past. She knew of his affairs and as per their understanding, did not mind, especially as the girls were all over the age of consent at the time of the trysts - but it takes less than that to get fired in academia now a days. While this is happening, a brilliant young novelist and his wife start teaching in the department, and our narrator becomes obsessively infatuated with the younger (in his early forties) man.
This is a fantastic character study that dives so deep beneath the narrator’s skin. Unlikable as she may be, she is drawn superbly: incredibly intelligent, but insecure and often cold, not because she doesn’t feel, but because her feelings have had a way of punishing her in the past and now they stay wrapped up. There is a carefully layered commentary of current sexual politics, the theme of agency and accountability, female competitiveness and paranoia, and mental health woven through the inner monologue, and I loved it. The prose is elegant and strong, the pacing had me gobbling up the book in big chunks like a glutton, and I couldn’t wait to see how this would all unravel. The book lost a star because while the last quarter of the book was well executed, it took me strangely off-guard: this was not at all where I thought or expected this to go, and I had hoped for something a little darker.
This is a very, very impressive novel, and I look forward to whatever Ms. Jonas comes up with next!
May 6, 2022
Let’s be honest, I wanted to read this book as soon as I saw the cover . . . .
Although I didn’t read the blurb, it didn’t take long to figure out this wasn’t a porno when my non-smutty friends started reviewing it. But all of those fours and fives had me counting the seconds until my library hold came about.
There’s nothing quite like a well-done character study. And there’s really nothing quite like getting in the mind of a truly awful person. In an age where revenge fantasies have become all the rage, this is a story that takes a different approach to the #metoo movement by completely flipping it on its ear. Told via our main character, an aging college professor, immediately prior to an upcoming hearing regarding the alleged sexual misconduct by her husband with some of his former female students. Maintaining her stance that he has done nothing wrong as the “victims” were all consenting adults, instead our protagonist becomes fixated on the idea of maintaining her youth via a new affair of her own – with Vladimir, a recently hired adjunct professor.
I find it so cathartic to occasionally read the story of someone who is completely despicable in every way. When you really want to smack someone in your real life, but are well aware that prison orange is not your color, along comes an author like Julia May Jonas who offers up someone you are supposed to love to hate. This debut (still can't believe this was a debut) does with a leading lady what John Boyne did with Maurice in A Ladder to the Sky. What a compelling read . . . .
Although I didn’t read the blurb, it didn’t take long to figure out this wasn’t a porno when my non-smutty friends started reviewing it. But all of those fours and fives had me counting the seconds until my library hold came about.
There’s nothing quite like a well-done character study. And there’s really nothing quite like getting in the mind of a truly awful person. In an age where revenge fantasies have become all the rage, this is a story that takes a different approach to the #metoo movement by completely flipping it on its ear. Told via our main character, an aging college professor, immediately prior to an upcoming hearing regarding the alleged sexual misconduct by her husband with some of his former female students. Maintaining her stance that he has done nothing wrong as the “victims” were all consenting adults, instead our protagonist becomes fixated on the idea of maintaining her youth via a new affair of her own – with Vladimir, a recently hired adjunct professor.
I find it so cathartic to occasionally read the story of someone who is completely despicable in every way. When you really want to smack someone in your real life, but are well aware that prison orange is not your color, along comes an author like Julia May Jonas who offers up someone you are supposed to love to hate. This debut (still can't believe this was a debut) does with a leading lady what John Boyne did with Maurice in A Ladder to the Sky. What a compelling read . . . .
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