What do you think?
Rate this book
Margery Kempe
This tale of romantic obsession chronicles two relationships that take place in disparate worlds, separated by 500 years. The story of failed saint Margery Kempe's physical passion for Jesus mirrors the tale of the narrator's adoration of a young man.
192 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1994
68 people are currently reading
2,083 people want to read
About the author
Robert Glück
36Ìýbooks49ÌýfollowersBorn in Cleveland, poet, fiction writer, editor, and New Narrative theorist Robert Glück grew up there and in Los Angeles. He was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Edinburgh, the College of Art in Edinburgh, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a BA. He also studied writing in New York City workshops with poet Ted Berrigan and earned an MA at San Francisco State University.
With Bruce Boone and other writers, Glück co-founded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco in the early 1980s. Glück’s experimental work—typically prose—infuses L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theory with queer, feminist, and class-based discourse while exploring issues of autobiography and self. In his essay “Long Note on New Narrative,� which appeared in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004), Glück stated, “We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.�
Glück’s poetry includes the collection Reader (1989) and, with Bruce Boone, the collaboration La Fontaine (1981). His fiction includes the story collection Denny Smith (2003) and the novels Jack the Modernist (1995) and Margery Kempe (1994). Glück’s work has been selected for numerous anthologies, including The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (1992), Best American Erotica 2005, and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006). He has received a California Arts Council Fellowship and a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant.
Glück has served as director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, codirector of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and editor for Lapis Press and the literary journal Narrativity. He lives in San Francisco.
With Bruce Boone and other writers, Glück co-founded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco in the early 1980s. Glück’s experimental work—typically prose—infuses L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theory with queer, feminist, and class-based discourse while exploring issues of autobiography and self. In his essay “Long Note on New Narrative,� which appeared in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004), Glück stated, “We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.�
Glück’s poetry includes the collection Reader (1989) and, with Bruce Boone, the collaboration La Fontaine (1981). His fiction includes the story collection Denny Smith (2003) and the novels Jack the Modernist (1995) and Margery Kempe (1994). Glück’s work has been selected for numerous anthologies, including The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (1992), Best American Erotica 2005, and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006). He has received a California Arts Council Fellowship and a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant.
Glück has served as director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, codirector of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and editor for Lapis Press and the literary journal Narrativity. He lives in San Francisco.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 110 reviews
February 13, 2019
The late 80s through mid-90s was a fertile time for experimental queer writers. (It was an exciting time for me as well, as a queer Creative Writing student during that period.) From fiery Kathy Acker to quirky Kevin Killian to angry David Wojnarowicz to loving Joan Nestle to ice cold Dennis Cooper, the sheer range of mood and purpose of this group of fresh voices made reading them an exhilerating crap shoot. Would I be enlightened, as I was with Acker, moved and angered, as with Wojnarowicz? Or would I be disgusted, as I was with Cooper? And how would I use what I read in my own writing? The unifying factor across these diverse voices was the idea that our own stories, our personal narratives, could be centralized in works of so-called fiction. Genre boundaries were blurred, as were the boundaries between fiction and fact, love and sex, overt activism and internal exploration. I loved reading (and writing) these sorts of stories - the kinds of stories where the storyteller's own personal story is just as important as the story they are telling.
Unfortunately, Margery Kempe is a huge failure in my book, despite it doing exactly what I described above. I wonder why I even wrote all of that as an intro. I suppose to justify to myself why I still admire these sorts of books, these kinds of experiments with structure, theme, perception, reality.
Anyway, Glück constructs two stories that are supposed to comment on one another: Margery Kempe's love for Jesus and the author's own love for some babe. I started off annoyed and then moved into dismayed and ended with an irritated sort of bored. One can't criticize the writing itself, which is often beautiful and challenging and beautifully challenging - despite an intense focus on extremely explicit, un-romanticized sex. Or perhaps because of it? We all have our muses, and for many writers of that era, sex itself was a muse - especially since queer sex often automatically gave its practitioners a sort of outlaw status.
But here's the thing: this is a book about a woman who loved God, written by an atheist (probably). It's utterly bizarre that the author decided that his obsession with some cute young thing would even equate with Margery Kempe's love of Jesus. Reducing Kempe's intensely spiritual connection to God to the ravings of some demented woman who is hungry for Jesus' dick is not just, well, reductive, it is genuinely diminishing. Diminishing in that particularly easy and ugly way that men diminish women all the time. In the modern parlance, Glück tries to mansplain Margery's complicated feelings as pure lust - albeit lust of a higher form, I guess. Lust to the/a higher power? LOL? But Margery Kempe - author of the first recorded autobiography and obviously a real person - was defined by her faith and her spirituality. She was not defined by her lusts! Love of the physical body is not the same as a spiritual connection, and sorry to anyone who still suffers under that delusion. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I'm saying that one is an apple and the other is an orange and that the author is a nitwit for pretending that they are the same fruit. Sorry, author.
I'd like to say that at least the "personal narrative" portions of the book were interesting, but I can't. They are real at least, or were once real for the author. Sadly, the obsessive longings of an older gent for a younger lad are completely uninteresting to me. The genders could have been switched out and I would have been equally bored.
Unfortunately, Margery Kempe is a huge failure in my book, despite it doing exactly what I described above. I wonder why I even wrote all of that as an intro. I suppose to justify to myself why I still admire these sorts of books, these kinds of experiments with structure, theme, perception, reality.
Anyway, Glück constructs two stories that are supposed to comment on one another: Margery Kempe's love for Jesus and the author's own love for some babe. I started off annoyed and then moved into dismayed and ended with an irritated sort of bored. One can't criticize the writing itself, which is often beautiful and challenging and beautifully challenging - despite an intense focus on extremely explicit, un-romanticized sex. Or perhaps because of it? We all have our muses, and for many writers of that era, sex itself was a muse - especially since queer sex often automatically gave its practitioners a sort of outlaw status.
