Bring Up the Bodies

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novel ties up the saga of Henry and Anne well with Thomas lurking about doing the lawyerly thing—in the name of the King!— but really exacting revenge for seemingly petty crimes performed years ago. Brilliant! Again, not sure how historicall accurate it all is but it makes a supremely satisfying read. This novel was not quite as nuanced as the first, so it read a bit quicker, (and was much shorter). All the hubbub about the pronoun “he” in the first book was addressed in the second, but since I had figured out her system of using “he” for Cromwell unless otherwise specified, I was actually irritated with continual clarification in this book! Still, a must read to continue the saga. Better historical fiction than most.


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All our labours, our sophistry, all our learning both acquired or pretended; the stratagems of state, the lawyers’ decrees, the churchmen’s curses, and the grave resolutions of judges, sacred and secular: all and each can be defeated by a woman’s body, can they not? God should have made their bellies transparent, and saved us the hope and fear. But perhaps what grows in there has to grow in the dark.’

He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Great historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and the creation of the Church of England from the Catholic Church as a for Henry to divorce Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn. Mantel does a good job of recounting the history with plenty of humanity, so you feel immersed in that world. It’s always hard to tell how much the author embellishes the truth for me since I am not much of a history buff, but Mantel does a good job of explaining the motivations and machinations in a believable way. So interesting to see how the split in the Catholic Church helped pave the way for the Bible to be available to the common man. Also interesting to see how little power women had and yet so much depended on a woman to produce an heir, and how a woman could use that dependency to her advantage. Women used what means they had to have a voice. Loved it. (The adaptation on tv is slow and whoever plays Cromwell doesn’t portray the humor and cleverness I found in the book)

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Her Body and Other Parties

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an uneven collection of short stories. “The Husband Stitch” expands and riffs on the story of the woman with the black/green ribbon around her neck. It’s well done and the audience involvement is a genius touch, but it’s chilly tale is ultimately just a retelling. “Especially Heinious” is especially overlong, convoluted and unreadable. “Real Women Have Bodies” is the most original, with a tight storyline that comments on the sacrifices we willingly make as women to fit into society’s mold of fashion and conformity. It is probably the best of the bunch. Several more stories are simply forgettable. “The Resident” is haunting but confusing. And “Difficult at Parties” is simply unreadable. It’s always hard to find a solid collection of short stories but I would simply seek out “Real Women Have Bodies” in an anthology and call it good.

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Babies are heavier than you’d think.

 Her mouth is an endless cavern, into which light and thought and sound descend, never to return.

 Around me was not the absence of sound, but the sound of absence:

My body was so cold it felt like it was disappearing at the edges, like my shoreline wasevaporating. It was the opposite of pleasure, which had pumped blood through me and warmed my body like the mammal I was. But here, I was just skin, then just muscle, and then merely bone. I felt like my spine was pulling up into my skull, each vertebra click-click-clicking like a car slowly ascending a roller coaster’s first hill. And then I was just a hovering brain, and then a consciousness, floating and fragile as a bubble. And then I was nothing.

The receding bubbles leave strange white striations on my skin, like the tide-scarred sand at the beach’s edge.