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Virginie: Her Two Lives
Her former master is a Pygmalion-styled creator of erotically-receptive women, a teacher who raises women of lowly origins to accommodate the tastes of a decadent French nobility. In the latter life, Bocage brings a circle of prostitutes home for his evenings of entertainment.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published April 7, 1982
1 person is currently reading
113 people want to read
About the author
John Hawkes
109 books191 followersJohn Hawkes, born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr., was a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended the traditional constraints of the narrative.
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Later, however, his second novel, The Beetle Leg, an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th Century American literature.
Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Later, however, his second novel, The Beetle Leg, an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th Century American literature.
Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 14, 2014
The Novel Fights Back
Wow, that was a roller coaster ride!
As far as ratings go, it was looking like a four until half way through, when it seemed to bog down and become a three (it was probably at the very top of the ride, before it started to plunge), but finally it picked itself up from the studio floor and proudly asserted that it deserved a five.
This was my first Hawkes novel. It was published in 1982, 33 years after his first novel and 15 years before his last. For much of it, I was wondering whether I had made a mistake not reading his earlier works first. I wanted to get a feel for how he fitted into the world of Realism, Modernism and Post-Modernism.
Having finished it, I wouldn’t discourage anybody from starting with this novel, especially if you’re not sure how many of his works you want to read.
The Shell-Pink Space in Literature
The inside front jacket blurb says of Hawkes:
"John Hawkes is widely regarded as one of the masters of modernism, a narrative virtuoso who is as innovative as he is accomplished."
It's odd that, as recently as 1982, the blurb uses the word "Modernism", not "Post-Modernism".
In 1965, Hawkes said:
"I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained. And structure – verbal and psychological coherence – is still my largest concern as a writer."
Some say that Hawkes returned to plot and character later in his career. I’d say that this novel has everything. However, the relative realism of the prose, at least initially, disguises what a truly subtle and sophisticated work it is. And this sophistication derives not so much from its realism, or plot or character, but its structure, its verbal and psychological coherence.
When you get to the end you realise just how metafictional the work was all along. You can’t help but admire Hawkes for the precision with which he pulled it off. Equally, you can’t help grinning, because his sense of humour also becomes apparent, if it wasn’t all along.
This gives retrospective meaning to Hawkes’ words in the preface:
"My subject was, from the start, that wisp of shell-pink space shared equally, I am convinced, by the pornographic narrative (in colour photographs) and the love lyric, from the troubadours, say, to the present. Thus, parody, archaic tones, and an overall comic flavour were inevitable, as were sources and influences."
Sadeian Bravado
Hawkes wrote the preface in Venasque, France, close to the location of the Marquis de Sade’s chateau. Half of the novel is set in Venasque in 1740, the year of de Sade’s birth.
Hawkes admits it was conceived as a reverie about de Sade. You don’t realise until the last pages just how much of a tribute it is.
Hawkes displayed real courage in writing the novel the way he did.
It’s narrated in the first person by a female. Many question the right or ability of a male to accomplish this. To complicate matters, there are two female narrators. So, double the trouble. But then, one narrates in 1740 and the other in Paris in 1945. As if that’s not enough, it turns out that both narrators are the same person, Virginie, or perhaps the same spirit.
The fact that the narrators are the same spirit might help us deal with another anomaly. The narrators are both aged 11. Hawkes makes them witness extreme graphic sex and violence, the sort that makes the conservative moral and child protection lobbies freak out.
It has to be said that the narrative is precocious for an 11 year old. They both write like adults. We have to assume that the mind and spirit are timeless, but made flesh in the body of an 11 year old. Anyway, the novel is good enough to let him get away with this deliberate and playful anomaly.
The Task of Making Five True Women at a Time
The 1740 narrative documents the life of Seigneur, an aristocrat who crafts women for the use of other aristocrats. He instructs young girls, five at a time, often found on the street or in the countryside, in the art of "true womanhood".
When the girls arrive in his chateau, they must adopt a name that reflects one of the five qualities they must eventually have to be released back into the world as a Noblesse: Colère, Bel Esprit, Volupté, Finesse or Magie (anger, wit, voluptuousness, delicacy and magic).
