Cockatoo's Lie

Marion Bloem looks at the human condition through the eyes of several generations of a family - almost all women - reminiscing in the first person. Each reminiscence comes as a pithy vignette - mostly as direct speech. This device keeps the pace moving swiftly. To identify the speaker, the author has provided a family tree at the beginning of the book. The reader, by triangulation (as it were) from the relatives referred to, works out who is talking. The highly colored, sharply-observed scenes move between Java and the Netherlands, and between Dutch and "Indo's" (mixed race Dutch/Indonesians). The publisher's write-up suggests that the accent of the book is on the crisis of identity experienced by Indo's. However, what comes through more powerfully is that, whatever their origins or wherever they live, Indo's have the same day-to-day worries, passions, frustrations, delights and preoccupations as everyone else. The Cockatoo's Lie, by focusing on context, emotions and family ways is a remarkable Odyssey laying bare the intricate network of strings and pulleys manipulating the family's lives down through the generations, culminating in that of the narrator. We see how her extended family (in particular) mold her beliefs, attitudes, taboos and complexes. Her mother indoctrinates her with an austere "Jiminy Cricket" conscience against which she rebels. Male readers will be amazed by the revelations of female emotional processes and how they result in meta-behavior. One example will suffice: the narrator's mother frequently slaps and chastises her as a child. Years later the mother repents and explains to her now adult daughter that: "every slap I gave you was actually meant for your father." But on the way the family members give homilies that still resonate today: "The man must be older, bigger, richer, so that as a woman you can lean on him, not the other way around, because then everything will go wrong."; and: "...you shouldn't want to be better in everything than your husband, because then you'll lose your respect for him, and he will feel inferior." In fact, the title of the book refers metaphorically to the Indo narrator's discovery of her own physical attractiveness, the development of her healthily vigorous sexuality and the top-to-toe tingling of physical desire which she dubs "the ribbon". She has a series of red-blooded adventures, mostly with the tacit (if hardly credible) acceptance of her anthropologist husband who studies the Trobriand Islanders near Papua New Guinea. He uncovered one of their legends concerning a cockatoo and a clitoris. The clitoris: "would risk everything for a single sensation that seemed more important than food" to the point where it starved to death. This notion is the principle leitmotif for the narrator's struggles with her Jiminy Cricket to break out of the limits she has set herself. She oversteps one limit by clandestinely having an extended love affair with her husband's friend. She felt that this

Didnt read Marion Bloem for a long time. This is a great boek, mysterious and dreamy. It's a beautiful story about the female and male influences, and Indonesian influences on the main characters life.