'I wasn't raped until I was almost ten which is pretty good it seems when I ask around because many have been touched but are afraid to say.'
In this stark, powerful and uncompromising novel Andrea Dworkin recreates the experiences of her narrator, a young woman repeatedly raped from childhood to womanhood.
The result is Mercy, a monumental work of fiction which asks the questions:
In a culture which still believes that rape is every
woman's fantasy, how is it possible to tell our story?
How do we make ourselves heard?
How are we to be believed?
And finally, when woman and children are being raped,
tortured and abused every minute of every day,
where is God?
Are we His pornography?
In this inspired and brilliantly sustained novel, Dworkin's narrator takes us on her terrifying journey through the man's world in which we all live.
She becomes a forceful and potent symbol of the struggle of all women for dignity, self determination and, above all, freedom.
--------
A controversial novel by the author of Pornography, Intercourse and Ice & Fire.
Mercy is an intelligent and courageous woman who, as a nine-year-old girl, was molested by a man in a dark theatre. The repercussions of this act follow her through her life.
Gloria Steinem says of Dworkin: "In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race evolve. Andrea is one of them."
If Andrea Dworkin is the Malcolm X of feminism, then this novel is her version of his autobiography. . . . She is brilliant, her anger is a polished and dangerous instrument, and even some of the people she's marked as enemies can hope she finds her way. –– Madison Smartt Bell, Chicago Tribune
