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Sphinx
Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others. A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language. Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist and LGBT literary canon appearing in English for the first time. Anne Garréta (b. 1962) is a lecturer at the University of Rennes II and research professor of literature and Romance studies at Duke University. She joined the Oulipo in 2000, becoming the first member to join born after the Oulipo was founded. Garréta won France's prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent," for her novel Pas un jour . Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University and received her master's in literary translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse. She is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco.
152 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 19, 1986
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8046 people want to read
About the author
Anne Garréta
10 books92 followersAnne F. Garréta (born 1962) is a French novelist and a member of the experimental literary group Oulipo. A graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Anne F. Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), hailed by critics, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator’s love interest, A***. Her second novel, Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990), tells the fate of a character losing the use of language. In La Décomposition (Grasset, 1999), a serial killer methodically murders characters from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994, and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won the Prix Médicis in 2002 for her novel Pas un jour. awarded each year to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent” (she is the second Oulipian to win the award—Georges Perec won in 1978).
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May 20, 2025
This is the first novel not using any gender markers for its protagonists, which confronts readers with their preconceptions about the binary and the limitations of language: The central plot point is a love story, but we never learn about the sex or gender of the two lovers. "Sphinx" is set in Paris in the 1980's and part of the canon of the Oulipo movement (Ouvrir de Litterérature potentielle), which works with restraints, so artificial writing rules (here the lack of gender markers). First published 1986, when characters outside the binary where even more unusual than now, it granted Garréta her status as the first female Oulipo member.
In the text, the narrator looks back at a love long gone: They just abandoned their studies of theology and dropped out of college, a pastor takes them to a club, and when the DJ dies of a heroine overdose, the narrator becomes the new DJ. In this scene of Paris nightlife and music, they meet their love interest A+++ who is ten years older, a Black Catholic and a dancer with a very different social background. Their environment perceive them as non-compatible, and A+++ is also hesitant at first, but the narrator keeps courting them - successfully, as it turns out. But their love soon turns sour because of their differences...
The whole thing is structured in five parts: Before the relationship, the relationship, the relationship aftermath, the narrator visiting A+++'s dying mother, and a last part that shouldn't be spoilt. Readers will find themselves constantly searching the text for clues, meaning they ponder which descriptions and behaviors might be coded within the binary - but of course, the text refuses to conform, that's the whole point. Rather, it helps readers to question their preconceptions about gender. And the aesthetic repercussions of the conceit show, which illustrates how our language is infused with gendered ideas - still, it makes for a shaky read that renders the characters elusive and difficult to picture, especially A+++ who almost can't be described because in French, even adjectives are gendered. The pacing is also questionable, and the story itself surprisingly conventional, relying on obvious juxtapositions.
Great as a literary experiment, but not particularly successful as a story in itself.
In the text, the narrator looks back at a love long gone: They just abandoned their studies of theology and dropped out of college, a pastor takes them to a club, and when the DJ dies of a heroine overdose, the narrator becomes the new DJ. In this scene of Paris nightlife and music, they meet their love interest A+++ who is ten years older, a Black Catholic and a dancer with a very different social background. Their environment perceive them as non-compatible, and A+++ is also hesitant at first, but the narrator keeps courting them - successfully, as it turns out. But their love soon turns sour because of their differences...
The whole thing is structured in five parts: Before the relationship, the relationship, the relationship aftermath, the narrator visiting A+++'s dying mother, and a last part that shouldn't be spoilt. Readers will find themselves constantly searching the text for clues, meaning they ponder which descriptions and behaviors might be coded within the binary - but of course, the text refuses to conform, that's the whole point. Rather, it helps readers to question their preconceptions about gender. And the aesthetic repercussions of the conceit show, which illustrates how our language is infused with gendered ideas - still, it makes for a shaky read that renders the characters elusive and difficult to picture, especially A+++ who almost can't be described because in French, even adjectives are gendered. The pacing is also questionable, and the story itself surprisingly conventional, relying on obvious juxtapositions.
Great as a literary experiment, but not particularly successful as a story in itself.
April 16, 2015
Besides the constraint driving this, which would be even more amazing to gradually feel out had it not been spelled out by the back cover and everything to refer to this book*, this is just a gorgeous piece of writing and very atmospheric exploration of the nocturnal life of a city. The fact that Garreta (the first female member of the oulipo reach English translation!) is able make this so elegantly readable, and also so dense and involving despite its being, essentially, a simple love story, is a testament to her command of language and narrative, and to her engagement with the metaphysical beyond (but always informing) the simple terms or relationship arc. This becomes something almost as difficult to pin down, in places, as Maurice Blanchot in recit, but more -- even at its most abstract -- closely tethered into feeling and narrative. Formidable, I hope this will only be the first of many Garreta works to reach English translation now. This and Jane Unrue are clearly the discoveries of the winter/spring.
*Incidentally, I'm not entirely sure that the main constraint, leading this to be cited as the "First ____-less novel ever written", was actually first used here. From what I've heard, Delany did something like this three years earlier (I need to verify), but then he was doing totally differently and it in a sci-fi context (thus probably not reaching enough of the readers who would be enticed by that blurb. That said, this is beautiful. People should read more Garreta, and more Delany.
*Incidentally, I'm not entirely sure that the main constraint, leading this to be cited as the "First ____-less novel ever written", was actually first used here. From what I've heard, Delany did something like this three years earlier (I need to verify), but then he was doing totally differently and it in a sci-fi context (thus probably not reaching enough of the readers who would be enticed by that blurb. That said, this is beautiful. People should read more Garreta, and more Delany.
August 8, 2022
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: First-novel longueurs are here, but they are eclipsed by the astonishingly ambitious project that it represents. It's not a spoiler, or if it is it's already occurred in the blurb above, to say that a sexy novel about lovers written without any gender markers is a very different challenge in English than in French, a very strictly gendered language.
Translator Ramadan took a trait that eased Author Garréta's trajectory to accomplish this complex feat, the use of a grammatical tense that English does not have and that makes the speaker sound ever so pretentious, and then she runs with its effect on the prose.
Soul heavy from too much knowing, body tired from feeling pensive and powerless at the same time, so riven by this obsessive ennui that nothing, or almost nothing, can distract from it anymore. Back then, if I recall correctly, I used to describe the world as a theater where processions of corpses danced in a macabre ball of drives and desires. My contempt and ennui did not, however, keep me from observing how this dance dissolved into an amorous waltz. Languid nights at the whim of syncopated rhythms and fleeting pulses; the road to hell was lit with pale lanterns; the bottom of the abyss drew closer indefinitely; I moved through the smooth insides of a whirlwind and gazed at deformed images of ecstatic bodies in the slow, hoarse death rattle of tortured flesh.
That is, I think you'll all agree with me, pretty mannered writing. I like it, but then I would; the semi-colons, the layering of clauses...well! My Christmas came early with this read! It felt like I was reading a good translation of Proust.
Yes, that is so a compliment.
What shines through in this croquembouche of a story is the way that eliminating the simple fact of gender enables a love story, a passionate, consummated love story, to take on layers of meaning that otherwise wouldn't be available to readers. It enables the narrator to muse on the unsuitability of their fellow theology student, a man, as a target for a fling, a little light sexual fun...but because the fellow student is set on becoming a celibate priest, or because he is a man? It doesn't necessarily matter, but the two possibilities are very different even today. They were even moreso in the France of 1986.
