The Spider's House

Nina Allan's Homepage

Category: Girls Against God

Girls Against God #7: I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel and Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko

April 13, 2023 /

What he is, is greedy and lazy, selfish and a coward but what he also is, is clear and when he gives me a way out, I refuse to take it.

Readers and critics alike have described the unnamed narrator of Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan as an ‘unlikable character’, one of those Moshfeghian millennial bitches we love to hate. I have problems getting to grips with this designation. To me, she’s simply real. If angry and uncomfortably honest makes you unlikable, I guess that’s just more of the shit we’re having to wade through.

As in Anna Burns’s Booker-winning novel Milkman, with which Patel’s debut shares more than a strand of literary DNA, no one is named. Characters are ascribed a function within the text: ‘the man I want to be with,’ ‘the woman I am obsessed with’, ‘his wife’, ‘my boyfriend’. This is both alienating and strangely intimate, as if we too are engaged in spying on these people, as if we too are complicit with what is going on. As, if you are a woman, you will be. Because in one way or another, you will have been there.

If I had been writing about this subject at the time when similar stuff was happening to me, the resulting text’s internal furniture would have been different: street maps instead of Google maps, telephone boxes instead of iPhones, newspaper articles instead of Insta. The sentences would have unfolded differently as a result, more formally structured and punctuated in keeping with the times. But the story would have been the same, or broadly similar. That tortuous tract of time when one’s internal weather is mainly dictated by the narcissistic, self-seeking actions of another person. The madness of knowing that, but still sacrificing one’s agency. The pointless suffering that – with a portion of luck and a fuckton of time – you eventually wrest yourself free of and pick up your life.

What cannot be wrested free of are the adjacent pitfalls, the systemic inequalities of class, race and gender Patel’s unnamed narrator catalogues and interrogates with matter-of-fact, intimate knowledge and brutal precision.

*

No, I would really like for someone to explain to me, why the hell would one come into this world a woman – and in Ukraine, yet! – with this fucking dependency programmed into your body like a delayed-action bomb, with this craziness, this need to be transformed into moist, squishy clay kneaded into the Earth’s surface…

You’re a woman. And that’s your limit./Your moon sleeps like a silver fish lure./Like spices off the edge of a knife/Dependency sprinkled into your blood.

Oh, this book.

So there it was, girlfriend – you fell in love. And how you fell in love – you exploded blindly, went flying headfirst, your witch’s laugh ringing to the heavens, lifted by the invisible absolute power of whirlwinds, and that pain didn’t stop you – although it should have – but no, you cut the juice to all your warning signs that had lit up with their red lights flashing and screaming “meltdown” – like before the accident at the atomic station – and only your poems, which switched on immediately and rushed forward in a steady, unrelenting stream, sent out unambiguous signals of danger: persistent flashes of hell, and death, and sickness.

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is as much about language as physical intimacy. The vexed and now murderously abusive relationship between Russia and Ukraine, between the Ukrainian language and the Russian language, runs through this novel like a sword, as its true subject matter, the matter of language not so much a metaphor for sexual politics as the other way around.

Zabuzhko’s work contains some of the most thrilling, innovative writing at the sentence level that I have ever read, and I want to give particular mention here to the novel’s translator, Halyna Hryn, who has conveyed the raw force of the original with a facility and passion that keeps English-language readers as close to Zabuzhko’s furious rhythms, her sardonic humour and dextrous word choices as is possible.

The way this novel is freely punctuated with poetry. The way there is no redemption, save the hunger for freedom.

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is most likely the most important novel I will read all year. The fact that it was written in 1996 should make us all ask ourselves questions about the gaps between the real and the imagined in our attitude to nations, peoples and individuals threatened with existential as well as physical annihilation.

Eyes Wide Open: Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

March 5, 2022 /

When earlier in the week I read Johanna Thomas-Corr’s excellent review in the Guardian of Maria Gainza’s new novel Portrait of an Unknown Lady, I was reminded that I never had caught up with Gainza’s first novel Optic Nerve, published in its original Spanish in 2014 and then latterly in an English translation by Thomas Bunstead in 2019. I remember reading reviews of it, noting it down in my ever-expanding ‘of interest’ file. I even remember, quite clearly, holding a copy of the book in my hand. I was in a big Waterstones somewhere – either Chris or I, I cannot recall now which of us it was, had been asked to come in and sign some books. I remember trying to decide between Optic Nerve and Laura Cuming’s elegantly articulated memoir On Chapel Sands, both books, coincidentally, with a central focus on art.