Seigneur comes across as a benign character. He might even symbolize the author, or at least an author (de Sade?). Even if his charges are being bred for servitude, he believes he is doing good by them:
"Magie! Be brave! Be proud! In all your days to come, and without thinking and as a matter of fact, you must expect to receive from each and every lover, master, lord of your life, precisely that kind of gift to compare favourably, in quality, with the gift you shall now receive from me. Nothing is too good for you, Magie! Nothing too abominable! Nothing too rare!"
The Statue’s Disdain for the Sculptor
When we first meet Seigneur, his most recent Noblesse has just turned her back on him:
"She is gone, quite gone. And she was not grateful. In the end she was unable to summon from her heart that I myself made proud the slightest sign of gratitude or affection. She forgave nothing. She chose not to recall the pleasure that grew with her development and that was an obvious recompense for pain. There is no living statue more beautiful than Noblesse. And what can we say of the statue that disdains the very sculptor who brought it to life? How sad it is, Virginie. How sad."
The entire novel is steeped in the words and world of de Sade. However, this passage also alludes to the Pygmalion myth. There is no suggestion that Seigneur ever falls in love with any of his pupils. In fact, he forbids himself the pleasure of sleeping with any of them. However, he does bring his aesthetic works to life. The problem is that some of them turn their back on him. In literary terms, the characters rebel against their author.
The Sadeian Woman
In 1945, Bocage seems equally intent on creating the perfect Sadeian woman (alluded to in Angela Carter’s book of that name):
"This is the woman who knows herself, who has seen the readiness of her craving in the oval glass, who is aware of little else, indeed, than that she lives for desire, and wakes, moves about, sleeps in the consciousness of her desire which is boldness of mind and body that never dies, not for an instant…
"What is this woman’s very person if not desire? What does this ordinary woman understand if not precisely this state of affairs? That she herself is desire, that she exists in the form of desire, that she desires generally and specifically throughout all the minutes of the day and in her dreams, which is to say that she herself is absorbed in the desire that is herself, as only she can know, that her desire comes first and then the man…
"The woman, I say, is not dependent on the man. No, the woman in all her consciousness lives out her days until at last she is able to fit some man to her desire. And then another, and another, and another, vows and reason notwithstanding."
Seigneur takes his women on a similar route from the Plain of Indifference to the Land of Love, the Terrain of Sensuality, or even Lust (having avoided or negotiated the Valley of Declared Love, the Citadel of the Desire to Please, the Labyrinth of Surrender All, the Chateau of Resistance and the Fields of the Wounded Heart).
"We Live Solely by the Sphinx and the Zizi"
Virginie is a witness to all of the 1740 Charades of Love and the goings on in the 1945 Sex Arcade, but never a participant.
What she sees and hears is pretty explicit (there is an abundance of women’s breasts and men’s "zizi’s"), if frequently fun and always well-written:
"I knew what he wanted. He wanted my hand-sized sphinx exposed. Now it was…I felt on the softness of his fingers my own wetness….I reached down for his apricot and found it and pulled it into me, all the rest following as smoothly as if it had been unattached to his body, and had belonged to me alone…but I knew what was his and what was mine, and that we balanced."
Virginie envies the other women. Seigneur reassures her with a passionate logic:
"Life’s first principle is love. But the first principle of love is secrecy. In the salon, you are my secret."
Like de Sade, Seigneur adopts the same logic with respect to marriage:
"Paradoxically, marriage is antithetical to love, since duty is the fundament of marriage, and duty, by definition, destroys the free reciprocity which is the heart of love.
"Fidelity in marriage is duty in a false cloak; between lovers fidelity is the yearning of the freely generous spirit."
This recalls Simone de Beauvoir’s language in her Hegelian analysis of de Sade in "Must We Burn Sade?"
The Love of Innocence
Virginie is not just a secret, she’s also a kitchen hand, a practical, loyal, obedient servant:
”I thought myself a statue of a young and naked girl on her way for water, as if I were a member of a functioning household…”
She does what is expected of her. It’s not her role to challenge the authority of Seigneur or Bocage, each of whom sees her as a far more important creation:
"I am the artist, and you…you are my soul."
