Book of Joan (Yuknavitch)

The Book of Joan
by Lidia Yuknavitch, 2017
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062383273


Summary
A vision of our near-extinction and a heroine—a reimagined Joan of Arc—poised to save a world ravaged by war, violence, and greed, and forever change history, in this provocative new novel.

In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home.

The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin.

Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule—galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth.

When de Men and his armies turn Joan into a martyr, the consequences are astonishing. And no one—not the rebels, Jean de Men, or even Joan herself—can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.

A riveting tale of destruction and love found in the direst of places—even at the extreme end of post-human experience—Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan raises questions about what it means to be human, the fluidity of sex and gender, and the role of art as a means for survival (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth— June 18, 1963
• Where—in the state of Oregon, USA
• Education—Ph.D., University of Oregon
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon


Lidia Yuknavitch is an American writer, teacher, and editor based in Oregon. She is the author of the The Book of Joan (2017), The Small Backs of Children (2015), Dora: A Headcase (2012), and a memoir, The Chronology of Water (2011).

Yuknavitch grew up in a family beset with alcoholism (her mother) and physical and sexual abuse (her father). As a teen, she was noticed by a coach, who helped her move towards her dream of becoming a competitive swimmer. The family moved from Oregon to Florida for additional training, and Yuknavitch began abusing alcohol.

She attended a university in Texas on a swimming scholarship and had hopes of qualifying for the United States Olympic swimming team. However, the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow—and her own struggle with drugs and alcohol —put an end to her competitive swimming career. She lost her scholarship and moved back to Oregon where she attended the University of Oregon in Eugene, eventually receiving her Ph.D.

In addition to authoring books, Yuknavitch teaches writing, literature, film, and women's studies and is on the MFA faculty at Eastern Oregon University. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with the filmmaker Andy Mingo, and the two are the editors of Chiasmus Press, a "micro indie press." They have a son. In 1986, Yuknavitch gave birth to a baby girl, who died that same day. On her website, she says, "From her I became a writer."

Writing and awards
♦ I think the space of making art is freedom of being.
♦ I think things that happen to us are true. Writing is a whole other body.
♦ I believe in art the way other people believe in god. (Excerpts from Yuknavitch's website.)

Awards for her memoir, Chronology of Water:
2012 - Readers' Choice, Oregon Book Award
2012 - Finalist, PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award
2012 - Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award
2011 - Best Books of the Year, The Oregonian
1997 - Writers Exchange Award, Poets & Writers

(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website. Retrieved 5/27/2017.)

Book Reviews
Post-apocalyptic fiction too often pays lip service to serious problems like climate change while allowing the reader to walk away unscathed, cocooned in an ironic escapism and convinced that the impending disaster is remote. Not so with Lidia Yuknavitch's brilliant and incendiary new novel, which speaks to the reader in raw, boldly honest terms.… Yet it's also radically new, full of maniacal invention and page-turning momentum…Yuknavitch's prose is passionate and lyrical…Fusing grand themes and the visceral details of daily life…using both realism and fabulism…to break through the white noise of a consumerist culture that tries to commodify post-apocalyptic fiction, to render it safe. But in Yuknavitch's work there's no quick cauterizing of the wound, nothing to allow us to engage in escapism. The result is a rich, heady concoction, rippling with provocative ideas. There is nothing in The Book of Joan that is not a great gift to Yuknavitch's readers, if only they are ready to receive it.
Jeff VanderMeer - New York Times Book Review


Joan [of Arc] offers herself as the perfect figure for Yuknavitch’s new novel. Translated into a dystopian future, this New Joan of Dirt serves as emblem for all the stalwart commoners in whose crushing defeat lies a kind of inviolate spiritual victory.… [The Book of Joan] offers a wealth of pathos, with plenty of resonant excruciations and some disturbing meditations on humanity’s place in creation.… [It] concludes in a bold and satisfying apotheosis like some legend out of The Golden Bough and reaffirms that even amid utter devastation and ruin, hope can still blossom.
Washington Post


The future of life on a barren, ravaged Earth is in the hands of a new Joan of Arc in Yuknavitch’s  muddled novel.… Yuknavitch attempts to draw on nature writing, gender studies, and the theater, but these strains are poorly synthesized and result in a sloppy and confusing text..
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [T]he quintessential postapocalyptic dystopian nightmare.… [A] captivating commentary on the hubris of humanity. An interesting blend of posthuman literary body politics and paranormal ecological transmutation; highly recommended. —Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA
Library Journal


The heart-stopping climax will surprise readers of this dystopian tale that ponders the meanings of gender, sex, love, and life.
Booklist


A retelling of the Joan of Arc story set in a terrifying near future of environmental and political chaos..… [T]he world Yuknatitch creates astounds even in the face of the novel's ambitiously messy sprawl.… [H]arrowing and timely.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers questions for The Book of Joan … then take off on your own:

1. How does Lidia Yuknavitch portray life in her dystopian world? What activities brought the earth to its current crisis? What do you find most frightening in the author's futurist vision?

2.Talk about CIEL, which is filled what is left of humankind. What is the physical state of humans?

3. Discuss Jean de Men: his rise to power and his abuse of it. What are his ultimate goals, what does he hope to achieve? In what way, as the book progresses, does Jean de Men reveal himself even more heinous than he initially seems.

4. Why is Trinculo Forsythe scheduled to be executed? As the founder of CIEL, what has he been charged with?

5. Trinculo's partner, and the book's narrator, is Christine Pizan. Why does she insist on keeping the story of Joan alive? What does she hope to accomplish?

6. Christine burns the story into her skin: "Once she had a voice. Now her voice is in my body." Notice the interesting conjunction in Christine's use of the word "body" and the author's quotation (in the Reading Guide's Author Biography above): "I think things that happen to us are true. Writing is a whole other body." What might she mean by that insight...and what is the symbolic significance of Christine locating the book of Joan onto her body?

7. As Joan's story unfolds, we learn of her "otherworldly combat techniques." Talk about those. How does Joan use science's perspective in service to her aims?

8. Describe the animal world that Joan lives along side of. How do the animals impact Joan's rebellion and even her sense of her own self. Oilbirds, for instant, use echolocation to navigate, which Joan considers an "act of perfect imagination" and which reminds her "of her own warrior child self." What does she mean?

9. Does Lidia Yuknavitch offer any corrective to this dire world? Is their any hope on the horizon, so to speak? What lesson might the author want readers to learn?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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