And now we butt up against the one real issue I can see someone taking with this read: A***, lover of our narrator, is Black. It's a fact that we're made aware of, and that plays a significant role in the narrator's attraction to and arousal with A***'s body. I'm not quite convinced it's exoticization, in the fetishistic sense. It's present in the narrator's arousal, though I can't see that being any other way...after all, the object of one's lust is always possessed of traits and qualities that are arousing, including physical ones; and there is not a single thing about the narrator's other appraisals of A*** that suggest a less-than-genuine interest in all their facets. What is more troubling is that the ending is what it is. There is a racialized account of violence and the actions in question take place in Harlem. Granted that the book appeared in 1986 and that was a historically extra-violent time in Harlem, in New York, and in multiple other major US cities as the crack epidemic was reaching its peak.
Still, it's a thing that is present in the story and that could present a very different impression to a Person of Color. I give the information to you for your consideration. I lived in New York City at that time and was routinely very cautious for my personal safety, so it's permaybehaps down to my own familiarity with the milieu that prevents me from seeing it as anything but a reflection of the reality I lived here, and then.
I will say that what happened, and how it went down, knocked a star off my rating. My respect for the project of creating an ungendered love story that still contained passionate pleasure is undimmed. It's the manner in which Author Garréta chose to dismount the story-horse that did not meet with my whole-hearted approval.
Nothing is ever exactly as one would wish it to be, though, is it.
My Review: First-novel longueurs are here, but they are eclipsed by the astonishingly ambitious project that it represents. It's not a spoiler, or if it is it's already occurred in the blurb above, to say that a sexy novel about lovers written without any gender markers is a very different challenge in English than in French, a very strictly gendered language.
Translator Ramadan took a trait that eased Author Garréta's trajectory to accomplish this complex feat, the use of a grammatical tense that English does not have and that makes the speaker sound ever so pretentious, and then she runs with its effect on the prose.
Soul heavy from too much knowing, body tired from feeling pensive and powerless at the same time, so riven by this obsessive ennui that nothing, or almost nothing, can distract from it anymore. Back then, if I recall correctly, I used to describe the world as a theater where processions of corpses danced in a macabre ball of drives and desires. My contempt and ennui did not, however, keep me from observing how this dance dissolved into an amorous waltz. Languid nights at the whim of syncopated rhythms and fleeting pulses; the road to hell was lit with pale lanterns; the bottom of the abyss drew closer indefinitely; I moved through the smooth insides of a whirlwind and gazed at deformed images of ecstatic bodies in the slow, hoarse death rattle of tortured flesh.
That is, I think you'll all agree with me, pretty mannered writing. I like it, but then I would; the semi-colons, the layering of clauses...well! My Christmas came early with this read! It felt like I was reading a good translation of Proust.
Yes, that is so a compliment.
What shines through in this croquembouche of a story is the way that eliminating the simple fact of gender enables a love story, a passionate, consummated love story, to take on layers of meaning that otherwise wouldn't be available to readers. It enables the narrator to muse on the unsuitability of their fellow theology student, a man, as a target for a fling, a little light sexual fun...but because the fellow student is set on becoming a celibate priest, or because he is a man? It doesn't necessarily matter, but the two possibilities are very different even today. They were even moreso in the France of 1986.
And now we butt up against the one real issue I can see someone taking with this read: A***, lover of our narrator, is Black. It's a fact that we're made aware of, and that plays a significant role in the narrator's attraction to and arousal with A***'s body. I'm not quite convinced it's exoticization, in the fetishistic sense. It's present in the narrator's arousal, though I can't see that being any other way...after all, the object of one's lust is always possessed of traits and qualities that are arousing, including physical ones; and there is not a single thing about the narrator's other appraisals of A*** that suggest a less-than-genuine interest in all their facets. What is more troubling is that the ending is what it is. There is a racialized account of violence and the actions in question take place in Harlem. Granted that the book appeared in 1986 and that was a historically extra-violent time in Harlem, in New York, and in multiple other major US cities as the crack epidemic was reaching its peak.
Still, it's a thing that is present in the story and that could present a very different impression to a Person of Color. I give the information to you for your consideration. I lived in New York City at that time and was routinely very cautious for my personal safety, so it's permaybehaps down to my own familiarity with the milieu that prevents me from seeing it as anything but a reflection of the reality I lived here, and then.
I will say that what happened, and how it went down, knocked a star off my rating. My respect for the project of creating an ungendered love story that still contained passionate pleasure is undimmed. It's the manner in which Author Garréta chose to dismount the story-horse that did not meet with my whole-hearted approval.
Nothing is ever exactly as one would wish it to be, though, is it.
December 11, 2017
Remembering saddens me still, even years later. How many exactly, I don’t know anymore.Ten or maybe thirteen. And why do I always live only in memory? Soul heavy from too much knowing, body tired from feeling pensive and powerless at the same time, so riven by this obsessive ennui that nothing, or almost nothing, can distract it anymore. Back then, if I recall correctly, I used to describe the world as a theater where processions of corpses danced in a macabre ball of drives and desires. My contempt and ennui did not, however, keep me from observing how this dance dissolved into an amorous waltz. Languid nights at the whim of syncopated rhythms and fleeting pulses; the road to hell was lit with pale lanterns; the bottom of the abyss drew closer indefinitely; I moved through the smooth insides of a whirlwind and gazed at deformed images of ecstatic bodies in the slow, hoarse death rattle of tortured flesh.Sphinx is a novel featuring Oulipo-esque constraint.
An aside about that: technically Anne Garréta is an actual Oulipo member; however, she was invited to join the group in 2000, and this book was written in 1986. So, again, Ouilipo-esque, even though it's likely just splitting hairs.
The constraint of the novel (and it's right there in the book description, but this could be a spoiler if you want to discover it yourself) is that it's an erotic love story without gender. (Okay, it's more sensual than erotic, but there are a few steamy bits in it) Now, that's not to say gender does not exist within the book - women and men populate it's page - but the nameless narrator and their lover A*** are never attributed a gender. In addition, while the narrator uses "we" and "our" to describe the two together as a unit (I'm assuming this is due to a lack of gendered analogue to the pronouns), the narrator never resorts to singular genderless pronouns (such as "they", as I'm doing all over the place in this review. No Ouilipo invite for me!) in their description of A****. The primary constraint is laudable, the success of it with that particular detail in mind is triumphant. The genderless is even more difficult in French (I remembered something of these further limitations from reading A Void, and the translator's note at the end of this book sheds some light on these further limitations).
One of the immediate side effects of the genderless narrator is that thoughts and statements tend to have double meaning - they are a theology student (a Catholic) and they are contemplating the possibility of an impending "vow" (so, priest or nun); the narrator believes that their priest friend would like an intimate relationship, but it would "pose too many problems" (so, the vow of celibacy alone, or a homosexual relationship); these sorts of things are small, but they permeate the text, allowing for a double layered reading of the narrator's experiences. But the genderless aspect also adds this perceived but undefined otherness to the narrator; they wander indiscriminately through myriad nightclubs, "gay or straight, male or female"; somewhere in this is an implicit otherness (and, conversely, inclusion) but without the gendered signposts (for either the narrator or for A***) the otherness itself is fluid.