It becomes clear why Virginie is only 11 years old. It’s crucial that she be and remain as beautiful and innocent as a flower:
"I love your innocence. I could not love it more…Innocence is the clarity with which the self shows forth the self. Love is the respect we feel for innocence."
It’s equally important that Seigneur/Bocage/Hawkes the sculptor/creator/author love Virginie and her innocence, for she the character is destined to love them back.
The Bridegroom Stripped Bare by His Bachelorettes, Oddly
The other characters have a mind of their own, and are prone to rebellion. No man is God, especially the author. However, just as Christ died for those whom God created, the author is expected to die for his art.
The denouement is both profound and hilarious. I won’t say much about it, except that Seigneur, the bridegroom, is stripped bare by his bachelorettes. The response to what they see reveals a little tongue-in-cheek vanity on the part of Hawkes:
"…what a waste of abstinence! Oh, sad disuse!...must we burn this man?"
Inevitably, for a laugh, Hawkes implicitly positions himself, the author, in the narrative as de Sade. These are his creations. One of them loves him. She keeps a journal, well, two journals actually.
Whatever the fate of Virginie and her journals (and I’m not telling), this novel ensures that Hawkes’ art is not gone, that his art is not dead. Through it, fortunately, we can still ”remember the ghosts of dead flowers.”
SOUNDTRACK:
The Soundtrack of Our Lives - "Sister Surround"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Dgye...
"Surround sister, take care of me..."
The Soundtrack of Our Lives - "Sister Surround" [Live on Jools Holland in 2002]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw5Lf...
The Soundtrack of Our Lives - "Sister Surround" [Live on Letterman in 2002]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhKxM...
And while we're doing Doo Doo Doo songs:
The Rolling Stones - "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvMJG...
David McComb - "Setting You Free"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcdwd...
Wow, that was a roller coaster ride!
As far as ratings go, it was looking like a four until half way through, when it seemed to bog down and become a three (it was probably at the very top of the ride, before it started to plunge), but finally it picked itself up from the studio floor and proudly asserted that it deserved a five.
This was my first Hawkes novel. It was published in 1982, 33 years after his first novel and 15 years before his last. For much of it, I was wondering whether I had made a mistake not reading his earlier works first. I wanted to get a feel for how he fitted into the world of Realism, Modernism and Post-Modernism.
Having finished it, I wouldn’t discourage anybody from starting with this novel, especially if you’re not sure how many of his works you want to read.
The Shell-Pink Space in Literature
The inside front jacket blurb says of Hawkes:
"John Hawkes is widely regarded as one of the masters of modernism, a narrative virtuoso who is as innovative as he is accomplished."
It's odd that, as recently as 1982, the blurb uses the word "Modernism", not "Post-Modernism".
In 1965, Hawkes said:
"I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained. And structure – verbal and psychological coherence – is still my largest concern as a writer."
Some say that Hawkes returned to plot and character later in his career. I’d say that this novel has everything. However, the relative realism of the prose, at least initially, disguises what a truly subtle and sophisticated work it is. And this sophistication derives not so much from its realism, or plot or character, but its structure, its verbal and psychological coherence.
When you get to the end you realise just how metafictional the work was all along. You can’t help but admire Hawkes for the precision with which he pulled it off. Equally, you can’t help grinning, because his sense of humour also becomes apparent, if it wasn’t all along.
This gives retrospective meaning to Hawkes’ words in the preface:
"My subject was, from the start, that wisp of shell-pink space shared equally, I am convinced, by the pornographic narrative (in colour photographs) and the love lyric, from the troubadours, say, to the present. Thus, parody, archaic tones, and an overall comic flavour were inevitable, as were sources and influences."
Sadeian Bravado
Hawkes wrote the preface in Venasque, France, close to the location of the Marquis de Sade’s chateau. Half of the novel is set in Venasque in 1740, the year of de Sade’s birth.
Hawkes admits it was conceived as a reverie about de Sade. You don’t realise until the last pages just how much of a tribute it is.