In the end I chose the Cuming, promising myself I would acquire the Gainza at a later date. But I never did. That morning, its details blurry, feels far away, on the other side of an unspeakable divide, with those books two of the sparsely connecting threads between then and now. Reading Thomas-Corr’s admiring retrospective words about Optic Nerve, I experienced a sudden and intense hunger for it, for that book precisely, no other would do. Not even wanting to wait the time it would take to arrive in physical form, I downloaded it in e-format and started to read it more or less immediately.

Novels by nearest and dearest aside, Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve – or so it feels to me in this moment – is the most beautiful book I have ever read. ‘It was clear that Gainza, like British authors Rachel Cusk and Claire-Louise Bennett, was opening up new possibilities for the novel as a place of freedom,’ Thomas-Corr writes in her review, ‘where you could blend fiction, memoir, art history and anecdote. She immediately felt like a thrilling discovery.’ I agree with this totally. I agree also with her additional claim that Gainza’s fiction actually ‘has more in common with Roberto Bolaño’s, with its themes of art and infamy, craft and theft.’ There is, as Thomas-Corr maintains, a Bolano-esque depth of field to her ‘stories within stories, each with its own melancholy mood and unsolvable mystery.’

And there is something more, something still greater, a quality of emotional admission, of inclusivity and of risk-taking, of personal involvement – of vulnerability even – that reminds me of the stories and writing of Mariana Enriquez, a passion that dares to reveal, to expose the self in a way that others have not, and that includes myself.

I can say only that I am thinking on this, wondering and struggling with how to address it. I am getting to know the paintings Gainza writes about in Optic Nerve, studying them in detail, reliving the moments of their discovery through the filter of Gainza’s tapestried language, of a knowledge profoundly felt and acutely described.

I am saving Maria Gainza’s new book for the moment, as something to look forward to. To cherish and to rejoice in. We need voices like these, above all, voices that remind us of all that life and art can be and what it is for.

A Season in Null-Space: Transit by Rachel Cusk

February 28, 2022 /

A book such as Julian’s was far more palatable. It always surprised him, how people lapped it up, extremity, how eager they were to consume what lay far outside the compass of their own experience, their relish for it if anything increased by the absence of the very thing, he, Louis, was abjured for removing – the screen of fiction. People believed that Julian didn’t need to make things up because the extremity of his experiences was such that it released him from that obligation.

Working on my current manuscript, I have been thinking a great deal about the weight we attach to ‘true’ narratives, and how objective truth might be said to differ from experiential truth.

If I say: ‘This happened to me’, is that enough to prove that it really did?

Since 2016, our experience of the world has become fragmentary and unstable, no longer measured in years, but in seasons, weeks and days. As a writer I feel I have become less capable and less desirous of constructing grand illusions. I have instead become obsessed with small details, with exploring the imaginative potential in day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute experience, with tracking the potential answers to the question: what really happened? My growing interest in true-crime narratives is both a response to and a driver of this. And precisely because much of the drama of such narratives lies in the mundane.

‘I don’t really believe in character,’ says Rachel Cusk in a recent podcast conversation with Sheila Heti, ‘I believe in moments of truth.’ In the second instalment of her Outline trilogy, Cusk demonstrates how the quotidian, when fully inhabited, can spiral outwards into a poetic hyperrealism, into the fire of language. How daily reality is never banal, but rather the greyish-brown outer crust of the entire luminosity of existence. The dinner party that forms the climax of the novel is, in its own subversive way, as revelatory and as disturbing as the family get-together that forms the subject of Thomas Vinterberg’s seminal 1998 movie Festen. Reading this book, in which ostensibly dull things happen in such a way as to make them seem life-defining, is to see reality, elusive as the leopard, changing its spots before our eyes.