But this level of otherness kind of bleeds over into universality, the absence of the gendered sign posts never takes away from the story, or the actions. Whether the narrator of A*** is female, male, gay, straight, eventually plays no bearing on the story nor on its pathos. I guess that's at least part of the point.
February 19, 2019
Wow! I got this book off a display of "LGBTQ Books" at a big bookstore in New York, and I could not be more disappointed. There will be extreme spoilers in this review, but I think that's fine because you should absolutely not read this book.
The like, conceit of this book or whatever, its Oulipan Exercise, is that Garréta doesn't gender her main character or her main character's love interest. Sphinx is described as a book where "gender doesn't matter" - a concept that, theoretically, I could get behind, but what I read is just so fucking far from actually achieving that.
Sphinx was written in French, and in the translator's note at the end, she says that the narrator "walks, overtakes, passes, is dragged along, is led places, follows, hurries, rushes, reaches [...] Never does the narrator simply go anywhere [...] for the narrator to say that they simply went anywhere would require revealing his or her gender. Sphinx is powerful because it refuses to do just that." I don't think that makes Sphinx powerful! I think it just demonstrates that French is a silly fucking language!
Sphinx utterly fails at subverting gender in any real way. The narrator is a pompous, self-centered [white] intellectual, and their annoying, insistent prose is so un-self-conscious about their own pretention that I could not help but conclude that this character was written with a man in mind. Maybe that says more about my concepts of gender than Garréta's, but contrasted with A***'s depiction as almost entirely grounded within the expressions of their body, and how they were only interested in their own looks, and how possessive the narrator was of them, and it was just abundantly clear throughout the book that this was nowhere near an "LGBTQ" love story.
Besides that, gender is present incessantly in the rest of the book - and what's worthwhile about writing an ungendered love story if you're going to have misogynistic biases littered throughout the rest of the text?
Which brings me to the main awful bit of this book - it was enormously racist! A*** is Black, and any time the narrator talks about them, it's "delicious" "dark skinned" this and "caramel" that. If I have to read the word "dusky" one more time, I'm going to throw something out a window. The narrator visits A***'s family, and describes the impact of the family's affectations on their English as "stigmata." Harlem's "misery" becomes a metaphorical dead body that the narrator feels they are carrying! I know that Sphinx was originally written in like, the 80's or something, but this is inexcusable.
So, then, A*** dies! Tragically and suddenly. And the narrator grieves like ~no one has ever grieved before~, as if they have discovered what grieving is, actually. And they literally say things like, A***'s hips were what they loved most about them. They can never love again, though, because their love for A*** was so Pure and True. Some years later, they get word that A***'s mother is dying and they fly to New York to be her sole comforter on her death bed, and to pay for her to be treated better by this Harlem hospital. [The narrator is inexplicably wealthy - they dropped out of college to be a DJ, then went back to school, and now their only occupation is the occasional lecture to "small" and "specialized" audiences - not vocations that denote money to blow on international travel and spruced up medical care in the US! But maybe they're just wealthy because they're white.] The narrator is the only person with A***'s mom, and Garréta waxes poetic for like 10 pages about how lonely this tearful "black momma" is. The narrator is present for her death, considers themself instrumental in her ability to peacefully release, and then notifies her family [!!! her family!!! some more "tearful mommas" - her sisters!!! Where were they before???]. The narrator directs her family [!!!] to her apartment to take what they like - the narrator themself has already removed what they want. That is to say, things they assumed the family [!!!] wouldn't want, because they were only worth sentimental value [!!!].
To finish it all off, the narrator is murdered by Black men in Harlem! Yep! That's the end of the book! Honestly, that was the only good part, I was like finally, this asshole is fucking dead!
Is this book supposed to be satire? There's like, two explanations, right? One, that this character is so absurd and repulsive because they are satire (in which case, Satire should have a point, and this book does Not), or! That Garréta is a racist white French person who was writing in the 80's which seems the more likely event.
Anyway, at the end, the translator claims (in 2015) that "excluding this translation, there does not yet exist a genderless love story written in English." Emma Ramadan, hats off to you because that's a bold fucking claim!!! @ Friends, can any of you rec me some genderless love stories?
The like, conceit of this book or whatever, its Oulipan Exercise, is that Garréta doesn't gender her main character or her main character's love interest. Sphinx is described as a book where "gender doesn't matter" - a concept that, theoretically, I could get behind, but what I read is just so fucking far from actually achieving that.
Sphinx was written in French, and in the translator's note at the end, she says that the narrator "walks, overtakes, passes, is dragged along, is led places, follows, hurries, rushes, reaches [...] Never does the narrator simply go anywhere [...] for the narrator to say that they simply went anywhere would require revealing his or her gender. Sphinx is powerful because it refuses to do just that." I don't think that makes Sphinx powerful! I think it just demonstrates that French is a silly fucking language!
Sphinx utterly fails at subverting gender in any real way. The narrator is a pompous, self-centered [white] intellectual, and their annoying, insistent prose is so un-self-conscious about their own pretention that I could not help but conclude that this character was written with a man in mind. Maybe that says more about my concepts of gender than Garréta's, but contrasted with A***'s depiction as almost entirely grounded within the expressions of their body, and how they were only interested in their own looks, and how possessive the narrator was of them, and it was just abundantly clear throughout the book that this was nowhere near an "LGBTQ" love story.
Besides that, gender is present incessantly in the rest of the book - and what's worthwhile about writing an ungendered love story if you're going to have misogynistic biases littered throughout the rest of the text?
Which brings me to the main awful bit of this book - it was enormously racist! A*** is Black, and any time the narrator talks about them, it's "delicious" "dark skinned" this and "caramel" that. If I have to read the word "dusky" one more time, I'm going to throw something out a window. The narrator visits A***'s family, and describes the impact of the family's affectations on their English as "stigmata." Harlem's "misery" becomes a metaphorical dead body that the narrator feels they are carrying! I know that Sphinx was originally written in like, the 80's or something, but this is inexcusable.
So, then, A*** dies! Tragically and suddenly. And the narrator grieves like ~no one has ever grieved before~, as if they have discovered what grieving is, actually. And they literally say things like, A***'s hips were what they loved most about them. They can never love again, though, because their love for A*** was so Pure and True. Some years later, they get word that A***'s mother is dying and they fly to New York to be her sole comforter on her death bed, and to pay for her to be treated better by this Harlem hospital. [The narrator is inexplicably wealthy - they dropped out of college to be a DJ, then went back to school, and now their only occupation is the occasional lecture to "small" and "specialized" audiences - not vocations that denote money to blow on international travel and spruced up medical care in the US! But maybe they're just wealthy because they're white.] The narrator is the only person with A***'s mom, and Garréta waxes poetic for like 10 pages about how lonely this tearful "black momma" is. The narrator is present for her death, considers themself instrumental in her ability to peacefully release, and then notifies her family [!!! her family!!! some more "tearful mommas" - her sisters!!! Where were they before???]. The narrator directs her family [!!!] to her apartment to take what they like - the narrator themself has already removed what they want. That is to say, things they assumed the family [!!!] wouldn't want, because they were only worth sentimental value [!!!].