But here's the thing: this is a book about a woman who loved God, written by an atheist (probably). It's utterly bizarre that the author decided that his obsession with some cute young thing would even equate with Margery Kempe's love of Jesus. Reducing Kempe's intensely spiritual connection to God to the ravings of some demented woman who is hungry for Jesus' dick is not just, well, reductive, it is genuinely diminishing. Diminishing in that particularly easy and ugly way that men diminish women all the time. In the modern parlance, Glück tries to mansplain Margery's complicated feelings as pure lust - albeit lust of a higher form, I guess. Lust to the/a higher power? LOL? But Margery Kempe - author of the first recorded autobiography and obviously a real person - was defined by her faith and her spirituality. She was not defined by her lusts! Love of the physical body is not the same as a spiritual connection, and sorry to anyone who still suffers under that delusion. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I'm saying that one is an apple and the other is an orange and that the author is a nitwit for pretending that they are the same fruit. Sorry, author.
I'd like to say that at least the "personal narrative" portions of the book were interesting, but I can't. They are real at least, or were once real for the author. Sadly, the obsessive longings of an older gent for a younger lad are completely uninteresting to me. The genders could have been switched out and I would have been equally bored.
March 19, 2020
Well, now I know I will not have to wait until November or December to determine what was the worst book I read this year. I write that even though I am not offended by blasphemy and may even engage in it from time to time. Nor does graphic description of sex get me overheated with disgust. Yet neither the blasphemy nor the sex redeemed this book. A warning: If either of those two things offend you, then not only should you not read this book; you shouldn't read this review either.
There are two narratives intertwined in this novel. One is the Jesus fantasy of the 15th century title character, apparently a real enough, if deluded, person. The other is the author's homosexual yearning for L. The stories are meant to conjoin, at least that's what the author explains in the telling. Or, My book depends on the tension between maintaining an impersonation and breaking it. Or, In this novel every sentence is a discrete image of promise. A car door slams; I think it must be L. Margery is traveling. Got it?
Mostly though, I had the sense that the author merely wanted to offend, notwithstanding what I believe were ostensible artistic impulses. I am not easily offended, but there's George Bataille's and the picture Piss Christ by Andres Serrano (Google it up if you need to), and there's this:
Jesus kisses her too quickly, jamming his tongue down her throat; he says, "I'm horny."
Again, it's not the blasphemy that offends me, nor the sex (Jesus does the whole playbook), it's the shitty writing. Like:
The thick drunken histamine ache of needing to shit; L. can't find a toilet in time; his face convulses; it makes me feel awe; Jesus doesn't have a conscience. Like L., whatever he does is normal.
Here's a simile:
Her cunt dripped like the shinbone of a saint that weeps in continuous relation to God.
There's more, much more, and now you know where to find it if that's your thing.
There are two narratives intertwined in this novel. One is the Jesus fantasy of the 15th century title character, apparently a real enough, if deluded, person. The other is the author's homosexual yearning for L. The stories are meant to conjoin, at least that's what the author explains in the telling. Or, My book depends on the tension between maintaining an impersonation and breaking it. Or, In this novel every sentence is a discrete image of promise. A car door slams; I think it must be L. Margery is traveling. Got it?
Mostly though, I had the sense that the author merely wanted to offend, notwithstanding what I believe were ostensible artistic impulses. I am not easily offended, but there's George Bataille's and the picture Piss Christ by Andres Serrano (Google it up if you need to), and there's this:
Jesus kisses her too quickly, jamming his tongue down her throat; he says, "I'm horny."
Again, it's not the blasphemy that offends me, nor the sex (Jesus does the whole playbook), it's the shitty writing. Like:
The thick drunken histamine ache of needing to shit; L. can't find a toilet in time; his face convulses; it makes me feel awe; Jesus doesn't have a conscience. Like L., whatever he does is normal.
Here's a simile:
Her cunt dripped like the shinbone of a saint that weeps in continuous relation to God.
There's more, much more, and now you know where to find it if that's your thing.
Read
May 17, 2020absolutely loved this book. absolutely could not sell it to anyone who is not a complete freak. contender for top 3 of 2020. margery kempe was a real woman--a fanatic and visionary who is widely believed to have written the first autobiography. gluck contrasts his obsession and grief over a failed relationship in his life with margery's grief at feeling forsaken by jesus and uses the form of autobiography to reflect the stories in a way that is, frankly, cool. sexuality is a big theme here and its depiction is frequent and explict. so is plague/aids, another clear parallel. gorgeous, highly experimental book written by someone who is primarily a poet, and it shows. bonus appearance by kathy acker playing herself. bigtime recommend for fans of acker and/or wittgenstein's mistress.
February 6, 2025
Bizarre, often nonsensical. Blasphemous and freaky. Couldn't explain the plot of this even if I had a gun to my head. The author appears to be borderline obsessed with nipples - I found this troubling.
I am definitely the target audience of this book (and that says something terrible about me).
I am definitely the target audience of this book (and that says something terrible about me).
April 19, 2020
There are some books that, I must frankly state, leave me in a state of rank distaste as to the contents of it. This book was one of those obviously meant in poor taste. Well, I do not really see the point of it all. To put it bluntly graphic sex interspersed with religious devotion is not my cup of tea. I mean to say I can allow for sex in fiction quite generously and I read a lot of erotic fiction too. But semblances of the cunt and the phallus in such graphic detail throughout almost seventy percent of the pages of this book is grossly malapropos. True, I can allow for the religious devotion of a fifteenth century Christian saint for Jesus in more sensual terms but the explicit physicality of it all is carried on a bit too far to my taste. This, indeed, comes off as a big disappointment to me after having waited with eager anticipation for one of the first releases from NYRB in 2020 (and considering the fact that the last few releases had been exceptional).