Cusk’s writing truly is superlative. She has not only raised the bar for British literary fiction, she has opened up a new arena for the discussion and contemplation of what fiction is, and how it works.

*

Meanwhile and elsewhere, this marvellous essay by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky articulates brilliantly the shock, terror and heartbreak of these anxious days.

Girls Against God #6: Bernard and Pat by Blair James

February 4, 2021 /

I listened to the songs, and I didn’t know the words. I bowed my head where everyone else bowed theirs. I stood and sat on cue. And at one point, during a song, I turned my head to look at Lucy. I looked at her and her eyes were closed, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a vision of ardent faith. She looked as though she was not on this plane, but another, better and more peaceful one. Her face looked so beautiful. Pious. And it brought tears to my eyes to see someone so lost in love and belief and happiness. And I found it so admirable for her to have so much faith in something, when I had none in myself, or in anything.

If you like Eimear McBride, you will love Blair James.

I think Bernard and Pat might be the saddest story I have ever read.

Catherine’s life has been defined by two events: the death of her father when she was five and the time she spent as a child in the home of Christian childminders Bernard and Pat. We never learn what age Catherine is as she writes; we know only that in many ways she is still that child, still trapped inside that house.

One of the central questions asked by the book is not so much will Catherine escape from that house, but is escape from what happened there ever even possible?

There are other books that deal with child abuse and trauma but Bernard and Pat is made exceptional through the manner of its telling. James’s narrative unfolds through a series of vignettes, some several pages in length, others as brief and fleeting as a single line. The timeline is elastic and infinitely fluid, shifting and switching between Catherine’s fragmented memories of her beloved father – indeed she later questions if these are her own memories, or simply anecdotes she has heard so many times they have the feeling of memories – her partially-blanked recollections of Bernard and Pat, her uncertain, jagged present. Our understanding of ‘what happened’ is arrived at gradually, through a process not unlike stacking building blocks, or putting together a jigsaw puzzle: a particular piece may not make sense until we come upon the piece that fits beside it, sometimes many pages later.

The language of Bernard and Pat is what sets this book in its own category and above many others. Catherine’s voice is not a child’s voice, and little Catherine is not a child narrator. Rather, it is the juxtaposition of the hurt, damaged, unadulterated clarity of childhood perceptions with the mature vocabulary of the adult Catherine, someone who reads, concludes, remembers that makes an encounter with Bernard and Pat, more than anything, like reading a collection of poems.

The shattering of self, the helplessness, above all Catherine’s loneliness is palpable on every page.

Reading Bernard and Pat felt energising, exciting, like a blessing in the way that discovering such a fresh, original and dynamic literary talent always does; at the same time it felt and still feels almost unspeakably painful, like witnessing a terrible accident that can never be put right.

The concise nature of this book means you could easily finish it in a single sitting, yet its interior space is so large you will never entirely encompass it, or stop wanting to revisit it. In this also it is like poetry.

Blair James’s willingness and ability to convey ambiguity – not just the ambiguity surrounding events but the ambiguity surrounding character – is both necessary and daring. Catherine’s circumstances are not those of abject poverty, of a shocking one-off crime that makes newspaper headlines. Rather they are a slow accretion of need, of time stretched to breaking point, of carelessness, exhaustion, making-do, lack of insight or thought. James somehow finds the artistic bravery to make Bernard himself an ambiguous character, a minotaur who is half pathetic inadequate, half predatory monster.

This is not just truth-telling, this is great writing.

I referenced Eimear McBride at the top of this page. You might well read Bernard and Pat and think of McBride’s groundbreaking debut A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, but for me James’s novel equally shares elements of tone and structure with her more recent book Strange Hotel, which I read at the close of last year and loved so much it would have had a Girls Against God spot all to itself, had my encounter with it not coincided with best-of-year lists and all that stuff. Strange Hotel delivers its denouement through a list of place names, a formal flourish I found so joyous both as style and substance it still lifts my spirits when I think about it. I was not hoping for such a moment of closure from Bernard and Pat, yet in its final two brief pages – in its final word – there is, after all, something approaching if not consolation then at least a spark of hope. Brava.