To finish it all off, the narrator is murdered by Black men in Harlem! Yep! That's the end of the book! Honestly, that was the only good part, I was like finally, this asshole is fucking dead!
Is this book supposed to be satire? There's like, two explanations, right? One, that this character is so absurd and repulsive because they are satire (in which case, Satire should have a point, and this book does Not), or! That Garréta is a racist white French person who was writing in the 80's which seems the more likely event.
Anyway, at the end, the translator claims (in 2015) that "excluding this translation, there does not yet exist a genderless love story written in English." Emma Ramadan, hats off to you because that's a bold fucking claim!!! @ Friends, can any of you rec me some genderless love stories?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 13, 2017
This is an Oulipian novel, meaning it is part of a workshop consisting largely of French writers and mathematicians aspiring to create works that operate within certain writing constraints. One of the most famous examples of this writing comes in the form of La Disparition, written by Georges Perec, which omits the use of the letter "e."
I won't mention here what restriction Sphinx employs, as I feel it's better to go in blind. That means keeping away from the Introduction.
But suffice it to say this is a strange novel, and what can be considered a love story depending on your perspective.
I enjoyed the plot of this one, there were moments where it was truly gripping. I sped through those sections with voracity, eager to figure out where the story would go.
There were frequent sections, however, where the main speaker would ramble on for paragraphs at a time, deep in contemplation about their happiness and their relationship to others in their life.
This sections were incredibly dense. I found myself often stumbling through the sentences, totally losing the original point the speaker was trying to make. In these paragraphs I would sigh and hope that forward motion of the plot would soon bring an end to the convoluted introspection.
Thankfully the enthralling sections were enough to keep me mostly present, and spaced well between the less interesting sections.
This novel is one that everyone can receive differently depending on what kind of life they have lived. There is a message here to be discovered if you can will yourself through tangled contemplations of the main character.
***Note: I should mention that the version I read is an English translation, as Sphinx was originally written in French. That may account for some of my distaste concerning the writing.
I won't mention here what restriction Sphinx employs, as I feel it's better to go in blind. That means keeping away from the Introduction.
But suffice it to say this is a strange novel, and what can be considered a love story depending on your perspective.
I enjoyed the plot of this one, there were moments where it was truly gripping. I sped through those sections with voracity, eager to figure out where the story would go.
There were frequent sections, however, where the main speaker would ramble on for paragraphs at a time, deep in contemplation about their happiness and their relationship to others in their life.
This sections were incredibly dense. I found myself often stumbling through the sentences, totally losing the original point the speaker was trying to make. In these paragraphs I would sigh and hope that forward motion of the plot would soon bring an end to the convoluted introspection.
Thankfully the enthralling sections were enough to keep me mostly present, and spaced well between the less interesting sections.
This novel is one that everyone can receive differently depending on what kind of life they have lived. There is a message here to be discovered if you can will yourself through tangled contemplations of the main character.
***Note: I should mention that the version I read is an English translation, as Sphinx was originally written in French. That may account for some of my distaste concerning the writing.
June 24, 2016
This fell far short of my expectations. Beyond the admirable and ambitious effort to code genders, the novel was full of problems. In only disguising the main characters' gender while leaving all supporting characters explicitly gendered, the book misses an opportunity to explore more interesting questions about gender and only successfully highlights how terribly gendered language is. Rather than create a world that was beyond binary gender, it instead offered an encrypted story that left me continuously resisting guessing the gender of the two characters.
I was also troubled by the book's overall treatment of blackness. Despite presenting A*** as the love of the narrators life, the narrator acknowledges that A****'s ideas aren't interesting and portrays A*** as a promiscuous physical object. Later, the main features of note of A***'s family are soul food and then the narrator is inexplicably assaulted by two unnecessarily dark-skinned muggers. I found no indication of intentionality or self-awareness in the presentation of these.
Sphinx had a few compelling scenes that didn't come together coherently and the pretentiousness of the narrator and the book's prose throughout were distracting. The digression in which the narrator criticizes the pretense of the French existentialists was particularly tone deaf, as Sphinx went beyond much of that body of work in its aloofness and solipsism.
These main criticisms gloss over smaller one such as the misplaced violence at the beginning and end of the novel and a number of unbelievable plot points that seemed out of a bad indie rom-com (mopey ex-theology student visits a club with a priest and then masters the art of DJ-ing in 10 minutes; a hoarse but sage mafioso is the only person who understands the main characters' attraction; the narrator doesn't need to earn a living because of a mentioned once large inheritance).
Overall, an interesting linguistic accomplishment. For all the morbid self-consciousness of the narrator, though, ultimately I found Sphinx to be a let down of a novel that couldn't seem to see its own blind spots.
I was also troubled by the book's overall treatment of blackness. Despite presenting A*** as the love of the narrators life, the narrator acknowledges that A****'s ideas aren't interesting and portrays A*** as a promiscuous physical object. Later, the main features of note of A***'s family are soul food and then the narrator is inexplicably assaulted by two unnecessarily dark-skinned muggers. I found no indication of intentionality or self-awareness in the presentation of these.
Sphinx had a few compelling scenes that didn't come together coherently and the pretentiousness of the narrator and the book's prose throughout were distracting. The digression in which the narrator criticizes the pretense of the French existentialists was particularly tone deaf, as Sphinx went beyond much of that body of work in its aloofness and solipsism.
These main criticisms gloss over smaller one such as the misplaced violence at the beginning and end of the novel and a number of unbelievable plot points that seemed out of a bad indie rom-com (mopey ex-theology student visits a club with a priest and then masters the art of DJ-ing in 10 minutes; a hoarse but sage mafioso is the only person who understands the main characters' attraction; the narrator doesn't need to earn a living because of a mentioned once large inheritance).
Overall, an interesting linguistic accomplishment. For all the morbid self-consciousness of the narrator, though, ultimately I found Sphinx to be a let down of a novel that couldn't seem to see its own blind spots.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 29, 2016
A book known more because of pronouns than plot, as a friend said of Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. Though unlike the Leckie, which I wasn't that keen on, I'd have read Sphinx much sooner if only I'd registered its milieu. It's going to irk some people, including at least one GR friend, that I, like a lot of book blogs this year, won't be treating Sphinx's Oulipian constraint as a spoiler issue. But if I hadn't known it, I probably still wouldn't have got round to reading the book. Although I'd have at least intended to regardless. (It's not the same as the time when I sought out spoilers for Me Before You because my decision on whether ever to read it – i.e. whether to buy it a sale - was 100% contingent on the ending. I got it. Which to some friends might be a spoiler in itself. Though I doubt they wanted to read the book anyway.)
Expecting Sphinx would be something worthy to plough through – albeit a book I knew I'd be way more sympathetic to than the Leckie – I read the introduction, and then left it for months to start the actual story.