December 17, 2022
EXULT, EXASPERATE, ABANDON, AMAZE
Margery Kempe is a taut, richly perceptive fable of mortality and unrequited love that takes loving a god as it’s metaphor and tangles it hopelessly with a queer modern day longing.
We start with the story of Margery Kempe, a woman living in the 15th century who had visions of Jesus Christ and wrote the first autobiography in the English language. In Robert Glück’s retelling, she has a love affair with Jesus who is forever “turning his face away�. In between we’re given snapshots of a doomed relationship in the 90s, where an older writer “going nowhere� is slowly estranged by his rich, young and flighty lover, L.
Quickly the two narrative voices begin to merge. The writer, Bob, jumps in and out of Margery’s being; his lover is at times L., at others Jesus, but always, we get the sense, it is transcendence he longs for and cannot make his—an escape from his earth-bound and disease-prone skin. Glück examines unrequited love from every angle. Through intensely tidy prose, he opens up the experience with a rigour reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s A Lovers Dialogue and turns it into something else entirely. What unfolds is as much about the terrible pain of loving someone who will never love you back as it is about the indifference of time (which is itself another kind of unrequited love).
The brilliance of this novel is its layers and symmetries. Metaphors are metaphors for metaphors—Jesus (as a god) is a metaphor for L. (as a member of the haughty rich and beautiful) and both are metaphors for life, which turns its back on us all. Just as Bob dives into the story of middle-aged Margery (“middle-aged� in both senses), Margery jumps into the story of Christ, has visions of herself at his birth and death. The time-travelling of these characters is representative of their desires, their lust for eternal life, and so too is their autobiographical writing and their limitless appetite for the body/ies of their beloved/s. Their beloveds, Jesus and L., are figures of motion, escape and transcendence: Jesus is always vanishing, slipping back up to Heaven; with his deep pockets, L. boards planes like one might hop on a bus—he even lives in a high-rise building, which Bob often stares up at from his place on the motionless ground. Margery and Bob may make visits to their lovers� transcendent worlds—they may even hope to claim their transcendent lovers, and in doing so to triumph over death—but before long both realise that they are therefore doomed to love from afar.
This novel will not be for everyone. The religious will likely find it blasphemous in its erotic portrayal of Jesus; the agnostic may detest the language of religion. As an atheist who grew up in the church, certainly I feel like I’m the perfect audience for this weird, porny, and experimental tale, whose blasphemy satiates my desire to rebel against my Christian roots. But while this novel certainly includes religion and faith, it is about neither. Jesus is only a symbol. As Glück (who is both author and, we presume, the unloved Bob of the narrative) says, “Jesus and Margery act out my love. Is that a problem?�
For lovers of Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson and everything strange and freaky, here is a brilliant and unconventional novel you won’t soon forget.
Margery Kempe is a taut, richly perceptive fable of mortality and unrequited love that takes loving a god as it’s metaphor and tangles it hopelessly with a queer modern day longing.
We start with the story of Margery Kempe, a woman living in the 15th century who had visions of Jesus Christ and wrote the first autobiography in the English language. In Robert Glück’s retelling, she has a love affair with Jesus who is forever “turning his face away�. In between we’re given snapshots of a doomed relationship in the 90s, where an older writer “going nowhere� is slowly estranged by his rich, young and flighty lover, L.
Quickly the two narrative voices begin to merge. The writer, Bob, jumps in and out of Margery’s being; his lover is at times L., at others Jesus, but always, we get the sense, it is transcendence he longs for and cannot make his—an escape from his earth-bound and disease-prone skin. Glück examines unrequited love from every angle. Through intensely tidy prose, he opens up the experience with a rigour reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s A Lovers Dialogue and turns it into something else entirely. What unfolds is as much about the terrible pain of loving someone who will never love you back as it is about the indifference of time (which is itself another kind of unrequited love).
The brilliance of this novel is its layers and symmetries. Metaphors are metaphors for metaphors—Jesus (as a god) is a metaphor for L. (as a member of the haughty rich and beautiful) and both are metaphors for life, which turns its back on us all. Just as Bob dives into the story of middle-aged Margery (“middle-aged� in both senses), Margery jumps into the story of Christ, has visions of herself at his birth and death. The time-travelling of these characters is representative of their desires, their lust for eternal life, and so too is their autobiographical writing and their limitless appetite for the body/ies of their beloved/s. Their beloveds, Jesus and L., are figures of motion, escape and transcendence: Jesus is always vanishing, slipping back up to Heaven; with his deep pockets, L. boards planes like one might hop on a bus—he even lives in a high-rise building, which Bob often stares up at from his place on the motionless ground. Margery and Bob may make visits to their lovers� transcendent worlds—they may even hope to claim their transcendent lovers, and in doing so to triumph over death—but before long both realise that they are therefore doomed to love from afar.
This novel will not be for everyone. The religious will likely find it blasphemous in its erotic portrayal of Jesus; the agnostic may detest the language of religion. As an atheist who grew up in the church, certainly I feel like I’m the perfect audience for this weird, porny, and experimental tale, whose blasphemy satiates my desire to rebel against my Christian roots. But while this novel certainly includes religion and faith, it is about neither. Jesus is only a symbol. As Glück (who is both author and, we presume, the unloved Bob of the narrative) says, “Jesus and Margery act out my love. Is that a problem?�
For lovers of Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson and everything strange and freaky, here is a brilliant and unconventional novel you won’t soon forget.
March 24, 2022
"In Gluck's world, the crumbling of experience is part of the deal, including the experience of reading. In the interview in EOAGH, he said, 'The best reading is an uncertain reading... We are educated to think that we should be able to know the meaning of a piece of writing, but what if the intention of the writing is to throw us into confusion, to induce a state of wonder, and unravel the basic tenets of our experience?'" (xiiii).