Hawkes displayed real courage in writing the novel the way he did.
It’s narrated in the first person by a female. Many question the right or ability of a male to accomplish this. To complicate matters, there are two female narrators. So, double the trouble. But then, one narrates in 1740 and the other in Paris in 1945. As if that’s not enough, it turns out that both narrators are the same person, Virginie, or perhaps the same spirit.
The fact that the narrators are the same spirit might help us deal with another anomaly. The narrators are both aged 11. Hawkes makes them witness extreme graphic sex and violence, the sort that makes the conservative moral and child protection lobbies freak out.
It has to be said that the narrative is precocious for an 11 year old. They both write like adults. We have to assume that the mind and spirit are timeless, but made flesh in the body of an 11 year old. Anyway, the novel is good enough to let him get away with this deliberate and playful anomaly.
The Task of Making Five True Women at a Time
The 1740 narrative documents the life of Seigneur, an aristocrat who crafts women for the use of other aristocrats. He instructs young girls, five at a time, often found on the street or in the countryside, in the art of "true womanhood".
When the girls arrive in his chateau, they must adopt a name that reflects one of the five qualities they must eventually have to be released back into the world as a Noblesse: Colère, Bel Esprit, Volupté, Finesse or Magie (anger, wit, voluptuousness, delicacy and magic).
Seigneur comes across as a benign character. He might even symbolize the author, or at least an author (de Sade?). Even if his charges are being bred for servitude, he believes he is doing good by them:
"Magie! Be brave! Be proud! In all your days to come, and without thinking and as a matter of fact, you must expect to receive from each and every lover, master, lord of your life, precisely that kind of gift to compare favourably, in quality, with the gift you shall now receive from me. Nothing is too good for you, Magie! Nothing too abominable! Nothing too rare!"
The Statue’s Disdain for the Sculptor
When we first meet Seigneur, his most recent Noblesse has just turned her back on him:
"She is gone, quite gone. And she was not grateful. In the end she was unable to summon from her heart that I myself made proud the slightest sign of gratitude or affection. She forgave nothing. She chose not to recall the pleasure that grew with her development and that was an obvious recompense for pain. There is no living statue more beautiful than Noblesse. And what can we say of the statue that disdains the very sculptor who brought it to life? How sad it is, Virginie. How sad."
The entire novel is steeped in the words and world of de Sade. However, this passage also alludes to the Pygmalion myth. There is no suggestion that Seigneur ever falls in love with any of his pupils. In fact, he forbids himself the pleasure of sleeping with any of them. However, he does bring his aesthetic works to life. The problem is that some of them turn their back on him. In literary terms, the characters rebel against their author.
The Sadeian Woman
In 1945, Bocage seems equally intent on creating the perfect Sadeian woman (alluded to in Angela Carter’s book of that name):
"This is the woman who knows herself, who has seen the readiness of her craving in the oval glass, who is aware of little else, indeed, than that she lives for desire, and wakes, moves about, sleeps in the consciousness of her desire which is boldness of mind and body that never dies, not for an instant…
"What is this woman’s very person if not desire? What does this ordinary woman understand if not precisely this state of affairs? That she herself is desire, that she exists in the form of desire, that she desires generally and specifically throughout all the minutes of the day and in her dreams, which is to say that she herself is absorbed in the desire that is herself, as only she can know, that her desire comes first and then the man…
"The woman, I say, is not dependent on the man. No, the woman in all her consciousness lives out her days until at last she is able to fit some man to her desire. And then another, and another, and another, vows and reason notwithstanding."
Seigneur takes his women on a similar route from the Plain of Indifference to the Land of Love, the Terrain of Sensuality, or even Lust (having avoided or negotiated the Valley of Declared Love, the Citadel of the Desire to Please, the Labyrinth of Surrender All, the Chateau of Resistance and the Fields of the Wounded Heart).
"We Live Solely by the Sphinx and the Zizi"
Virginie is a witness to all of the 1740 Charades of Love and the goings on in the 1945 Sex Arcade, but never a participant.
