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Reviews for Graham Rawle's Woman's World A breathtaking and breathtakingly idiosyncratic
work. What begins as an exquisitely wayward work
of art and outright comic masterpiece transforms into a galloping plot
of serious literary intent. Woman's World is charming, chilling, sinister,
surreal and utterly unforgettable. Far more than a mere exercise in form, Woman’s
World sparkles with linguistic mischief while detailing a moving and psychologically
acute story. Woman’s World, composed wholly of cutouts
from women’s magazines of the early Sixties, might just be the most
wildly original novel produced in this country in the past decade. It
tells the screamingly funny and devastating story of a transvestite, Norma
Fontaine/Roy Little, in a provincial English town.
The novel's powerful, twisting plot offers
a serious interrogation of the sexual stereotypes that can exert such
a perverse influence over the vulnerable. What emerges is a tender love
story in which an apparently happy ending also contains dark elements
of unfinished business. The narrative, it turns out, is as peculiar as
the presentation. Woman's World may prove metafiction's first
bestseller…Even the most dedicated players of jeux de mots…have not within
their chosen constraints wrought as truly persuasive a narrative as this
bodice-donning yarn which shows no slip…A tale that moves with the pace
of a thriller, with as many cliffhanging chapter endings and swerves of
story. But there's the added excitement of a typographical rollercoaster…Norma
is a brilliant invention, allowing full lyrical use of the available material,
which Rawle gathers and pleats into rhapsodic riffs of garment ecstasy…An
extended text needs to have more than novelty; the critical difference
between a notion and an idea is that only the latter can generate and
sustain intensity. Here the task is taken on with unflagging wit and psychological
acumen. Woman’s World by Graham Rawle is dazzling. What might seem like a labour of extreme eccentricity
demonstrates its own dark logic as the narrative reveals a tortured mind
behind these earnest womanly constructions. Rawle conjures a love story
threatened by shameful family secrets from pages of bright platitudes,
in a remarkable and highly original example of form dictating content.
Five years in the making, Rawle's book is both a work of art and an astonishingly moving, funny novel. This is an ingenious, wonderful book. If genius and madness go hand in hand, this
text is the proof… the genius is that this isn’t a mere novelty, but a
perfect marriage of form and function. Genius. The book I want to shout about…is Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World. A thrilling novel…extraordinary. Despite its unconventional and perhaps initially
daunting appearance, Rawle’s narrative grips as a reading experience from
start to finish. His appropriation of the found material is so seamless
and artful that words by an unnamed army of women’s magazine writers read
as his own…Rawle transforms the linguistic clichés peddled by these magazines
into something fresh, subtly subversive and often laugh-out-loud funny.
In his inspired use of simile, he is a kitchen-sink surrealist. Lips are
‘sweet and tender as Batchelor’s peas’. Rayon and Nylon skirts ‘cling
to the legs like a rock climber in a gale’. Heavy raindrops fall like
‘chocolate-covered Payne’s Poppets thrown from the branches above them
by playful confectioners’. Rawle adeptly manipulates the overripe, fastidiously
precise descriptive language of fashion journalism to convey his characters’
aspirations and longings… As a virtuoso piece of old-fashioned paste-up…the
book can be savoured for its visual qualities alone. Even the folios,
each constructed in a different style, provide a diversion. This novel’s
triumph is that it works on every level. One of the strangest and most enjoyable books
of this year - or any year. An astonishing book that’s both a sad, strange
story and a unique work of art…a pleasure to look at and a fascinating
joy to read. Rawle has painstakingly selected words and
phrases from 1960s women’s magazines and reassembled them to tell an enchanting
love story. It’s an original concept and sounds faintly far-reaching,
but it works. Rawle’s idiosyncrasy is his charm and, while his style takes
a little getting used to, it is intriguing rather than hard work. He arouses
a delightful nostalgia for the parochial and the minutiae of daily life
in the 1960s. A complete original…how rare to see something
completely new on the book shelves. 
WOMAN’S
WORLD
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