"As though completing one gesture, Margery hurried to bed, plowed through the night, and jumped up the next morning. When she found the roofer her face sank in lust, her mouth an O. She asked him directly to have sex. 'I'd rather be chopped up for stew-meat in a pot,' he drawled with lazy malice. A wave of nausea warped the air around her. With a nod Margery understood that failure was intrinsic, success merely an exception" (9).
"Margery was an individual in a recognizable nightmare: the twentieth century will also be called a hundred years war" (31).
"He was not satisfying to quarrel with since he didn't mind being wrong" (35).
"Greed for more life spoils the life in front of me" (40).
"Yet lying in bed wasn't boring. Dying became an activity full of lively interest. Just observing her fragility admitted endless variations. As she gained strength she was reborn to appetite and movement" (128).
"At last my position is not so fixed. I feel the anguish of rejecting him, but I'm not sure I do--a quandary of wanting and not wanting" (162).
"What is an historical novel? A time machine that seems to restore another era and give us access to its citizens. That is, we get to know Alexander the Great. There's a lie involved, but is that lie different from the lie fiction generally tells?" (165).
"For me, the world of fact is made up of fiction, from 'ideological state apparatuses,' to the sale of lifestyle, to the all-and-nothing of language itself. And, of course, the world of fiction is a fact" (167).
"The actual forms we take are a kind of extremity we are driven to in a quest for love. We exist to desire and be desired. Or more roundly, we make ourselves 'different' and 'same' in order to be loved (if only by the world). And behind this is the mystery of form, how weird and even unendurable it is to be one thing (race, sexuality, gender) rather than another" (169).
"But maybe that impurity, which is an expression of a problem rather than a way of containing or explaining it, is the way I handle the ever-crossing circuits of narration" (169).
"As though completing one gesture, Margery hurried to bed, plowed through the night, and jumped up the next morning. When she found the roofer her face sank in lust, her mouth an O. She asked him directly to have sex. 'I'd rather be chopped up for stew-meat in a pot,' he drawled with lazy malice. A wave of nausea warped the air around her. With a nod Margery understood that failure was intrinsic, success merely an exception" (9).
"Margery was an individual in a recognizable nightmare: the twentieth century will also be called a hundred years war" (31).
"He was not satisfying to quarrel with since he didn't mind being wrong" (35).
"Greed for more life spoils the life in front of me" (40).
"Yet lying in bed wasn't boring. Dying became an activity full of lively interest. Just observing her fragility admitted endless variations. As she gained strength she was reborn to appetite and movement" (128).
"At last my position is not so fixed. I feel the anguish of rejecting him, but I'm not sure I do--a quandary of wanting and not wanting" (162).
"What is an historical novel? A time machine that seems to restore another era and give us access to its citizens. That is, we get to know Alexander the Great. There's a lie involved, but is that lie different from the lie fiction generally tells?" (165).
"For me, the world of fact is made up of fiction, from 'ideological state apparatuses,' to the sale of lifestyle, to the all-and-nothing of language itself. And, of course, the world of fiction is a fact" (167).
"The actual forms we take are a kind of extremity we are driven to in a quest for love. We exist to desire and be desired. Or more roundly, we make ourselves 'different' and 'same' in order to be loved (if only by the world). And behind this is the mystery of form, how weird and even unendurable it is to be one thing (race, sexuality, gender) rather than another" (169).
"But maybe that impurity, which is an expression of a problem rather than a way of containing or explaining it, is the way I handle the ever-crossing circuits of narration" (169).
January 30, 2024
Judging by the first page of GR reviews, people are really put off by the premise of the book (Margery Kempe’s erotic obsession with Jesus in the 14th century, paralleled by the contemporary narrator’s erotic obsession with some guy from SF). Luckily, I’m not the kind of person who has hang-ups about this kind of thing, though I can’t say that I enjoyed reading it. It’s definitely a weird book, and gets to be a little much at times. But I respect it for what it is.
November 24, 2024
Why does this feel like another violation inflicted on Margery Kempe? Just no!
March 21, 2020
THE WEIRD TRAIL of circumstance, installment #716. I read a great interview with Glück in Believer magazine about six or seven years ago (conducted by Miranda Mellis, whose The Spokes I admire very much), and I immediately went online looking for copies of his books, purchasing three: Jack the Modernist, Elements of a Coffee Service, and this one, which I picked up for just a dollar.
Life being what it is, I did not read even one of them.
Then, last month, I saw an ad for what I took to be the NYRB Classic edition of The Book of Margery Kempe, but which on closer examination turned out to be their new edition of Glück's novel. I thought...don't I own that? After a short search, I found it. Now is the time to read it, the cosmos seemed to be telling me.
Having once upon a time read The Book of Margery Kempe--perhaps the first autobiography in English, the story of a woman who gave up a thriving business and her marriage to follow what seemed to her a vocation of sainthood--I felt more or less prepared.
Still, the book was quite a curveball. Glück goes over the same ground as Kempe's own autobiography--her trying to explain to her husband what is going on, the difficult meetings with church authorities, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the many people who think she is insane--but he gives her relationship to Jesus a startling twist, making it graphically erotic: "Jesus the athlete moved with her easily. Her aroused her with his long burrowing tongue. He pulled hair aside and drew her clit into his mouth." That sort of thing.
But who said mystical experience is necessarily decorous and well-behaved? Might it not just as likely be shocking, disturbing, transgressive, even a little gross? As Teresa of Avila said in The Interior Castle, there will be things going on between you and Jesus that only you and Jesus know about.
