A groundbreaking, anachronistic experiment in literature informed by the countertraditions of New Narrative and queer writing
Judith, an academic celebrity, and Wendy, a slightly less famous academic celebrity, fall in love. They break up. In her ensuing grief, Wendy finds herself in a pornographic, epistolary haze that slumps toward the narrative. Fueled by the only things that cut through the pain―sex and democratic theory―Wendy takes us along on her wild ride toward self-actualization. In Claire Star Finch’s first novel, love and the void question each other in action.
The prose in this one blew me away so much that often times while reading it, I had to set it down and just sit with the feelings. I want to write a review that this book deserves but I need to sit with it a little longer I think.
the whole thing is just a lot of academic language and REALLY intense sex scenes. its another book i am too stupid for. i felt like nothing was gained the entire time but i think that's just because, as i mentioned, i'm too stupid for this book.
Undoubtedly satirical, I spent much of my time reading this wondering to what extent the book is consciously or unconsciously a, if not the, butt(ler) of its own joke. Invested academics being an especially abominable clump, and humanities academia being one of the most fundamentally dishonest professions imaginable, vapidly and pointlessly obsessed with copey legitimation on the mirage tropes of “potentiality,” “new worlds/ways/etc,” “the political,” this book astutely skewers such premises while remaining, it seems, thoroughly invested in their viability—as if auto-fiction, however ironized, can, through chortles of sharp, quasi-detached wit, reinvest deeply losery institutional lives with affective and thus significant politicality: a pseudo-critical critique of the academic feeling of “feeling political” while being generically bourgeois and individualist.
Anyway, this book has fleeting glimmers of brilliance, notably when it takes the above (and other adjacent) premises and burns with them for fuel, interrogating its own crevices and holes and fuckery in ways that strain for a point at which “we” can just be “explicit.” But then inevitably it flumps back into the accumulating tedium of its regurgitative fuck litany. It’s a grad student’s cannibalistic orgy at queer theory’s professionally neutered limits, mockery as melancholy, high on its own cut supply, the same joke told over and over again until you realize it wasn’t funny to begin with.
Le décalage entre les passages de sexe lesbien hard et les références à la philosophie politique qui s'enchaînent paragraphe après paragraphe m'ont fait trop rire, bien sûr c'est une prose dense du coup, avec une dimension presque académique, ça le rend un peu inaccessible sans doute et il faut aimer ça, moi j'ai kiffé