Jowita Bydlowska has also written a memoir, Drunk Mom, and the novel, Guy.
- Title: Posessed
- Author: Jowita Bydlowska
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Dundurn Press
- Pages: 336
Writing about the phenomenon of sex can take readers on a voyage to the erotic edge, or it can lead them astray on an aimless journey. Jowita Bydlowska’s psychologically rich novel Possessed (Dundurn Press), which is equal parts Harlequin romance, Gothic horror story and Camusian moral tale, has a clear destination in mind, and illuminates the states of consciousness that only sexual dependency can inspire.
Josephine works at a Toronto travel agency specializing in “unusual tours.” In the evening, she looks after her schizophrenic mother, who made her childhood a living nightmare. Socially awkward and fearful of inheriting her mother’s ailments, Josephine hurls herself into unfulfilling relationships with men: her “maybe-boyfriend” Victor, a locally famous photographer, compels her to dabble in S&M sex parties, while Sebastian, a graphic designer 10 years her junior, has a tendency to be sexually aggressive between the sheets.
Josephine’s surrender to Sebastian develops into an unhealthy obsession about his every move and reluctance to commit to a relationship. She cannot account for this all-consuming passion, nor can she resist indulging every one of Sebastian’s ludicrous whims (he has an especial fondness for having sex in restaurant bathrooms); what Josephine does suspect is that this change in her behaviour can be traced to the moment her mother first warned her of a supernatural presence living inside their home.
Josephine knows on some level that she has felt these ghostly impressions too; for some reason they seem to occur at their highest intensity while she is scouring the internet for exotic destinations to incorporate into her company travel packages. It is not until a work assignment to the Croatian quarantine island of Tajni Otok – a tourist trap that boasts its own haunted asylum – that Josephine encounters Luka, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-him corporeal manifestation of the spirit haunting her.
The spell Sebastian holds over her is soon broken, and as Luka’s woebegone, hundred-year-old story unfolds, Josephine feels a strange attraction to her wraith-swain; there is an eerie symmetry connecting their lives across the impossibly broad terrain of space and time and that revolves around their fixation on paramours with no hard limits.
Bydlowska, the author of the bestselling books Drunk Mom and Guy, packs her novel with racy scenarios exploring the emotions that surface when sex wheels its inquisitive head; their purpose in less capable hands might simply titillate, but in Possessed they also become evocative of mental crisis and mortifying insecurity. As only a novelist that has come into their own can manage, Bydlowska presents the upheavals in Josephine and Luka’s lives with a great deal of emotional perceptiveness.
“I could feel it all the time,” Josephine says about the loss of autonomy to infatuation, “the desperation, as I walk the streets like an animal.” The intimacy with Josephine’s spiraling thoughts is by far the novel’s greatest asset, but the pursuit of documenting this inner turmoil with fidelity can come at the expense of the propulsive momentum the book delivers at its outset.
The book’s final act abounds in welcome elaborations, and the reasons for Luka’s placement at the asylum after the events of the First World War, and the mysterious origins surrounding Josephine’s possession, are handily dealt with. With these two narrative arcs developing in counterpoint, Bydlowska executes a finale involving no shortage of discredited doctors, false accusations and forbidden trysts.
Possessed continues Bydlowska’s engagement with probing the “unspeakable” contours of existence – the spider holes of desire and the feelings of annihilation brought on by neurotic instability. Her novel may not be a response to any particular source of moral panic, but it can be characterized by a great longing – a yearning for a day when idealizations of femininity are cast down and buried under the weight of an unsentimental – if slightly degraded – humanity.
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