I always look forward to the debut novelists feature that appears in the Observer towards the end of January. This year’s selection feels particularly noteworthy, important and progressive. There isn’t a single book on the list I wouldn’t be interested in reading, and I am especially gratified by the emphasis on more experimental forms. If I could, I would add one more name to this list and that name would be Blair James. Bernard and Pat is devastating, intense and brilliant. I cannot wait to see where James takes us next.

Girls Against God #5: A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa

December 18, 2020 /

It would probably be more apposite to file this stunning work of autofiction under ‘Girls for God’ as its central endeavour constitutes nothing less than an act of literary resurrection.

The narrator (who seems not at all unlike Doireann ni Ghriofa herself) is on a journey of self discovery. Determined to pursue a career in medicine, she finds herself profoundly unsuited to the work and following a crisis that results in a traumatic personal breakdown she gets married, becomes a teacher and starts a family. Being a mother to children – the climactic state of being pregnant and giving birth to children – proves to be the deepest source of spiritual sustenance and self-realisation, as well as an increasingly destructive addiction to self-relinquishment, to the immoderate sacrificing of her own thoughts, desires and ambitions to the needs of others.

The narrator finds the idea that she is a writer actively threatening. This was never what she planned for herself. She proceeds with stealth. Focusing on her dissatisfaction with the extant translations of a work that has always been of central importance to her thinking about the act of writing, she begins to investigate the life and history of Eibhlinn Dubh Ni Chonaill, the composer of the eighteenth century epic poem The Keen for Art O Laoghaire. The Caoineadh is a work that holds key significance in Ireland’s school curriculum and literary canon, yet its author – Eibhlinn herself – has always had her identity subsumed in that of her famous nephew Daniel O’Connell, who fought for the emancipation of Catholics in Ireland and was finally allowed to take up his seat in the Westminster parliament in 1829.

Eibhlinn, our narrator discovers, has been rendered more or less invisible by the male historians who painstakingly charted Daniel’s life and works. Yet still she is everywhere, the ghost that haunts, her love-song for a murdered husband an insistent, life-affirming heartbeat that comes increasingly to possess and obsess her. As she drives across rural Ireland searching for traces of Eibhlinn, however meagre, our narrator begins to work on her own translation of the Caoineadh, an act that will lay her own ghosts to rest at last and offer her a new assurance in her poetic vocation.

Doireann Ni Ghriofa is a prizewinning poet – A Ghost in the Throat is her first work of prose fiction – and poetry’s rhythms and recursive themes, both her own and Eibhlinn’s, inform every line of this original, tactile, intelligent and fiercely compelling work. Part detective story, part memoir, part treatise on the poetic life, A Ghost in the Throat interrogates the concepts of self-sacrifice and longing from a female perspective, offering insights and revelations that are both clear-eyed and merciless, passages that will move you to tears. This book, like a benevolent ghost, will return to haunt you. The work closes with Ni Ghriofa’s full translation of the Caoineadh in parallel text with Eiblinn’s original.

You can (and please, please do) watch an interview with Doireann Ni Ghriofa here. She is in conversation with the writer Megan Nolan, whose own debut novel Acts of Desperation is out in March.

Girls Against God #4: Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez and You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South

December 11, 2020 /

Reading these two story collections back-to-back presented an eerily similar aesthetic experience to my encounter with Geen and Ferrante last week, only in reverse. Both collections deal with social change, buried secrets and personal crisis. Both employ elements of the fantastic to secure their effects. Yet the manner of approach, the mode of attack could not be more different, with the internal temperature of these stories, above all, providing a fascinating contrast.

Enriquez’s stories (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) take place against the shifting, unstable backdrop of dictatorships past. In ‘The Intoxicated Years’ we follow a group of teenagers as they confront issues of identity, addiction and sexuality in the years following the fall of the Peron regime. The political repercussions and personal reckonings that preoccupy their parents are to their children a matter of intense dullness, of ‘yeah, whatevs’; set against the agonies of teenage angst, the adult world even in its moment of greatest precariousness feels tedious, played out, irrelevant. Only as they grow older do they begin to understand how no one can live surrounded by such a society and emerge unscathed.

