Mājoklis. Afterthoughts.

One of or rather the best-known Latvian music band "Prata Vetra" (BrainStorm) has a song called "Tavas majas mana azote". It can be loosely translated as your home is in my embrace, a callback to that deeply romantic and somewhat naive notion that all you need is love and material things have little if no importance at all when you are together with the one. Home in this particular song, one could argue, is not even a real place or space even though the name of the song alludes to the physical closeness of another person. Yes, an embrace is not an imaginary experience. It's real and shared. Still, the more essential question is whether the core value of the idea of such a home lies in the embrace itself or rather in the feeling of love connected to it?

Anna Auzina (Latvian poet and now also a novelist) has just recently published her first novel called "Majoklis". The word means just that - a home. But not necessarily a regular house, or an apartment, or any other type of housing. For that in Latvian we usually go for the shorter version of the word - maja. Majoklis on the other hand carries a more primal meaning with it. It's something that's both more primitive and conceptual at the same time - a word that bears meaning far more symbolic than a simple house ever could.

Now, contrary to the previously mentioned song, the home devised by the author in her novel is by no means romantic. At least not in the traditional sense of the word. It isn't a story about finding the one either. Once again, at least not in the traditionally expected way. And yet on some deeply primal level "Majoklis" is exactly about these things - about love and finding peace and, thus, home through it. It's just that this love is raw, sensual, messy and selfish, and unapologetically honest. It also isn't directed at a particular person. Rather it stems from one person, the protagonist of the book, - a woman called Tereze.

At first, it can seem that "Majoklis" is going to be just another erotic novel seeking to turn into Latvian incarnation of the infamous "50 Shades of Grey". The first chapter of the book is full of thoughts about sex, dicks, and orgasms, and about the exact times and ways Tereze wants and likes to be touched and fucked. Yet pretty soon it becomes obvious that for a typical erotic novel "Majoklis" is too technical if I dare say so. All those tiny little physical, technical, and emotional details may be arousing but definitely not as a sensual romantic fantasy would be. The author's interest in sex is hardly abstract. On the contrary, it's graphic and meticulous almost to a scientific degree. Thus, although provocative, "Majoklis" reveals itself to be totally uninterested in constructing bland and cliched fairytale-like scenarios about how sex feels like. What the book is actually drawn to is detailing what's at the core of female sexuality and painting an honest picture of a woman's relationship to sex.

Contrary to the commonly held beliefs about women, Tereze thinks about sex often, actively, shamelessly, and at times obsessively even. Although happily married, she fantasizes about men she hardly knows or doesn't know at all, unabashedly objectifying and reducing them to mere sources of sexual pleasure.

Are modern-day gender-swap dynamics at play here assigning male attributes to female characters? To a certain degree, there can be some small element of truth to the notion, but as a woman, I like to think that in this particular case modern-day cultural background is just making it easier to finally talk about realities previously mostly ignored - the true nature of a woman's sexuality being one of such realities.

Reading about sex is fun and stimulating at first but "Majoklis" wouldn't be a book worth talking about if it was just a simple erotic novel. It begins as such yet slowly evolves into something far darker and more complicated. Tereze begins to recall her earlier relationships, both with different men she was attracted to and with her family. Carnal desires blend with emotional and spiritual ones. That's when what feels like the main conflict of the book becomes evident. Desires of the body are simple and straightforward. Physical pleasure isn't complicated. When Tereze is still a child experimenting with her own body and touching herself for the first time she isn't hurting anyone. How can she when it's only her and her body? Emotions, beliefs, traditions, and values are what complicate it all. What our bodies crave and enjoy exist outside of the domain of right and wrong. Yet we are conscious beings and therefore cannot perceive our own desires and actions outside of the moral dimension. Is Tereze a bad person for not being honest, faithful, attentive? Or for harsh words and acting out of fear or anger? And more importantly - if she is, is it because of her acting upon those desires or just for having them in the first place?

Gradually (the fact that Tereze is getting older might have a role as well), as the book progresses towards its conclusion, sex, dicks, and orgasms get mentioned less and less, pushing forward other types of desires not as provocative and arousing but often even more selfish and dark, eventually confronting the ultimate frontier - death. Tereze has to deal first with her father's and then also with her mother's death, in each case grappling with two completely different situations and emotional baggage. She's helpless to aid her father in battling cancer (although she would desperately like to) and is forced to assist her mother in her last months out of a sense of duty rather than an actual desire to ease her mother's end. This once again highlights the same question - is Tereze a bad person for wishing her mother would die sooner if she did take care of her regardless?

The subtitle of the book reads "The Diary of Tereze", and the whole novel is a confession that lasts for years displaying all the dirt and ugliness but also the honesty and rawness of what constitutes a person - a conscious mind in a physical body.

Quoting the Bible, our body is the house in which our spirit lives here on earth, and Tereze is desperately curious to get to know and understand hers - both her sensual body that is the house that her soul has to live its life in here on earth as well as her mind that is inseparably trapped in it.

So in the end, this majoklis, the home in the title of the book, are we, our inner world and our physical body together, and those that we let in.

The novel concludes with a short entry where Tereze describes in detail what her future husband's dick looked like when she first saw it. And it may feel like a grotesque, style-over-substance type of unnecessary over-exaggeration even retelling it here but it's actually perfectly fitting in a strangely poetic way. A woman, when she loves a man romantically, lets him in both literarily and figuratively. Why should we discuss freely and without shame or stigma one but not the other?

"Majoklis" is the first step towards normalizing these other conversations.

And a desperately needed one, if you ask me.