knig's Reviews > The Nun

This went down in one sitting: less a tribute to the literary merits of this novel and more an expose of my coarse, voyeuristic nature. Of the very base, chav chasing, track suit wearing, Vicky Pollard yeah but no but yeah variety where I settle my newly acquired Christmas overhang on the settee, spread out the fries and Baconnaise washed down with a spot of bitter shandy and munch my way through this epic saga of nuns being very, very naughty. In France. And, lets face it, nobody does naughty like the French (except maybe Berlusconi and the Bunga Bunga parties. Which I only know about through hearsay because I’m no longer a minor and therefore was not invited). The picture I paint above is ofcourse, exactly the kind of parody I used to laugh over with my mates in college: the beached whale with the mills&boon tucked under one arm, and the tub of Hagendaaz in the other at the supermarket checkout, getting ready to spread her mutton-dressed as lamb buttmuch on the sofa for a Friday night staycation. Well, whose laughing now. Wait, that came out wrong, like a bad Bushism. I mean, except, I’m not laughing anymore. Still, Diderot gives a lot more bang for my buck than Mills & Boon, so some mercies abound.

So, theres a pubescent girl Suzanne who is thrown into a convent in 1758 in a process called ‘coerced monachization’ (no Diderot didn’t use this phrase. No, I didn’t come up with it either. No, it has nothing to do with monage, ménage or any variation thereof. Some academic did to explain the fact that up to half of all patrician females (thats the nobility to you and me) were voluntarily-on-purpose left in these convents against their will). Once inside, Suzanne is subjected to all kinds of debauchery, torture, sexual harassment, incarceration, and basically any degrading acts you can think of. And some you can’t.

So, there I am, eating, reading, reading, eating, unable to stop, because I have GOT to know just how far that pesky mother Superior is going to take her ‘dangerous liaison’: we have a slow progression from holding hands, to kissing the eyelids, the neck, the shoulders (and orgasming fully clothed at this point which was surprising yet reminiscent of a Bikram kind of mind over matter way. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was offered as extra credit course somewhere: How to orgasm fully clothed and at arms length from the object of your affection).

So, as all of this action (or inaction, depending on your point of view) was developing, I did get this slightly uncomfortable snapshotty feeling of reading this novel for all the wrong reasons: namely a vacuous mesmerisation (is that a word?) with this 18c French Big Brother reality show. The torture, the cruelty, the petty shenanigans of a bunch of sexually frustrated and extremely bored nuns.

I say all the wrong reasons because the novel was/is meant to be so much more than raunchy tell all. Its actually a scathing indictment of a despicable practice of forcibly ‘interring’ superfluous daughters in perpetual oblivion within the walls of these positively heathenish convents. And once you were in, you were in. Breaking the vows was impossible. Que desolee.
But I’ll admit, thats not why I was reading it. I was reading it to see how bad those nuns could get.