Other stories come populated more literally with ghosts from the past and monsters of the present, and Enriquez’s manner of merging the bitterest social commentary with elements of horror – see ‘Under the Black Water’ for a Lovecraft-tinged death cult (this story carries strongly resounding echoes of Clive Barker’s ‘The Forbidden’ aka Candyman) and ‘The Neighbour’s Courtyard for a hideously unsettling variation on the zombie story – is brilliantly handled. The stories’ boldness in confronting issues of violence against women is, for me, the strongest, most vital aspect of this collection. Women here struggle not only against weak, bullying husbands and cowardly fathers, they have the whole machinery of systemic machismo to deal with as well:

How many times had a cop like this one denied to her face and against all evidence that he had murdered a poor teenager? Because that was what cops did in the southern slums, much more than protect people: they killed teenagers, sometimes out of cruelty, other times because the kids refused to ‘work’ for them – to steal for them or sell the drugs the police seized. Or for betraying them. The reasons for killing poor kids were many and despicable.

My personal favourites among these stories are those in which the horror is less overt, where the line between the uncanny and the everyday is most cunningly hidden. ‘An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt’ follows a tour guide as he entertains tourists with tales of the city’s most notorious murderers and serial killers, among whom the eponymous big-eared runt is most notorious of all, most especially because of the studied delight he seemed to take in the crimes he committed. As Pablo becomes ever more obsessed with the runt, the more the strain of his home life seems to tell on him. The story’s final lines are chilling, all the more so because they are inconclusive. The collection’s tour-de-force is ‘Spiderweb’, in which a young woman tied to a peevish and controlling husband goes on a day trip with him and her extravagantly charismatic and forthright cousin Natalia. Juan-Martin’s nagging and complaining is a constant irritation, and when their car breaks down on the return journey a reckoning seems at hand.

The landscape, atmosphere and tension of ‘Spiderweb’ are reminiscent of stories by Roberto Bolano in which the threat of violence, ever-present, hovers just out of sight. As soldiers of the regime torment a waitress at the neighbouring dining table, Juan-Martin’s unwavering sanctimoniousness threatens to push the threat over the edge towards calamity. Natalia though has her own ideas on how to deal with Martin. Once again, this story is all the more effective through leaving the reader to draw their own conclusion.

After the heat, dust and sweltering tension of Enriquez, I found the atmosphere of Mary South’s stories chilly at first; studied, beautifully turned and just a little too careful. I have seen other critics reference the SF TV series Black Mirror in their assessment of this debut collection, but the more I read of You Will Never Be Forgotten, the more this description seemed too pat, too obvious, and not wholly accurate. It is only really the first story, ‘Keith Prime’, that recalls Black Mirror, not to mention Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, and in spite of being (as are all the stories) beautifully written, it is the one I find least interesting, precisely because its minimalist, soft-sci-fi tropes have been rehearsed before. South makes overt use of science fiction again in ‘To Save the Universe, We Must Also Save Ourselves’, in which the messy real-life dramas of actor Faith Massey are set against the unswerving heroism of her screen incarnation, Dinara Gorun, captain of the spacecraft Audacity.

Fans of the movie Galaxy Quest will find themselves chuckling happily along, and the story leaves no doubt it is doing its own thing by placing Faith’s battle with entrenched sexism – the most indestructible monster she has faced both onscreen and off – front and centre. Far stronger though are those stories in which South turns away from convention and pushes hardest against the boundary between the disdainfully ironic and the overtly uncomfortable. ‘Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy’ starts out reading like a conventional ‘list’ story but gradually strays into territory that is both horrific and heart-shattering. ‘Architecture for Monsters’ follows a journalist-fan of the groundbreaking architect Helen Dannenforth as she works to uncover the inconvenient truths at the heart of a genius’s life and art. ‘The Promised Hostel’ is, in common parlance, something of a mind-fuck, also a great story, while the title piece ‘You Will Never Be Forgotten’, in which a content moderator at ‘the world’s most popular search engine’ seeks to confront her rapist, is equally bold and ambiguous.