What she sees and hears is pretty explicit (there is an abundance of women’s breasts and men’s "zizi’s"), if frequently fun and always well-written:
"I knew what he wanted. He wanted my hand-sized sphinx exposed. Now it was…I felt on the softness of his fingers my own wetness….I reached down for his apricot and found it and pulled it into me, all the rest following as smoothly as if it had been unattached to his body, and had belonged to me alone…but I knew what was his and what was mine, and that we balanced."
Virginie envies the other women. Seigneur reassures her with a passionate logic:
"Life’s first principle is love. But the first principle of love is secrecy. In the salon, you are my secret."
Like de Sade, Seigneur adopts the same logic with respect to marriage:
"Paradoxically, marriage is antithetical to love, since duty is the fundament of marriage, and duty, by definition, destroys the free reciprocity which is the heart of love.
"Fidelity in marriage is duty in a false cloak; between lovers fidelity is the yearning of the freely generous spirit."
This recalls Simone de Beauvoir’s language in her Hegelian analysis of de Sade in "Must We Burn Sade?"
The Love of Innocence
Virginie is not just a secret, she’s also a kitchen hand, a practical, loyal, obedient servant:
”I thought myself a statue of a young and naked girl on her way for water, as if I were a member of a functioning household…”
She does what is expected of her. It’s not her role to challenge the authority of Seigneur or Bocage, each of whom sees her as a far more important creation:
"I am the artist, and you…you are my soul."
It becomes clear why Virginie is only 11 years old. It’s crucial that she be and remain as beautiful and innocent as a flower:
"I love your innocence. I could not love it more…Innocence is the clarity with which the self shows forth the self. Love is the respect we feel for innocence."
It’s equally important that Seigneur/Bocage/Hawkes the sculptor/creator/author love Virginie and her innocence, for she the character is destined to love them back.
The Bridegroom Stripped Bare by His Bachelorettes, Oddly
The other characters have a mind of their own, and are prone to rebellion. No man is God, especially the author. However, just as Christ died for those whom God created, the author is expected to die for his art.
The denouement is both profound and hilarious. I won’t say much about it, except that Seigneur, the bridegroom, is stripped bare by his bachelorettes. The response to what they see reveals a little tongue-in-cheek vanity on the part of Hawkes:
"…what a waste of abstinence! Oh, sad disuse!...must we burn this man?"
Inevitably, for a laugh, Hawkes implicitly positions himself, the author, in the narrative as de Sade. These are his creations. One of them loves him. She keeps a journal, well, two journals actually.
Whatever the fate of Virginie and her journals (and I’m not telling), this novel ensures that Hawkes’ art is not gone, that his art is not dead. Through it, fortunately, we can still ”remember the ghosts of dead flowers.”
SOUNDTRACK:
The Soundtrack of Our Lives - "Sister Surround"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Dgye...
"Surround sister, take care of me..."
The Soundtrack of Our Lives - "Sister Surround" [Live on Jools Holland in 2002]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw5Lf...
The Soundtrack of Our Lives - "Sister Surround" [Live on Letterman in 2002]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhKxM...
And while we're doing Doo Doo Doo songs:
The Rolling Stones - "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvMJG...
David McComb - "Setting You Free"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcdwd...