Also unexpected, audacious, and ultimately richly rewarding is Glück's decision to braid Margery's story with a recounting of one of his own affairs, with a man here called L. Glück gets methodologically explicit about midpoint in the book: "This novel records my breakdown; conventional narrative is preserved but the interest lies elsewhere. Like L., Jesus must be real but must also represent a crisis" (p. 78 in my edition, from High Risk Books).
Makes sense, no? The beloved is like a god; any contact with him is fulfilling as nothing else is. When he smiles, the universe is redeemed. But his attention is divided, somehow. He sometimes abruptly withdraws. He gets to set all the terms. He has fabulous outfits. We like to think God is not as flakey and unpredictable as a human beloved, but honestly, how many has he left in the lurch?
Fascinating as all that is, what really kept me going was the sheer pleasure of Glück's sentences.
Arundel invited Margery to sit in his garden. He had chalky skin and a red nose, the patrician bearing and tight gray ringlets of a schoolmarm.
A bee backed out of a lily trumpet. A turtle walked resolutely across the path, shifting attitudes of attention. Margery started small. She asked Arundel for permission to receive communion every Sunday--unusual at that time but not exceptional. He consented with a nod. His gray eyes drifted, diluted in thick lenses. Thus established, Margery asked him for authority to wear white clothes--to confirm her affair with Jesus. Her voice was a clear bell that broke at the highs with a scratch of emphasis. He approved.
My favorite touch: the turtle.
Life being what it is, I did not read even one of them.
Then, last month, I saw an ad for what I took to be the NYRB Classic edition of The Book of Margery Kempe, but which on closer examination turned out to be their new edition of Glück's novel. I thought...don't I own that? After a short search, I found it. Now is the time to read it, the cosmos seemed to be telling me.
Having once upon a time read The Book of Margery Kempe--perhaps the first autobiography in English, the story of a woman who gave up a thriving business and her marriage to follow what seemed to her a vocation of sainthood--I felt more or less prepared.
Still, the book was quite a curveball. Glück goes over the same ground as Kempe's own autobiography--her trying to explain to her husband what is going on, the difficult meetings with church authorities, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the many people who think she is insane--but he gives her relationship to Jesus a startling twist, making it graphically erotic: "Jesus the athlete moved with her easily. Her aroused her with his long burrowing tongue. He pulled hair aside and drew her clit into his mouth." That sort of thing.
But who said mystical experience is necessarily decorous and well-behaved? Might it not just as likely be shocking, disturbing, transgressive, even a little gross? As Teresa of Avila said in The Interior Castle, there will be things going on between you and Jesus that only you and Jesus know about.
Also unexpected, audacious, and ultimately richly rewarding is Glück's decision to braid Margery's story with a recounting of one of his own affairs, with a man here called L. Glück gets methodologically explicit about midpoint in the book: "This novel records my breakdown; conventional narrative is preserved but the interest lies elsewhere. Like L., Jesus must be real but must also represent a crisis" (p. 78 in my edition, from High Risk Books).
Makes sense, no? The beloved is like a god; any contact with him is fulfilling as nothing else is. When he smiles, the universe is redeemed. But his attention is divided, somehow. He sometimes abruptly withdraws. He gets to set all the terms. He has fabulous outfits. We like to think God is not as flakey and unpredictable as a human beloved, but honestly, how many has he left in the lurch?
Fascinating as all that is, what really kept me going was the sheer pleasure of Glück's sentences.
Arundel invited Margery to sit in his garden. He had chalky skin and a red nose, the patrician bearing and tight gray ringlets of a schoolmarm.
A bee backed out of a lily trumpet. A turtle walked resolutely across the path, shifting attitudes of attention. Margery started small. She asked Arundel for permission to receive communion every Sunday--unusual at that time but not exceptional. He consented with a nod. His gray eyes drifted, diluted in thick lenses. Thus established, Margery asked him for authority to wear white clothes--to confirm her affair with Jesus. Her voice was a clear bell that broke at the highs with a scratch of emphasis. He approved.
My favorite touch: the turtle.
February 21, 2021
This is a book I picked up on a recommendation without knowing what it would be about. So I was surprised! A married mother of the 15th century embarks on a sexual obsession with Jesus, while her parallel, a gay man of the 20th century, likewise craves and lusts after a younger man, called L. Both Jesus and L. are beautiful, aloof objects of worship and fervent longing. They form the centerpiece of two separate "middle-aged" crises.
Margery Kempe is a real figure, a woman who had visions and apparently thought herself in a personal relationship with Jesus. She is said to have written the first autobiography in English. Of course she was thought both crazy and possessed, and by some also holy. I doubt her autobiography involves sex with Jesus, but I understand no one made her a saint, the fate of a number of Christians who in our time would be more likely to be classified as insane.
The narrator of the book, Bob, is in love with beauty and the unobtainable in the form of the younger L. Bob and Margery's stories are meant to amplify each other, though Bob's narrative strand takes up much less of the book.
The book is not for everyone, especially the pious or those who shy away from descriptions of bodily functions. But I found the writing well crafted -- carnal and transcendental simultaneously. The intertwined stories deal with love, rejection, obsession and abandonment. There’s a lot of physical life � pain, illness, sex, dirt, grime, shit, piss, tears, etc. Another reason I like it in addition to the writing and learning about Margery Kempe is that it is different than anything I've read before.
One of my favorite sentences: "Daylight was crisp and weak, celery green."
Margery Kempe is a real figure, a woman who had visions and apparently thought herself in a personal relationship with Jesus. She is said to have written the first autobiography in English. Of course she was thought both crazy and possessed, and by some also holy. I doubt her autobiography involves sex with Jesus, but I understand no one made her a saint, the fate of a number of Christians who in our time would be more likely to be classified as insane.
The narrator of the book, Bob, is in love with beauty and the unobtainable in the form of the younger L. Bob and Margery's stories are meant to amplify each other, though Bob's narrative strand takes up much less of the book.
