I Am the Brother of XX – Fleur Jaeggy
The private self will not be saved by rationality.
The problem of girlhood cannot be adequately addressed within the form of literary realism.
Eve Out of Her Ruins – Ananda Devi
I looked up from the fever dream of this Troumaron world to recognize myself in Kuala Lumpur, feeling like something is being sucked out of me.
Bye Bye Blondie – Virginie Despentes
Like Chris Kraus in I LOVE DICK, in this book Despentes too seems to have set out to solve the problem of heterosexuality.
The same non-intervention the biologists practice on the island — not to leave a human mark on the fragile ecosystem and thus to merely observe, even when a baby animal is dying and could be saved by a small push in the right direction — is extended towards each other.
What might be taken for granted as comfortable or soothing or beautiful in a novel that subscribes to bourgeois realism becomes intentionally alienating or disconcerting and potentially hostile in a novel about the subaltern.
Volodine’s writers, as it turns out, write because they must kill.
The poorest, youngest, least-defended bodies are handed around, back and forth.