Donna Gershten: Kissing the Virgin's Mouth

By JAN TRELIVING-BROWN

It is energising the way Donna Gershten has written, first up, such a rich, raw statement about women, for women. Kissing The Virgin's Mouth is a powerful novel and it made me feel powerful reading it, at times pausing, identifying, grinning, fanning my flushing cheeks with its pages.

An immediate aside - the book warrants superior quality paper. Unlined Mighty Pad does nothing to enrich a good read and Kissing The Virgin's Mouth deserves class all the way.

It deals with the fictional memoirs of one Guadalupe Magdalena Molina Vasquez: daughter, wife, mother, aunt, raised in poverty only to rise to a state of riches which leaves her wholly unsatisfied. Mexico is in her blood - the Golden Zone of Teatlan, Sinaloa. Magda finds she simply must return.

Gershten treats Mexico a tad like Laura Esquivel did in Like Water For Chocolate. Mexican phrases pop up so frequently it would pay to brush up on your "Buenos dias senoritas" before you dip in. It is tiresome knowing you are missing out on details for want of a simple translation. Though I scoured front and back for a glossary, alas, there is none.

I wouldn't have wanted to spoil the plot by saying Magda, like her mama, eventually faces the challenges of blindness, except there it is on the back cover, where Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage Of The Narwhal, calls Gershten's novel "vivid, sexy, generous and bold", and I can only say amen to that.

Take Magda's view of men: "Will I curse men? I thank the contaminadores del universo. I celebrate their weaknesses, their generosity. I light a candle to the small cracks in their power. I kiss their cheeks." And now I've become accustomed to the Mexican lilt, I'm liking the way my enunciation goes rollicking up and down the scales in my head.

Magda has an insatiable, maternal urge to pass on to her half-American daughter, Martina, her sense of the flow and ebb of life with its potential traps of religion, race, class and gender; her sense that "love and lust are as common as hair"; that happiness can make you weak; the surprising charm of tenderness and the lazy seduction of security.

"Del plato a la boca, a veces se cae la sopa - From the plate to the mouth, the soup sometimes spills." Magda is such a vamp, and I loved her.* Norman Bilbrough is a Wellington writer; Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer; Jan Treliving-Brown is a freelance writer.

Random House

$26.95