If South’s collection seems to lack the visceral, palpable urgency of Enriquez’s, this could well be down to the fact that I read the two books so close together. The elegance of South’s writing, the smooth turns from the domestic-banal to the queasily unnerving, her unswerving examination of aspects of the way we all live now makes You Will Never Be Forgotten well worth seeking out, and leaves the reader in eager anticipation of what South will write next. As for Mariana Enriquez, I understand her next novel is shortly to appear in English translation and I cannot wait. In the meantime, I would urge you to take an hour’s break to watch this conversation between Enriquez and M. John Harrison at this year’s (unavoidably Zoom-based) Buenos Aires Literary Festival. The insights into their writing lives, literary process and aesthetic outlook are many, varied and scintillating. Well worth your time.

Girls Against God #3: The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante and What You Could Have Won by Rachel Genn

December 4, 2020 /

The whole future – I thought – will be that way. Life lives together with the damp odour of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. But it won’t be worse than the past. (The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante)

Encountering these two books back-to-back provided an extraordinary reading experience. Both are superb. Each tackles a broadly similar subject matter but from a wildly different angle. For two novels covering tangentially allied themes, they could hardly have been more different. For anyone doubting the radical potential of works that focus intimately on human relationships, Ferrante and Genn tear down the curtain, revealing the stormy truth of the adage, ‘the personal is political’. What talent and drive.

In What You Could Have Won, we follow the unequal, tormented relationship between Henry, a psychiatrist engaged in research into addictive behaviours, and Astrid, a newly minted superstar who (the author has affirmed) is loosely based on the (phenomenally talented and tragically deceased) singer and songwriter Amy Winehouse. The narrative switches point of view along a disjointed timeline as we observe Henry’s jealous machinations against various colleagues, his depersonalised fascination with Astrid and his use of her – putting it bluntly – as a kind of lab rat.

Astrid is dazzled by Henry because he appears to be so solidly in control. We follow her terrifying ordeal at the Burning Man concert and subsequent escape (with Henry) to a Greek island, we observe her treatment at the hands of ‘hypno Ray’, a cultish rehab guru with some strange ideas about personal boundaries. As Henry and Astrid’s timelines interweave, our involvement – our acquiescence? – deepens. Reading What You Could Have Won is like watching Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: you feel you’re eavesdropping on private trauma, something you were not supposed to see, and yet you have to see the drama through to its conclusion.

The experience of reading Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (translated by Ann Goldstein) is hardly less bruising. Olga is a writer living in Turin with her two children Illaria and Gianni and her husband Mario. After supper one evening, Mario announces that their fifteen-year marriage is over, that the relationship has ceased to have meaning for him. Olga is first bewildered and then increasingly devastated, at a loss as to what has precipitated Mario’s act of abandonment. Mario does that cowardly thing men do – insists ‘it’s not you, it’s me,’ before finally admitting he’s been having an affair. Not just any old affair, either, but the continuation of a relationship that began five years earlier. Olga feels she has, in effect, been living in an alternate reality.

As her grip on her new reality loosens and threatens to collapse, the pressure of trying to carry on as normal becomes increasingly onerous. Her behaviour, once restrained and conservative, becomes more and more untrammelled. Her children, caught in the crossfire between their warring parents, are forced towards a self-reliance that is inappropriate for their young age. For Olga, whose friends seem to have deserted her for the calmer, more glowingly temperate shores of Mario-and-Carla (seriously, I cannot imagine a better book about the realities of divorce), the future feels impenetrable – until a crisis intervenes.

What I have enjoyed most about my time with these two novels is the fascinating clash of registers. What You Could Have Won contains some of the most intelligent, close-grained writing I have encountered all year. For a novel that takes personal trauma as its central subject matter, the tone (almost in a Rachel-Cusk-like way) tends towards the abstract, even abstruse. You have to reach to engage, to dig for the emotion – but once you connect with it, the strength of feeling and power of description is both soul-shaking and mind-grabbing. The switch to first person in the final chapter – and what this means for Astrid – is a genuinely cathartic moment, and the fact that this is achieved through literary device makes it all the more satisfying. Genn’s construction work is careful, knowing and ingenious yet it is fuelled by passion – both for her story and for the written word – and I would expect to see What You Could Have Won strongly in contention for next year’s Goldsmiths.