What nobody had said (or if somebody said it I didn't notice) was that this is a story about clubland, decadence, feeling torn between decadence and asceticism, intellect and hedonism, and about brooding romantic pain of loss and realisation of one's own guilt. It takes place in a feather-boa festooned queer clubland (queer in the contemporary ambiguous sense, rather than gay male) which I imagined set in French equivalents of Bethnal Green Working Men's Club, or rather whatever this year's version of the place is, and dizzying warehouse parties where the music is at least as intoxicating as anything else. (Although several minor characters in Sphinx are racist, very much unlike the places I was thinking of.) The narrator is a theology PhD candidate who falls into DJing, and for a club dancer… I didn't know that this phenomenon of theology students/ grads being eccentric and leftfield - and never quite what those unacquainted with the type would expect – was far more universal than a few people around my own age from 3 or 4 different universities. (Who did/do say that plenty of theologians weren't the unquestioning, God-bothering nerds that outsiders assume.) Were they like this in 1980s France as well? Or had I stumbled on a resonance that the author could never have intended? Because based on people of my acquaintance, that might even be the most fitting choice of subject for this character, but one I'd never have dared to use for a made-up person because it seemed too much to explain, too improbable.
Sphinx is not dry and worthy, because it's like this:
our nocturnal itinerary: a dozen cabarets from Pigalle to Opéra, dives and spectacles of fake luxury where the same strippers strutted every fifteen minutes, turning tirelessly from stage to stage. She was describing hell to me with the frivolity of the damned. Due to the combined effect of a very hot coffee and a very dry cognac, I felt a sharp burn in my throat...
I had been in so many cabarets that they all started to look the same by five in the morning: a sweaty inferno, a bombardment of lighting alternatively seedy and brash, a night striped with so many lights that there was neither dusk nor dawn.
I liked to let myself be brushed by naked skin, by boas and feather fans.
Passing through the entrance of the club, something of my being was lost or absorbed, an inexplicable and immeasurable stripping away that, once I finally ended up on the dance floor, hadn’t left any of me behind except my carnal covering, spurred on only by the rhythmic pulsing of the music.
However, I did experience nights of rapture that no human ecstasy can equal, those nights when, for some unknown reason, a sort of inspired fury seized the entire club. This trancelike state that I provoked and prolonged vibrated through my body and carried me to unimaginable excesses of delirium. One such night is still carved into my memory,
Strictly speaking, I was no longer listening to the music; it was passing through me. I was cuing up the records as if by instinct, my vision obscured by a veil of blood. I was in a coma agitated by rhythms that were more and more painfully arousing my desire without ever draining it. In a vague fog I discerned the compact mass of people dancing, flattened one against the other and yet swaying, lifted up in waves. United almost without fissure, they were probably incapable of moving, but the entire mass vibrated in rhythm, all individual drives undone and lost in a higher, sovereign need… It still reigns supreme in my memory; no other night ever achieved such furious intensity. From then on they all seemed bland and nondescript. That night inflicted a violence upon me, an annihilation; I experienced what only sex at its extremes allows one to feel, infrequently and fleetingly. I had reached a limit, and after that came repetition and ennui.
I no longer slept at night; what had previously been a tendency of mine became a permanent mode of being.
The sum of the stories they confided in me could fill entire volumes of sociological or ethnological reports. There was the tedious and nonsensical conversation of tipsy society men; the chatter vaguely colored with the philosophy and aestheticism of the washed-up who cling to a completely superficial and secondhand culture as a fiery temper clings to a menopausal bourgeoise; and, in passing, the virile and noxious conversations of old bachelors following the antics of their protégées out of the corner of their eyes—I was subjected to it all, and I listened with all the presence of mind that was still within my power in those hours of confusion.
Entering a club or a bar was in a way like going to the cinema: a dark room with sounds and images in three dimensions (were there really three?). I lived on the film set of an enormous stock of unrealized B-movies of a hitherto unseen genre. At the hour when the television programs come to an end, when the last spectators leave from the theaters and the marquees are taken down, a different vision appears, a variation each night on the same miserable and violent scenario.
This particular policy forced us into a transhumance around four in the morning, inevitably leading us to a rather snooty club... [I love the choice of 'transhumance'. It's perfect. I feel like I'd thought it at some point but would never have dared articulate it.]
A*** had a naïve and clichéd fondness for the antiquated world of the aristocracy, an admiration for the bygone, the retro, the image of luxury that Hollywood associates with times past.
Before, I was mourning the present; today I mourn a past that was never present.
My aptitude for suffering astonished me in that moment. I was suffering as no one suffers anymore in this century; my sensibility was outmoded in the extreme. Had I ever been capable of loving without suffering?
I was experiencing a premature nostalgia, which was sucking me into a state of melancholy; I was imagining all of this was closed off to me forever before I had even lost it.
I know these states enough for them to feel like home, but because I didn't get nearly enough of most of them whilst I could, they exert a far greater emotional pull in art than do most other 'homes'. Reading this, I was comfortable and exhilarated and hungry and, yes, nostalgic and melancholy.
Most blog and media reviews of Sphinx are so very dazzled by the concept of a story of two lovers during which neither party's gender is revealed (although we do know that A*** has been involved with men and women) that they don't say enough about the rest of the book.
As per the Leckie review, I continue to be surprised that more like this has not already been written, specifically that a few decent works using the singular they aren't yet in existence, but am very pleased that what is around in terms of gender neutrality in fiction, such as this and [Written on the Body] has a great deal to recommend it in terms of style and feeling, merits that are obvious to plenty of readers who've never personally been bothered about gender or pronouns. From what I've gleaned about Garréta, it seems that there were some political aims, and personal frustrations with the French language, in creating Sphinx, so I couldn't agree that this is a purely artistic work of thirty years ago that has been adopted for contemporary gender-political ends – but the important thing is that it is artistically good enough to be a lot more than its politics, unlike Little Women in space: it has something to offer to people who read for aesthetics and form instead of, or as well as, politics. [Added: There are a few other examples here of novels with some sort of gender ambiguity.]
The book's influence made me notice that I often want to refer to people using the singular they, but I had been stopping myself sometimes because I thought it might annoy them, or they might think I was being unnecessarily opaque and cryptic in trying to semi-conceal some other's identity when there was little need. (Repeating myself from the Ancillary Justice post, it's a habit I learned back in primary school to refer to an un-named other as 'they' even when their gender was in no doubt, and use of singular 'they' is a habit that has been growing in the last few years although I made no conscious effort towards it; there seem to be more and more people I'd reflexively refer to as 'they' rather than 'he' or 'she' if I left it unchecked. (There isn't a fixed pattern as such, but the least likely to be 'they'd appear to be relatives or ex-lovers.) I suppose some people might take it as political flagwaving – and I am no fan of the made-up neutral terms such as 'zie' which I find forced (this is not the book page on which to be less complimentary about them) but will use them if someone prefers them – yet to me this 'they' is natural, in a way that some friends must be familiar with: someone calls it pretentious to use a 'long word', when it was actually just the first thing you thought of to say what you meant.
I've often wondered how people deal with heavily gendered languages when they don't feel entirely comfortable with their own, or perhaps simply object on principle to such a strong presence of gender - but had never heard any native speaker's opinion on this before a couple of quotes from Garréta in one or other of the essays that bookend the novella. It wasn't much, but it was very satisfying to know something.
