What do Women Want?
The unifying element connecting all these otherwise unconnected stories is situated in the title. These are all stories about women, but it goes deeper than that. That description only tells half the story. Many collections features stories about women, but that one singular common thread does not necessarily unite them thematically. What unites all the stories in this connection isn’t so much that they are about women, but that they are stories about women a singularly male point of view. While most of these stories are told by a first-person narrator, not all of them are yet even when the narration is presented from an otherwise objective third-person perspective, it still seen through a lens of masculinity.
And at every point, the single most common aspect tying each of this disparate group of narrative perspectives tightly together is the question: what do women want? The male perspective here firmly grounded in a solid foundation of an incapacity to see the world through a feminine perspective. Sometimes this is due to not trying, but even those who do try ultimately. In manner or another all these different men experiencing pageant of different relationships appreciate women for one thing or another, but collectively as a universal symbol of the male, none of them have a clue about what women actually want.
What do Men Think?
Any sensitive man who genuinely craves more illuminating insight into the workings of the female mind is, as indicated, destined for disappointment if that is their reason for picking up this book. On the other hand, any woman who wants to gain a little more insight into the way men think could do a lot worse than reading these stories. The most useful thing here for anyone reading the book for that purpose is that the author is quite committed to presenting each of his males who are telling the story—or having the story told through their eyes—as unique individuals rather than mere symbolic incarnations. (The same holds for each of the women who are the object of the attention of these men.) The book begins with a 19-year-old narrator working as a sales clerk in a large store and expands outward in terms of experience and background from there. With a heavy focus on self-reflective first-person narration, one can definitely gain more insight into what’s going on in the male mind while they are struggling to figure out what women want.
Storytelling: Image versus Text
Woodcuts of Women is not just metaphorical title. Each of the stories is preceded by a reproduction of an actual woodcutting image of a woman. (Along with men, children, demons, etc.) The woodcut is always directly connected to the story which follows. “A Painting in Santa Fe” features a woodcutting showing diners sitting at tables in the restaurant dominated by the larger painting as described in the story. Not every image is so literal nor filled with such detail fulfilled textually. “About Tere Who was in palomas” is an excellent example: the almost surreal quality of the woodcut is much more disturbing than the story which follows with imagery of demons and serpents vaguely recalling the Garden of Eden’s more darker corners.
Since each story is accompanied by a visual image, it is only natural to try to make connections between them, but this is an effort which can very often lead to a larger contextual query about the nature of visual arts and textual arts to tell a story. Both image and story are, by virtue of proximity, telling the same story to a degree and the inclusion of the artworks as a requisite component lends an extra layer of thematic depth to the entire experience.