The Days of Abandonment is so upfront in its treatment of raw emotion – so confronting in its portrayal of mental pain – it can be harrowing to read. And yet this concise, searing account of personal dissolution and restitution is about as far from a conventional ‘relationship drama’ as you might wish it to be. As Olga spirals out of control, Ferrante employs what might be called a storm of language, torrential word-power to evoke her distorted perceptions, for as it turns out, Ferrante’s novel is as much about addiction and altered states as Genn’s. There are passages of hallucinatory rage that spiral off into the abstract, an analysis of consciousness and affect that approaches the philosophical. As with Genn, Ferrante’s endgame is one of transfiguration and catharsis. Olga’s new understanding of love is more astringent, based in self-reliance. The toxic enchantment is broken, the creative life replenished with a newly-found trenchancy.

Girls Against God #2: Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

November 25, 2020 /

I read this and I thought: this book should win prizes. This book should be at the very least longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. But I bet they’re not brave enough.

Irina Sturges is a photographer. She studied at Central St Martins and then went on to do a postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art. She found her time as a student in London confronting, confusing, exhilarating and ultimately destabilizing. She has an eating disorder, a coke habit and a very guilty conscience. She has been passionately in love yet determined to sabotage her own happiness. She finds it almost impossible to relate to people other than by exploiting them. Back home in Newcastle, she is doing fairly OK professionally through online sales and her edgy, transgressive imagery has brought her a massive Instagram following. When she gets a call from a gallery in Hackney interested in putting on a retrospective, Irina goes into a tailspin, belief in her work vying with the ever-present, ever corrosive urge to self-destruction. As she sorts through her back catalogue of images, we gain insights into her process, as well as glimpses of the terrible act that brought her to this point of imminent crisis.

What’s to say about this excoriating, impassioned, incisive debut other than go read it? Is it possible for me to say I liked Irina? Put it this way, if I’d lived in a student house with her I would have been the tedious bore making cups of tea, scrubbing the KFC stains off the carpet, putting out the bins and banging on about how she should be eating proper meals. Her work though I get, her intelligence I respect, her ambition I admire. While there will be some who read Boy Parts and understandably feel repelled by Irina’s abrasiveness and misanthropy, for me the most horrific part of what can often be an uncomfortable narrative to read is what happens to Irina at the gallery and afterwards: her experience of marginalisation and eye-watering prejudice, her own uncertainty over the crime that might be a delusion, a fundamental break with reality brought on by mental and emotional collapse.

What actually happened? There are clues but they are inconclusive. Like all the most satisfying novels, Boy Parts leaves us free to make up our own minds. Whatever else this novel is, or might be, it’s a brilliant dissection of objectification and how women making art, especially women from disadvantaged backgrounds, are perceived. Clark’s loose, colloquial style is both a perfect evocation of a particular zeitgeist and a cannily contrived screen for some excellent examination of artistic process and superbly evoked weirdness.

Boy Parts is bold and dark and strikingly ambitious – just like Irina. It is also very, very funny. I loved it a lot. I’m already looking forward to whatever Clark dreams up next. In the meantime, you can find out more about the background and inspirations for Boy Parts in this author interview.

Girls Against God #1: Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

November 19, 2020 /

Jenny Hval’s prickly second novel turns out to be the perfect place to begin my current reading project, because Girls Against God is a confronting text in every sense. At the surface level, the novel poses as an autofictional account of a young woman growing up in the stiflingly religious, provincial atmosphere of southern Norway. Raging against a society that presents a whiter-than-white face to the world whilst harbouring and nurturing attitudes of racism, intolerance and petit-bourgeois philistinism, our narrator finds a focus for her rebellion through the world of black metal music and its aggressive iconoclasm. Her passionate desire to ‘be in a band’ allies her with two other like-minded young women, Venke and Terese. Together they flirt with various styles of performance and expression, entwining their musical experimentation with the practice of modern witchcraft. They begin to think of themselves as a coven, an irritant in society’s gut, a literal ‘trash stench’.