As I expected when I first heard about Sphinx, I was comfortable in this world where gender was ambiguous or unstated, just as I was frustrated in Leckie's where everyone was 'she' (too reminiscent of school and impatiently waiting to escape.) It was interesting to observe the details that could make a reader lean one way or another about a character's identity, depending on the circles they'd moved in, but with enough memories of boys who liked wearing makeup and girls who didn't, and numerous similar analogues, it floats in an idea-world of both/neither which has become increasingly comfortable over the years. [God, I'm an annoyingly smug reader for this book...] I really appreciated the scenes in which the narrator went clubbing alone (and wasn't harrassed. It's one of these things that online 4th wave feminism seems to continually assert is impossible for women, and that leaves me indignant about those sites by effectively saying that experiences I've had don't exist. The implication here is that the keys to getting away with it - and you probably wouldn't bother trying if it's not a music-focused/arty sort of club with some special set that's like going to a gig - are a certain amount of aloofness without being entirely asocial, and not being drunk, which I think is spot on. Garreta DJ'd for a while in the seventies and a few of the experiences in the book, although it's not quite clear which, apparently have some autobiographical basis. )
A GR friend, who is English-French bilingual, has found what appear to be inaccurate assertions about properties of French in excerpts from the translator's afterword (excerpts quoted in online reviews). I found the afterword enlightening and interesting, on topics such as the narrator's aloof personality stemming from the use of constraint in French, but I feel that I'd be on shaky ground to praise these things in more detail, until / unless there are several analyses available from bilingual people who've read the entire essay.
After all that, why only give it four stars? Two reasons.
There is some intoxicatingly intense writing here, yet at other times, the narrative descends into dull descriptions with a bloodless, administrative tone. And inexplicably, about things that the narrator must feel deeply. There were pages, sometimes several at a time, that were a slog. Perhaps there's some feature of French which made it necessary for the emotion to disappear down the plughole at these times, although I couldn't think of any when trying a basic back-translation in my head.
“Insta-love” is a familiar critical term from reviewers of YA and romance – but “insta-talent” is almost as common a feature of cheesy movies and books. It was just too good to be true, and seriously lowered my opinion of the book for a while, that the narrator was quite that brilliant at DJing the first ever time they tried it. I've picked some things up pretty quickly at various times I've seen friends do it - so I'd believe it if someone became that good in a week or two or three, but that fast, in minutes when they'd never handled the equipment before, beyond home record players, was just too much. One could argue there's a heightened mood and melodrama to the whole story which fits its camp environment – much like press reviews have said about 2015 hit book A Little Life - and that the 'insta-talent is part of that just as much as the intensity of language in the paragraphs I loved, but because there's plenty of the book that does actually feel like life to me, that sounds like people I've known, this one impossible bit obtruded, and badly.
Anyway, something I'd love to know: could be meaningfully translated into a language where gender is unmarked, like Finnish or Estonian? (As far as I know, not actually speaking these languages, it would simply be a matter of not naming the characters.) Would there be any point in a book like that?
Expecting Sphinx would be something worthy to plough through – albeit a book I knew I'd be way more sympathetic to than the Leckie – I read the introduction, and then left it for months to start the actual story.
What nobody had said (or if somebody said it I didn't notice) was that this is a story about clubland, decadence, feeling torn between decadence and asceticism, intellect and hedonism, and about brooding romantic pain of loss and realisation of one's own guilt. It takes place in a feather-boa festooned queer clubland (queer in the contemporary ambiguous sense, rather than gay male) which I imagined set in French equivalents of Bethnal Green Working Men's Club, or rather whatever this year's version of the place is, and dizzying warehouse parties where the music is at least as intoxicating as anything else. (Although several minor characters in Sphinx are racist, very much unlike the places I was thinking of.) The narrator is a theology PhD candidate who falls into DJing, and for a club dancer… I didn't know that this phenomenon of theology students/ grads being eccentric and leftfield - and never quite what those unacquainted with the type would expect – was far more universal than a few people around my own age from 3 or 4 different universities. (Who did/do say that plenty of theologians weren't the unquestioning, God-bothering nerds that outsiders assume.) Were they like this in 1980s France as well? Or had I stumbled on a resonance that the author could never have intended? Because based on people of my acquaintance, that might even be the most fitting choice of subject for this character, but one I'd never have dared to use for a made-up person because it seemed too much to explain, too improbable.
Sphinx is not dry and worthy, because it's like this:
our nocturnal itinerary: a dozen cabarets from Pigalle to Opéra, dives and spectacles of fake luxury where the same strippers strutted every fifteen minutes, turning tirelessly from stage to stage. She was describing hell to me with the frivolity of the damned. Due to the combined effect of a very hot coffee and a very dry cognac, I felt a sharp burn in my throat...
I had been in so many cabarets that they all started to look the same by five in the morning: a sweaty inferno, a bombardment of lighting alternatively seedy and brash, a night striped with so many lights that there was neither dusk nor dawn.
I liked to let myself be brushed by naked skin, by boas and feather fans.
Passing through the entrance of the club, something of my being was lost or absorbed, an inexplicable and immeasurable stripping away that, once I finally ended up on the dance floor, hadn’t left any of me behind except my carnal covering, spurred on only by the rhythmic pulsing of the music.
However, I did experience nights of rapture that no human ecstasy can equal, those nights when, for some unknown reason, a sort of inspired fury seized the entire club. This trancelike state that I provoked and prolonged vibrated through my body and carried me to unimaginable excesses of delirium. One such night is still carved into my memory,
Strictly speaking, I was no longer listening to the music; it was passing through me. I was cuing up the records as if by instinct, my vision obscured by a veil of blood. I was in a coma agitated by rhythms that were more and more painfully arousing my desire without ever draining it. In a vague fog I discerned the compact mass of people dancing, flattened one against the other and yet swaying, lifted up in waves. United almost without fissure, they were probably incapable of moving, but the entire mass vibrated in rhythm, all individual drives undone and lost in a higher, sovereign need… It still reigns supreme in my memory; no other night ever achieved such furious intensity. From then on they all seemed bland and nondescript. That night inflicted a violence upon me, an annihilation; I experienced what only sex at its extremes allows one to feel, infrequently and fleetingly. I had reached a limit, and after that came repetition and ennui.
I no longer slept at night; what had previously been a tendency of mine became a permanent mode of being.
The sum of the stories they confided in me could fill entire volumes of sociological or ethnological reports. There was the tedious and nonsensical conversation of tipsy society men; the chatter vaguely colored with the philosophy and aestheticism of the washed-up who cling to a completely superficial and secondhand culture as a fiery temper clings to a menopausal bourgeoise; and, in passing, the virile and noxious conversations of old bachelors following the antics of their protégées out of the corner of their eyes—I was subjected to it all, and I listened with all the presence of mind that was still within my power in those hours of confusion.
Entering a club or a bar was in a way like going to the cinema: a dark room with sounds and images in three dimensions (were there really three?). I lived on the film set of an enormous stock of unrealized B-movies of a hitherto unseen genre. At the hour when the television programs come to an end, when the last spectators leave from the theaters and the marquees are taken down, a different vision appears, a variation each night on the same miserable and violent scenario.
This particular policy forced us into a transhumance around four in the morning, inevitably leading us to a rather snooty club... [I love the choice of 'transhumance'. It's perfect. I feel like I'd thought it at some point but would never have dared articulate it.]