The book is not for everyone, especially the pious or those who shy away from descriptions of bodily functions. But I found the writing well crafted -- carnal and transcendental simultaneously. The intertwined stories deal with love, rejection, obsession and abandonment. There’s a lot of physical life � pain, illness, sex, dirt, grime, shit, piss, tears, etc. Another reason I like it in addition to the writing and learning about Margery Kempe is that it is different than anything I've read before.
One of my favorite sentences: "Daylight was crisp and weak, celery green."
August 27, 2023
A strange, blasphemous and beautiful little book. Glück weaves together the stories of Margery Kempe, a medieval mystic who wrote probably the first autobiography in the English language, and his own affair/obsession with a younger man referred to only as L. In the process he grapples with the agony and humiliation of love, the decline of society, and failure as a painful yet inevitable feature of life, queer and otherwise.
This book is not for the faint of heart - it depicts sex unrelentingly and unromantically, including with Jesus, and is peppered with bodily details that the author collected from his friends and assigned to characters in Margery's world. But for those not put off by these explicit and potentially offensive features, Margery Kempe makes for a reflective, entertaining and even erotic read.
This book is not for the faint of heart - it depicts sex unrelentingly and unromantically, including with Jesus, and is peppered with bodily details that the author collected from his friends and assigned to characters in Margery's world. But for those not put off by these explicit and potentially offensive features, Margery Kempe makes for a reflective, entertaining and even erotic read.
Read
March 31, 2020Contrasting tales of a medieval saint's adoration of Christ with the author's own obsessive affection for a younger man. Is this a clever idea or is kinda on the nose? Hard to say. It's also the kind of book where some of the lines are really fabulous and some of them are just total duds. But it's quick and it's weird and I thought it was kind of funny and ultimately this was firmly in the like column.
September 22, 2023
My favourite novel ever! For personal reasons ... to whoever found my heavily underlined copy on the tram when I was 20 pages away from finishing, you have a small piece of my soul. Sort of fitting to be abandoned and made to wait by this book, though.
November 10, 2023
Formally ambitious, depraved, artful, challenging, elegiac. I can confidentially say I’ve never read a book like this one before. I certainly missed some of the connections, but I hope to revisit this novel again someday. 4/5
May 20, 2020
wow. even the illustrious NYRB makes mistakes. an absolutely bizarre mess masquerading as literature. wtf did I just read.
May 1, 2024
Goes beyond hard.
Corporeal and chaotic. Like oh my god give me soft boy horny Jesus forever!!!
Favorite read of 2024 so far. Easily
Corporeal and chaotic. Like oh my god give me soft boy horny Jesus forever!!!
Favorite read of 2024 so far. Easily
February 14, 2025
Nuts book, obviously up my street, but maybe I’m not enough of a self destructive yearner for this to be fully mine - my problem is always been I’ve wanted to be the Beloved and not enter into the ecstatic subspace of the Lover.
In total, while the conceit, poetry, and physicality of this book are impressive to feel and read (My lover is Jesus and I kneel at my gorgeous and aloof lovers feet and while I’m there ask for a footjob, just like 15th century saint and mad woman and overall icon TBH Margery Kempe knelt at Jesus’s feet - complete with outrageous sex scenes !), I felt a bit stuck in its repetition- the repetition and obsession, I’m sure that Glück would be the first to point out, of the masturbator and zealot. It was hard to keep reading once I understood what it was about. So I’m impressed but not personally moved.
Not 1000% for me but some of y’all would go crazy for this . Plus there are literally so so so many stand out lines and images �. Sacred cunts and clenching side wounds � contemplations on modernism and the Word� comparing crucifixion to the AIDS epidemic� the fact that Glück asked 40 of his friends to contribute musings on their own bodies so it would be realistic and yet impersonal�
In total, while the conceit, poetry, and physicality of this book are impressive to feel and read (My lover is Jesus and I kneel at my gorgeous and aloof lovers feet and while I’m there ask for a footjob, just like 15th century saint and mad woman and overall icon TBH Margery Kempe knelt at Jesus’s feet - complete with outrageous sex scenes !), I felt a bit stuck in its repetition- the repetition and obsession, I’m sure that Glück would be the first to point out, of the masturbator and zealot. It was hard to keep reading once I understood what it was about. So I’m impressed but not personally moved.
Not 1000% for me but some of y’all would go crazy for this . Plus there are literally so so so many stand out lines and images �. Sacred cunts and clenching side wounds � contemplations on modernism and the Word� comparing crucifixion to the AIDS epidemic� the fact that Glück asked 40 of his friends to contribute musings on their own bodies so it would be realistic and yet impersonal�
October 31, 2022
Engaging and intriguing at first, but ultimately repetitious and boring. The story of the author’s love for L. Is an unnecessary intrusion on the tale of Margery Kempe, and Gluck seems to have forced this short novel to conform to his own New Narrative genre. By 1994, the year Gluck’s Margery Kempe was published, wasn’t it already a given that all fiction is somehow autobiographical without the necessity of being so literal about it?
These aren’t really parallel tales, and the story of Bob and L. is barely fleshed out. We “get it� but the connection seems tenuous, too self-consciously post-modern, sophomoric and academic. Bob’s obsession with L. does nothing to illuminate for the modern reader the passion of a 15th C. mystic, nor does Margery Kempe’s story tell me anything about late 20th C. gay “Bob.�
There is some beautiful and sensual prose here though it is sometimes unintelligible, especially when it is bogged down with theory.
In many ways, though, Gluck has done a fine job of making the late medieval world comprehensible. He has written an historical novel in spite of his denials. It is helpful to have some familiarity with Medieval and Late Gothic Catholic art to understand how Margery Kempe imagined Christ, often dressed in the fashion of her own time. And Gluck’s novel is rich and colorful and visceral like a period painting, and very often humorous like those same paintings.
