*this quote – which made me laugh out loud when I read it – is from the wonderful book Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, a Nobel Prize winning Polish novelist I had never encountered previously but – the entire book, and this half-paragraph, are just faboo – a lot better than my perception of its darkness as suggested by the title, which meant this book stayed on my shelf far too long, unread because oh hell, that sounds so GRIM.
I love encountering new to me authors, especially female ones, especially too when they make me laugh, featuring female characters I can relate to, however different their lives might be from mine in details big and small.
Also, if we’re going to feminist the language, which we’re gonna have to do, y’all, we have to come up with more terms for the many ways in which men are testerical.
Published in 2009, this novel was translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones; the English language version was published in America in 2019 by Riverhead Books.
“It’s hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for intrapersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding.”