A*** had a naïve and clichéd fondness for the antiquated world of the aristocracy, an admiration for the bygone, the retro, the image of luxury that Hollywood associates with times past.
Before, I was mourning the present; today I mourn a past that was never present.
My aptitude for suffering astonished me in that moment. I was suffering as no one suffers anymore in this century; my sensibility was outmoded in the extreme. Had I ever been capable of loving without suffering?
I was experiencing a premature nostalgia, which was sucking me into a state of melancholy; I was imagining all of this was closed off to me forever before I had even lost it.
I know these states enough for them to feel like home, but because I didn't get nearly enough of most of them whilst I could, they exert a far greater emotional pull in art than do most other 'homes'. Reading this, I was comfortable and exhilarated and hungry and, yes, nostalgic and melancholy.
Most blog and media reviews of Sphinx are so very dazzled by the concept of a story of two lovers during which neither party's gender is revealed (although we do know that A*** has been involved with men and women) that they don't say enough about the rest of the book.
As per the Leckie review, I continue to be surprised that more like this has not already been written, specifically that a few decent works using the singular they aren't yet in existence, but am very pleased that what is around in terms of gender neutrality in fiction, such as this and [Written on the Body] has a great deal to recommend it in terms of style and feeling, merits that are obvious to plenty of readers who've never personally been bothered about gender or pronouns. From what I've gleaned about Garréta, it seems that there were some political aims, and personal frustrations with the French language, in creating Sphinx, so I couldn't agree that this is a purely artistic work of thirty years ago that has been adopted for contemporary gender-political ends – but the important thing is that it is artistically good enough to be a lot more than its politics, unlike Little Women in space: it has something to offer to people who read for aesthetics and form instead of, or as well as, politics. [Added: There are a few other examples here of novels with some sort of gender ambiguity.]
The book's influence made me notice that I often want to refer to people using the singular they, but I had been stopping myself sometimes because I thought it might annoy them, or they might think I was being unnecessarily opaque and cryptic in trying to semi-conceal some other's identity when there was little need. (Repeating myself from the Ancillary Justice post, it's a habit I learned back in primary school to refer to an un-named other as 'they' even when their gender was in no doubt, and use of singular 'they' is a habit that has been growing in the last few years although I made no conscious effort towards it; there seem to be more and more people I'd reflexively refer to as 'they' rather than 'he' or 'she' if I left it unchecked. (There isn't a fixed pattern as such, but the least likely to be 'they'd appear to be relatives or ex-lovers.) I suppose some people might take it as political flagwaving – and I am no fan of the made-up neutral terms such as 'zie' which I find forced (this is not the book page on which to be less complimentary about them) but will use them if someone prefers them – yet to me this 'they' is natural, in a way that some friends must be familiar with: someone calls it pretentious to use a 'long word', when it was actually just the first thing you thought of to say what you meant.
I've often wondered how people deal with heavily gendered languages when they don't feel entirely comfortable with their own, or perhaps simply object on principle to such a strong presence of gender - but had never heard any native speaker's opinion on this before a couple of quotes from Garréta in one or other of the essays that bookend the novella. It wasn't much, but it was very satisfying to know something.
As I expected when I first heard about Sphinx, I was comfortable in this world where gender was ambiguous or unstated, just as I was frustrated in Leckie's where everyone was 'she' (too reminiscent of school and impatiently waiting to escape.) It was interesting to observe the details that could make a reader lean one way or another about a character's identity, depending on the circles they'd moved in, but with enough memories of boys who liked wearing makeup and girls who didn't, and numerous similar analogues, it floats in an idea-world of both/neither which has become increasingly comfortable over the years. [God, I'm an annoyingly smug reader for this book...] I really appreciated the scenes in which the narrator went clubbing alone (and wasn't harrassed. It's one of these things that online 4th wave feminism seems to continually assert is impossible for women, and that leaves me indignant about those sites by effectively saying that experiences I've had don't exist. The implication here is that the keys to getting away with it - and you probably wouldn't bother trying if it's not a music-focused/arty sort of club with some special set that's like going to a gig - are a certain amount of aloofness without being entirely asocial, and not being drunk, which I think is spot on. Garreta DJ'd for a while in the seventies and a few of the experiences in the book, although it's not quite clear which, apparently have some autobiographical basis. )
A GR friend, who is English-French bilingual, has found what appear to be inaccurate assertions about properties of French in excerpts from the translator's afterword (excerpts quoted in online reviews). I found the afterword enlightening and interesting, on topics such as the narrator's aloof personality stemming from the use of constraint in French, but I feel that I'd be on shaky ground to praise these things in more detail, until / unless there are several analyses available from bilingual people who've read the entire essay.
After all that, why only give it four stars? Two reasons.
There is some intoxicatingly intense writing here, yet at other times, the narrative descends into dull descriptions with a bloodless, administrative tone. And inexplicably, about things that the narrator must feel deeply. There were pages, sometimes several at a time, that were a slog. Perhaps there's some feature of French which made it necessary for the emotion to disappear down the plughole at these times, although I couldn't think of any when trying a basic back-translation in my head.
“Insta-love” is a familiar critical term from reviewers of YA and romance – but “insta-talent” is almost as common a feature of cheesy movies and books. It was just too good to be true, and seriously lowered my opinion of the book for a while, that the narrator was quite that brilliant at DJing the first ever time they tried it. I've picked some things up pretty quickly at various times I've seen friends do it - so I'd believe it if someone became that good in a week or two or three, but that fast, in minutes when they'd never handled the equipment before, beyond home record players, was just too much. One could argue there's a heightened mood and melodrama to the whole story which fits its camp environment – much like press reviews have said about 2015 hit book A Little Life - and that the 'insta-talent is part of that just as much as the intensity of language in the paragraphs I loved, but because there's plenty of the book that does actually feel like life to me, that sounds like people I've known, this one impossible bit obtruded, and badly.
Anyway, something I'd love to know: could be meaningfully translated into a language where gender is unmarked, like Finnish or Estonian? (As far as I know, not actually speaking these languages, it would simply be a matter of not naming the characters.) Would there be any point in a book like that?
November 13, 2015
So, the actual book is excellent.
The constraint was spoiled for me, which is a shame, because I think it has much more of a direct effect on the writing than people who are whirled off into identity politics and political points understand. Indeed, I believe this is the point of constrained writing, both for the writer and for the reader: it focuses the attention on the language, on how it is used, how words are actually put down on the page all the way through, a million tiny decisions leading to a book. I think I would very much have liked to discover that gradually for myself while reading, and I wasn't able to. (Side-note: it's very interesting to me how careful most readers are not to spoil plot-points, almost as though doing so was a breach of something hallowed, something sacred, and yet something like this we are much less careful about. I am tempted to say, kidstodaygetoffmylawn style, that this is because language as art is devalued in favor of shallow entertainment, and that this is a shame.)
On the other hand, being aware of the constraint from the beginning did also affect my reading experience, and the overall effect was to be impressed by how little it changed the actual writing. If you are reading in translation, it is possible that some claims about the book's basic style and grammar in the afterward, which I have not read and have only seen cited in a review, are not accurate (see the rant below). The language is very little changed, except insofar as there is a heightened attention to it on the part of writer and reader. The end effect was to draw my attention to thousands of tiny constructions like this one:
Étant d'une nature peu communicative et d'une extrême réserve quant à mon intimité et mes convictions, j'eus peu à craindre des égarements éthyliques de fin de nuit de tout ce beau monde d'abonnés aux vices.