Any reader who is at all familiar with the ecstasies of Catholic saints will not be too surprised by Kempe’s longing for Christ. But Margerie’s obsession makes for tedious reading after awhile. Maybe that is Gluck’s point. Obsessive and jealous passions are repetitive and boring, and I imagine that Robert Gluck’s friends found him pretty boring when he was in the throes of his obsession with “L.�
Margerie’s sexual longing for Jesus is rendered so explicitly and repetitively that I wondered if Gluck wasn’t getting an adolescent-like thrill just trying to be shocking and sacrilegious and thinking he was breaking new intellectual ground.
Gluck’s Margery used religion as a way out of a secure but dull marriage. Her endless pilgrimages got her on the road and out of town and she got to meet interesting people on the way. She gave up bourgeois security for a life of extremes. If she sometimes nearly starved, she was also, at other times, wined and dined as a celebrity mystic.
Gluck’s Margery was a public nuisance, and although ecclesiastics more than once exonerated her of any heresy, the Catholic Church has never honored Kempe with beatification or sainthood. The Anglicans now commemorate her in their calendar, but for what reason, exactly, I am not sure.
These aren’t really parallel tales, and the story of Bob and L. is barely fleshed out. We “get it� but the connection seems tenuous, too self-consciously post-modern, sophomoric and academic. Bob’s obsession with L. does nothing to illuminate for the modern reader the passion of a 15th C. mystic, nor does Margery Kempe’s story tell me anything about late 20th C. gay “Bob.�
There is some beautiful and sensual prose here though it is sometimes unintelligible, especially when it is bogged down with theory.
In many ways, though, Gluck has done a fine job of making the late medieval world comprehensible. He has written an historical novel in spite of his denials. It is helpful to have some familiarity with Medieval and Late Gothic Catholic art to understand how Margery Kempe imagined Christ, often dressed in the fashion of her own time. And Gluck’s novel is rich and colorful and visceral like a period painting, and very often humorous like those same paintings.
Any reader who is at all familiar with the ecstasies of Catholic saints will not be too surprised by Kempe’s longing for Christ. But Margerie’s obsession makes for tedious reading after awhile. Maybe that is Gluck’s point. Obsessive and jealous passions are repetitive and boring, and I imagine that Robert Gluck’s friends found him pretty boring when he was in the throes of his obsession with “L.�
Margerie’s sexual longing for Jesus is rendered so explicitly and repetitively that I wondered if Gluck wasn’t getting an adolescent-like thrill just trying to be shocking and sacrilegious and thinking he was breaking new intellectual ground.
Gluck’s Margery used religion as a way out of a secure but dull marriage. Her endless pilgrimages got her on the road and out of town and she got to meet interesting people on the way. She gave up bourgeois security for a life of extremes. If she sometimes nearly starved, she was also, at other times, wined and dined as a celebrity mystic.
Gluck’s Margery was a public nuisance, and although ecclesiastics more than once exonerated her of any heresy, the Catholic Church has never honored Kempe with beatification or sainthood. The Anglicans now commemorate her in their calendar, but for what reason, exactly, I am not sure.
Read
March 23, 2024The third book in Enzo and Morgan's batshit bookclub. Not initially as batshit as I would have thought, especially considering the sex scenes between Jesus and Margery. I think this is because I didn't grow up religious and a large part of my understanding of Jesus, and by extension Christianity, is shaped by having studied Art History. I didn't have the years of nonstop immersion and while the images showed us he was holy, something was lost in translation so to speak.
I will say as the book progressed it did become more extreme. The descriptions of the body were gruesome at points. Towards the end of the book Margery finds of house of lepers and kisses one of the women's ulcers? And drinks from the water used to clean the wound (I am disgusted just writing this). Once Margery sees Jesus dying, it also has gruesome descriptions of the human body and his wounds.
I did enjoy Gluck's writing. Truly some beautiful descriptions and the way he wrote about his own relationship with L was great. As Gluck states in a later afterword, Margery and the narrator merge together and her pain of loosing Jesus is his pain of loosing L. Gluck is a very smart writer and sometimes I really have to take my time in understanding it but I didn't really have that this time. Maybe the historical setting helped.
I will say as the book progressed it did become more extreme. The descriptions of the body were gruesome at points. Towards the end of the book Margery finds of house of lepers and kisses one of the women's ulcers? And drinks from the water used to clean the wound (I am disgusted just writing this). Once Margery sees Jesus dying, it also has gruesome descriptions of the human body and his wounds.
I did enjoy Gluck's writing. Truly some beautiful descriptions and the way he wrote about his own relationship with L was great. As Gluck states in a later afterword, Margery and the narrator merge together and her pain of loosing Jesus is his pain of loosing L. Gluck is a very smart writer and sometimes I really have to take my time in understanding it but I didn't really have that this time. Maybe the historical setting helped.
December 16, 2007
I found this in a used bookstore last week, and I was unfamiliar with Robert Gluck but intrigued by the story of , whose autobiography was required reading in one of my college history courses. This book's premise sounded interesting--Margery Kempe's obsessive relationship with Jesus paired with Gluck's obsessive relationship, five centuries later, with a man he refers to as "L."--but I didn't expect to respond quite so strongly to it, or to come away so struck by Gluck's words. The ecstatic moments are transcendent yet always undercut by the trauma of rejection, abandonment, and abasement, and it's all conveyed in really precise, unforgiving language. It's a very powerful and startling work. (Plus, I don't think it's necessary to have more than a passing acquaintance with Margery K. in order to be moved by it.)
October 4, 2024
Bob is down bad!
This book is so interesting�
Robert Glück (Bob) is obsessed with an emotionally unavailable younger man, L. He uses Margery Kempe’s erotic obsession with Jesus (a real woman who lived in the 1400s) as a mirror for his own experience of all-consuming lust and grief for his eventual abandonment and loneliness.
I looooved the language so much that I’m considering re-reading this just to sit with Glück’s stunning prose again. Example: “Margery told stories to Thomas and to the yeomen who had arrested her: her faith in language exceeded theirs but the spectacle of that belief gave them the consolation of believing their own lives had value.�
However, I couldn’t really get into the book because I felt Margery’s actions and movements lacked any clear cause and effect. I had to take most of the plot points at face value which isn’t super fun for the reader.
This book is so interesting�
Robert Glück (Bob) is obsessed with an emotionally unavailable younger man, L. He uses Margery Kempe’s erotic obsession with Jesus (a real woman who lived in the 1400s) as a mirror for his own experience of all-consuming lust and grief for his eventual abandonment and loneliness.
I looooved the language so much that I’m considering re-reading this just to sit with Glück’s stunning prose again. Example: “Margery told stories to Thomas and to the yeomen who had arrested her: her faith in language exceeded theirs but the spectacle of that belief gave them the consolation of believing their own lives had value.�
However, I couldn’t really get into the book because I felt Margery’s actions and movements lacked any clear cause and effect. I had to take most of the plot points at face value which isn’t super fun for the reader.
September 23, 2020
"A failed saint turns to autobiography. Love amazes me; I exult in my luck, in our sex; L. exasperates me; I am exasperating; I am abandoned." Margery Kempe is horny for God and Robert Glück turns the object of his sexual obsession into a God of his own. Across centuries they yearn for their capricious lovers, a longing to attain the transformative power of love - a power that no plague can stop. Glück is the New Narrative daddy for a reason.
December 20, 2012
This is my favorite Gluck book, because it does so much not only with queer theory but medieval somatics, so it's basically like a stuffed crust pizza for my academic interests. His reading of Kempe is astonishing, earthy and numinous at once, I just love it so much. When Foucault waxes cuckoo over Gluck, I hope its this book he's talking about.
August 9, 2020
Jesus discarded her dumb love and abandoned her. From there, Margery might have advanced to real faith - a vocation begun in tears, cracked open as she was, left for dead as she was. I don't know what that faith would be. Margery did not accept this emptiness; instead, she dilated on the point of rejection.
*
March 29, 2023
The prose is rich and dense, but it could’ve used more restraint. The aphoristic style was effective, but eventually the eroticism was tired and tedious, and the characters seemed like annoying polyamorous poets. Interesting to imagine Jesus� libido though.
February 17, 2022
i love this so much
October 20, 2023
“Margery lived during the Hundred Years War, the collapse of feudal systems, and the plague. Towns had walls; at night the gates shut. At the beginning of modernity the world and otherworld lay in shambles. Margery was an individual in a recognizable nightmare: the twentieth century will also be called a hundred years war. A simpler individual, she went by her first name except once before a high court. The same individual who now disintegrates. Inner life is a kind of greed, desire a form of personal profit. She pushes out the flat pictorial plane into personality and suspense, illusion of escape, while I go back to the ruins of overall pattern and to the somber murmur of the already known.�
“Gender is the extent we go to in order to be loved.�
“When I began Margery, I took Flaubert’s ‘The Legend of St. Julian Hospitaler� as a model, a moral and supernatural tale by a writer whose entire faith was in writing, as though telling a story perfectly were the same as obtaining forgiveness for existing. I am drawn to modernism but my faith is impure. I am no more the solitary author of this book than I alone invent the fiction of my life. As I write, I read my experience as well as Margery’s. Is that appropriation?—that I am also the reader, oscillating in a nowhere between what I invent and what changes me?�
“The yeomen were bald with pale blue eyes and red mustaches. One would die in 1421—a death in which one person dies for all—and the survivor would look at his friend’s corpse before mass. The heat that was his friend was still retreating. The yeoman was a little frightened of dead people, but the face did not turn brown or blue and when the yeoman met his friend’s cold hand for the last time there was no fear. He said, ‘We’re just the same body—and should I be afraid of myself?’â¶Ä�
“Gender is the extent we go to in order to be loved.�
“When I began Margery, I took Flaubert’s ‘The Legend of St. Julian Hospitaler� as a model, a moral and supernatural tale by a writer whose entire faith was in writing, as though telling a story perfectly were the same as obtaining forgiveness for existing. I am drawn to modernism but my faith is impure. I am no more the solitary author of this book than I alone invent the fiction of my life. As I write, I read my experience as well as Margery’s. Is that appropriation?—that I am also the reader, oscillating in a nowhere between what I invent and what changes me?�
“The yeomen were bald with pale blue eyes and red mustaches. One would die in 1421—a death in which one person dies for all—and the survivor would look at his friend’s corpse before mass. The heat that was his friend was still retreating. The yeoman was a little frightened of dead people, but the face did not turn brown or blue and when the yeoman met his friend’s cold hand for the last time there was no fear. He said, ‘We’re just the same body—and should I be afraid of myself?’â¶Ä�
April 3, 2023
i picked this up by mistake thinking it was the book of margery kempe and i was so disappointed and confused. this is one of the worst things i have ever read. only read if you're interested in hearing about how "jesus' cock poked out like a dogs nose" or how "she felt shit when she fingered his ass, but it was jesus' shit, after all." holy fuck this was awful. endless, endless over-the-top literary sex scenes. really really really really BAD.
April 29, 2023
The tedium of desire is exhausting; this book finds the common thread between ultimate pleasure and suffering. Descriptions of humanity and natural filth match that of DeLillo’s Mao II which I liked. Parallelism between the protagonist and Margery was actually lost/paled when he brought the two together. But now I do feel compelled to read her autobiography
Displaying 1 - 30 of 110 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.