The timeline jumps between the narrator’s schooldays and her years at college to residencies in London and New England to a moment in the near-present in which an older version of the narrator is engaged in the making of an experimental film. Girls Against God rejoices in filmic imagery and references. Derek Jarman makes an appearance, and Dusan Makavejev’s ultra-transgressive 1974 film Sweet Movie is referenced and analysed before being partially re-enacted in a scene of phantasmagorical weirdness in a school canteen. The Blair-Witch-like film Forest, whose description and analysis forms the third part of the novel, is both a metaphor for the book as a whole and a marvellous act of ventriloquism; Hval is able to translate the elusive visual language of film to the written word with remarkable acuity and power.

There is still more to be had from this book, though. Girls Against God reads almost as a polemic, a manifesto – Hval’s examination of the taboos around women’s self-expression, the persecution of ‘witches’ (and witches) and the authoritarian suppression of individual acts of rebellion and protest is the cold steel, the anger that gives this narrative its resonance. As a piece of weird fiction that places passages of memoir alongside strange slides into hallucinatory otherness and sublime terror, this book is unique, The Craft on LSD. As a record of the slow commodification of Nordic Black Metal, Girls Against God works as a fascinating piece of documentary. As a rebel yell, a scream of protest in the endless white night of Norwegian summer, it is lacerating, eloquent and exhilarating.

The novel goes still further in examining the nature and purpose of writing itself in breaking down atrophied systems and challenging norms. I especially admired Hval’s juxtaposition of the forest interludes with her startling and imaginative use of the electronic sounds (text tones, old dial-up modem sounds, skype calls) that make up the ‘cosmic internet’, a parallel natural history, a modern cosmology.

Impassioned, original and revelatory, Girls Against God is a dense, occasionally stubborn book that rewards the effort involved in reading it. Hval opens up the possibilities of fiction, fusing together music, image and thought in a web of text that is refreshing and inspirational in its integrity. One to keep.

Girls Against God

November 12, 2020 /

Late last month I happened to be reading an interview/conversation between the American writer Alexandra Kleeman (author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine) and the Norwegian writer and musician Jenny Hval, whose second novel Girls Against God has just been published. Both writers share an interest in transgression, in breaking down genre boundaries and in the idea of literary experimentation. It’s a fascinating piece, and one I found resonated with me a lot, most especially their discussion of how the radical-experimental space in writing has tended to be colonised by men. Helen de Witt in particular has written brilliantly about this, as of course has Rachel Cusk.

My own interest in fragmented narratives, in narratives that push beyond ‘story’ to examine not only the urge to record but also our relationship as both readers and writers with words on a page and especially in our current reality the value of words as resistance, protest, the proposition of counter-realities has become all-consuming of late. This obsession with narrative structures, with the purpose and meaning of the written word has resulted in notable and repeated upheavals in my work-in-progress as well as a renewed focus on and fascination with writers whom I perceive as sharing these ideals – writers whose engagement with language itself is relentless and searching.

The challenge of being a woman in such spaces is a matter of particular fascination and sometimes vexation. With this in mind, I have decided I would like to spend some of this winter exploring works by women writers that I see as radical and/or transgressive. Two years ago I read a series of such works one after the other: Ann Quin’s Berg, Eley Williams’s Attrib, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Break.up by Joanna Walsh, Milkman by Anna Burns, All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn, Exposure by Olivia Sudjic and Hell by Kathryn Davis. The effect of encountering these works so closely together, as a concentrated block of ideas, was profoundly energising and remains a touchstone experience, not just in and of itself but for the inspiration it provided, the example set: this is what is possible.

Trying to process this experience, to persuade it to bear fruit – that is the tricky bit. It is also the most exciting part of the work I am attempting to do. I thought it might be useful and interesting to share my thoughts on some of works I am finding most relevant, engaging and challenging at the moment, to discover them on the page, to set down my impressions as they are being gathered. In honour of the interview that inspired it, I am going to call this project Girls Against God, though we may well find as many girls who are pro god as anti. I am not going to set myself a strict timetable for posting, nor even a specific day, though I am hoping to put up something new for you to read roughly once a week.

I plan to start next week sometime with Girls Against God itself. In the meantime, let me commend to you Jenny Hval’s stunning album The Practice of Love, which seems to tie into everything she says in the interview with energy and grace.

© 2024 The Spider's House

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