{"id":5250,"date":"2023-05-14T21:39:51","date_gmt":"2023-05-14T21:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/?p=5250"},"modified":"2023-05-14T21:39:57","modified_gmt":"2023-05-14T21:39:57","slug":"iolanda-batalle-ill-do-anything-you-want","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/14\/iolanda-batalle-ill-do-anything-you-want\/","title":{"rendered":"Iolanda Batall\u00e9: I’ll Do Anything You Want"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ll Do Anything You Want<\/em> (2013, tr: Maruxa Rela\u00f1o & Martha Tennent, 2023) by Iolanda Batall\u00e9 is the tale of Nora, a painter who, after twenty-five years in a regular marriage, goes astray with a man she meets on a plane. It\u2019s a thrill that brings her marriage into focus (\u201cNeither of them made an effort. The man bored her.\u201d) and her decisions from there take her through the looking-glass into a world far removed from staid family life: that of high-end prostitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNora lived where everyone with a family lives, on the edge of an abyss\u201d, writes Batalle, and as she falls into it, we see initial uncertainty grow into confidence with each encounter. What may at first have been a sexual awakening becomes a journey of discovery ending in liberation. As a painter, she finds inspiration in her johns and looks to make an exhibition (\u201cMcCullers said that writing was her way of earning her soul\u2026[Nora] did the same with her painting.\u201d) stirred by her trysts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carson McCullers\u2019 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter<\/em> is a prominent reference, against many other touchstones, paraphrased as \u201conly by loving all things can one survive great heartbreak\u201d, effectively a mantra against the matrilineal norm that saw both her mother and grandmother remain committed, to the end, only to their husbands. \u201cNora,\u201d we\u2019re told, \u201chad decided to follow desire wherever it led her\u201d, an apt survival method as \u201ddeath begins when desire ceases\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all its sex and desire, this is not \u2018fifty shades\u2019 erotica, but a literary exploration of love, told in an engaging style that drifts freely through its characters\u2019 minds, with recurring thoughts and images gaining clarity with each wave, and full of reflections (\u201cWe all arrive at our knowledge of love by having loved a few people.\u201d) on love and what it truly means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of all the people in Nora\u2019s life, her deceased parents, and her independent daughters, there are ultimately three key men that come into sharp focus: her pimp, her husband, and the grandfather who raised her. Each have secrets that the narrative eventually unlocks and their combined impact leads a woman who \u201chad never really made any decisions about her life\u201d to take control and find her worth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ll Do Anything You Want (2013, tr: Maruxa Rela\u00f1o & Martha Tennent, 2023) by Iolanda Batall\u00e9 is the tale of Nora, a painter who, after twenty-five years in a regular marriage, goes astray with a man she meets on a plane. It\u2019s a thrill that brings her marriage into focus (\u201cNeither of them made an Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5251,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[288],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-batalle-iolanda"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/fare-tot-el-que-tu-vulguis-angles-2.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pon-1mG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5252,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250\/revisions\/5252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}