December 17, 2024
John Hawkes falls into that category of Ivy League educated pervert postmodernists of the 1980s (along with John Barth and Robert Coover, whose review adorns the dust jacket of Virginie: Her Two Lives). Hawkes is obsessed with picaresque and ribald novels, implementing the dense modernist prose of Djuna Barnes, James Joyce and the run-on sentences of Marcel Proust. So far Virginie (with echoes of other pedantically erotic heroines of Marquis de Sade novels Justine and Juliette) is a rather tedious exercise in style. Ideally substance would have emerged as I endeavored to read this meandering and repetitive ode to Georges Bataille with the requisite stream of consciousness narrative, it did not. Virginie, our reincarnated heroine, lives in 1740 as a child servant who sleeps in the embers of the kitchen hearth and assists a depraved member of the nobility, referred to solely as Seigneur, who offers impoverished women an instruction in “music as well as in the multitudinous forms of the erotic embrace” essentially molding through rigorous training and discipline Courtesans for equally depraved libertines. Virginie is also a child recounting her own death in Paris on the eve of World War II, after being cared for by Bocage, a taxi driver and pimp, who surrounds the child with prostitutes and thugs while her mother lies in bed suffering from paralysis. Each chapter alternates between the two time lines and seeks to capture the perspective of an innocent girl who witnesses masochistic debauchery whose significance she cannot possibly comprehend. Of course in the 1945 time line Virginie has such pretentiously incomprehensible thoughts as “Did I dream the darkness that wears soft the stone, like sheep in the narrow passages of a labyrinth?” and in the opening chapter alludes to a journal whose details she could not possibly recall but does, one must assume it chronicles the events of her previous life. However after a dense and unrewarding 58 pages I abandoned the exploits of Virginie, Seigneur (Bocage) and his five prostitutes in their various incarnations. I am curious about why the 1980s produced the popular revival of bawdy, intellectual novels, was it inspired by the publication of Susan Sontag's essay "The Pornographic Imagination" or translations of Pauline Reage's The Story of O? Regardless Virginie was just tedious.
May 31, 2024
Hawkes does Sade and does a great job of it.
October 12, 2024
There is forbidden life enough for everyone!
Following Travesty and The Passion Artist, this novel belongs to that point of Hawkes's career when he was thoroughly obsessed with love (read: sex), and it reads as though the writer is trying to purge himself of the obsession, fill a whole book with it to the exclusion of most everything else so as to finally move on.
What's not excluded are his characteristic intensity of prose and feeling, his unforgettable imagery, and his boundless creativity and strangeness, all of which elevate what could easily have grown tiresome in lesser hands. The setting is "France", though as usual Hawkes presents it with anti-realism, taking what vague cultural trappings of the place he sees fit and sculpting a new and utterly fanciful literary land. That our narrator (narrators?) is a child adds to the dreaminess and is a natural fit for Hawkes's style- it's a trick he uses again in later books, as well as at least one animal narrator.
Because he is a great artist, the lewd scenes always speak of higher and more rarefied things as well, and Virginie offers words of wisdom on broader topics of desire, self-sacrifice, the search for meaning. Nonetheless it's no surprise this one is a deep cut from an already lesser-known writer; someone just looking to pick up and read a novel, with no prior knowledge of John Hawkes, would likely find it extremely off-putting, in content but even more so in style. His best works (The Cannibal, The Lime Twig, Second Skin) integrate all the strange magics into something truly splendid; lesser entries like this one have all the pieces but don't quite achieve it. But it's still a sliver of a strange exquisite mind- an unassuming yet priceless thing.
Following Travesty and The Passion Artist, this novel belongs to that point of Hawkes's career when he was thoroughly obsessed with love (read: sex), and it reads as though the writer is trying to purge himself of the obsession, fill a whole book with it to the exclusion of most everything else so as to finally move on.
What's not excluded are his characteristic intensity of prose and feeling, his unforgettable imagery, and his boundless creativity and strangeness, all of which elevate what could easily have grown tiresome in lesser hands. The setting is "France", though as usual Hawkes presents it with anti-realism, taking what vague cultural trappings of the place he sees fit and sculpting a new and utterly fanciful literary land. That our narrator (narrators?) is a child adds to the dreaminess and is a natural fit for Hawkes's style- it's a trick he uses again in later books, as well as at least one animal narrator.
Because he is a great artist, the lewd scenes always speak of higher and more rarefied things as well, and Virginie offers words of wisdom on broader topics of desire, self-sacrifice, the search for meaning. Nonetheless it's no surprise this one is a deep cut from an already lesser-known writer; someone just looking to pick up and read a novel, with no prior knowledge of John Hawkes, would likely find it extremely off-putting, in content but even more so in style. His best works (The Cannibal, The Lime Twig, Second Skin) integrate all the strange magics into something truly splendid; lesser entries like this one have all the pieces but don't quite achieve it. But it's still a sliver of a strange exquisite mind- an unassuming yet priceless thing.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews