Published By: W&N
Pages: 240
Released On: 28/03/2024
In January 2017, Chimene Suleyman was on her way to an abortion clinic in Queens, New York with her boyfriend, the father of her nascent child. It was the last day they would spend together. In an extraordinary sequence of events, Chimene was to discover the truth of her boyfriend’s life: that she and many other women had been subtly, patiently and painfully betrayed.
In this spellbinding memoir, she exposes one man’s control over many women and the trauma he left behind, and celebrates the sisterhood that formed in his wake despite – and in spite of – him. Exploring how women are duped every day by individuals, she interrogates how society itself continually allows this to happen. She demonstrates that, no matter how intelligent, educated or self-aware they might be, over time a woman can be played into performing the age-old role of giver and nurturer: self-sacrificing and subordinate.
Both a devastating personal testimony and a searing indictment of persistent misogyny, The Chain is a book for any woman who has questioned her relationship and buried her doubts, for any woman who can’t quite identify the source of her unease and for any woman who has been sheltered by the fierce protection of her female friends.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and W&N for the advance copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I had been sooooo eager to read this, ever since I first saw it online. And whilst we don’t (we do) judge books by their covers, this one really drew me in.
There were some very good bits of this book, and some bits that didn’t quite hold my attention.
At times I forgot this wasn’t a storybook, because there’s some horrifying things in it that you hope are just fictional. But then you remember that the world can be like this and people can be like this, and it’s not a nice thought.
I tell you, she really sells New York as a place to live! I’ve never been someone who dreams of visiting America, but like others, New York has always held a bit of a fancy idea in my head, of Times Square and Broadway. But she’s really got to the nitty gritty in this book; the crime, the dirt, the rubbish, the smells, the murders – it all seems simply delightful 😛. But it is a great analogy to what she went through actually.
It is very powerful. She has not held back. Everything – the good, the bad, the ugly, the sad, the loving, the racist, the sexist, the horrific, the unbelievable, and the beautiful – everything is there. She’s been raw and honest, and produced something so harsh but good.
I am a white woman living in England. Chimene is a woman of Turkish-Cypriot descent living in the USA. I will never pretend to know what that’s like. But she’s portrayed such a vivid image that it is impossible not to feel something towards it. You become like the people in the book, like Chimene herself. You can feel what it’s like and it’s not all positive.
I was worried at first that it might be a bit of a man-bashing book under the guise of feminism. But it couldn’t be more different. It’s bashing one man in particular who deserves it and a whole lot more, and I hope he gets the chance to read this.
My two negatives, if you can call them negatives, are as thus. Firstly, there is a lot of what I would call, poetic language. Where instead of a sentence being written in a way that you or I would say it, it’s; been written in a way that looks good on the page. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it was only now and again, but it’s like she’s tried to make every sentence a standalone shocking one and it jars a little.
And also I found it a bit repetitive. The first quarter, say, was really good, but I did wonder what she would be filling the rest of the book with. I think it might have been stronger with a smaller page count, 100-200 maybe. I know all the stories in the book from these women are worth hearing about and I’ll never back down from that, but I think if you’re going to fill your book with these stories, there needs to be some kind of order, and things need to be condensed, otherwise it becomes a bit too long and samey.
On the whole, it’s not the most cheerful or uplifting book, but it does show how important sisterhood is, even between strangers.
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