This sentence avoids breaching the constraint and yet it is, at the same time, exactly how people write descriptions all the time anyway. What's interesting about it is that the basic construction is NOT unusual, does NOT breach normal standards of how to create a French sentence, does NOT seem odd or call attention to itself. This same thing is true of thousands of sentences throughout the narrative, including direct descriptions of A***, of A***'s charms, of A***'s body. That's why it's interesting to write this way: not the strange and unexpected, but rather the heightened awareness of what you're doing anyway. If it were down to language alone, I'm not sure most readers would ever have even noticed that there is a constraint at work.
My beforehand knowledge also made me hyper-aware of certain types of thematic content: our narrator and A*** have an unusual relationship in many of those ways that makes society take notice of a couple, and these seem somehow both more and less important in light of the fact that one, seemingly important, relationship classification device is never available to us, and yet the story remains more or less the same. The two lovers are from different races, different classes, there is an age difference between them, and they also experience individual differences of temperament that make them fight, particularly towards the end. This mix of individual characteristic and societal category is also true of all relationships, all descriptions of all people, and somehow leaving one big description out makes that all the more abundantly clear. It also gives passages like these an additional layer:
Je n'avais cure ni des remous ni des alarmes que mon attachement à ce qui paraissait ma parfaite antithèse provoquait. On fit mention devant moi de son inconsistance, de sa légèreté, de la multiplicité de ses aventures, de l'impossibilité à se l'attacher sûrement. On me prévint charitablement que je n'étais pas "son genre", non plus que de la même espèce.
_______________________________________________________________
http://www.bookforum.com/review/14775 (on this, note also that A*** is also a character in La Jalousie).
Ok, the above review is extremely troubling. The reviewer cites the afterward written BY THE TRANSLATOR, claiming:
As Ramadan notes in her afterward, the narrator does many things through the streets of Paris—s/he “wanders, descends, ascends, climbs, strolls, promenades, returns, roams,” and so on—not because Garréta is averse to putting things plainly, but because, Ramadan points out, if s/he simply “went” somewhere, the past tense in French would require agreement and thus allocate a gender to the subject. Je suis allé, for a man; je suis allée, for a woman. Garréta has to adopt the imperfect, a past tense used for recurrent actions, and so the narrator becomes the sort of person who is always inventing habits.
The only problem is, this is simply not true. The book, like so many French literary works, is written in the passé simple, which is not a compound tense and does not give away the gender of the grammatical subject in its construction. If the passé composé were used, many of the potential other verbs cited above -- monter, descendre, and retourner -- would all take être as well, and do not make good examples of avoiding it in favor of avoir verbs, so its unclear how these substitutions are meant to get us out of our grammatical problem. In addition, there is no more frequent use of the imparfait here than in any other French narrative; I think the translator perhaps does not understand the difference between, say, "je ne tardai pas" and "je ne tardais pas", which I find quite shocking for someone who has set herself up as expert enough to translate a literary text.
I seriously wonder about the quality of the translated text (which I have absolutely no plans to acquire and read).
Also, and I think this is partly a context of crankiness about other things*, I really, really wish people would just stop talking out of their collective ass, in general, and about France in particular. I don't know why, but this problem seems somehow to touch on our whole idea of "culture" and "foreign" and "difference"; a discourse which, at one and the same time, insists on cultural relativism for practices as horrific as FGM, and yet feels free to condemn France for stuff like liberté d'expression, as though it weren't a foreign culture at all. This, of course, wraps all the way around a full 360 degrees into the racism it's meant to be avoiding, suggesting that while developing countries have "cultures", western democracies, and especially the US, have a neutral, normal, outside observer thing happening that exempts us from the same relativity that we are so quick to embrace. In essence, black people have a culture, white people are anthropological observers. France, and Europe more generally, gets caught in the center of this, any differences make us not progressive enough (NEVER are we in any way better, perish the thought), but too allegedly white to be afforded the cultural difference discount**. And, of course, everybody is a soi-disant expert.
_________________________________________
*Notably, an in-depth discussion of which Proust translation is the "best" one by people who don't read any French. Now, I get that you might have criteria other than faithfulness for a good translation -- that the style be pleasing to you in your native language, that the prose be easy to read and accessible and not clunky, that the critical apparatus be helpful and provide you with an adequate context. But, even then, you're looking at reading several versions of a really long ass book in different translations in order to come to the conclusion that one is really better than the other, at which point the effort involved strikes me as a major waste of time, time that you could actually spend stating to learn the actual language. (Also, if I may analogy you all for a minute, a bit like having a tasting to determine the best brand of industrial snack cake. Do it if you like, and there may be genuine differences in quality, but please don't tell me you're engaged in the same kind of gourmet activity that leads people to study for years to become a sommelier.)
In any case, it seems to me on the translation front, that we all pick what is available, what is currently in fashion, or what seems ok from a casual skimming. Which is fine, but isn't expertise. I think the same overconfidence that leads people to talk out of their ass about things they know nothing about is an ingredient here, as is status conscious pseudo-intellectualism. End result? Crankiness.
**You know, there's a side issue here too about the difference between breadth and depth of knowledge and experience, and the colossal self-deception involved in thinking that it's a bigger and better accomplishment to read one book from every country than it is to really know a single literary tradition, and to love it deeply, particularly if that tradition is not getting the cultural difference discount, but as I have typed a screed and not yet put forth an opinion of the actual novel, perhaps it's time to draw a bath and go back to reading it. Spoiler: it's much more enjoyable than any of the discourse surrounding it, though I am unable to vouch for the English language translation.
The constraint was spoiled for me, which is a shame, because I think it has much more of a direct effect on the writing than people who are whirled off into identity politics and political points understand. Indeed, I believe this is the point of constrained writing, both for the writer and for the reader: it focuses the attention on the language, on how it is used, how words are actually put down on the page all the way through, a million tiny decisions leading to a book. I think I would very much have liked to discover that gradually for myself while reading, and I wasn't able to. (Side-note: it's very interesting to me how careful most readers are not to spoil plot-points, almost as though doing so was a breach of something hallowed, something sacred, and yet something like this we are much less careful about. I am tempted to say, kidstodaygetoffmylawn style, that this is because language as art is devalued in favor of shallow entertainment, and that this is a shame.)
On the other hand, being aware of the constraint from the beginning did also affect my reading experience, and the overall effect was to be impressed by how little it changed the actual writing. If you are reading in translation, it is possible that some claims about the book's basic style and grammar in the afterward, which I have not read and have only seen cited in a review, are not accurate (see the rant below). The language is very little changed, except insofar as there is a heightened attention to it on the part of writer and reader. The end effect was to draw my attention to thousands of tiny constructions like this one:
Étant d'une nature peu communicative et d'une extrême réserve quant à mon intimité et mes convictions, j'eus peu à craindre des égarements éthyliques de fin de nuit de tout ce beau monde d'abonnés aux vices.
This sentence avoids breaching the constraint and yet it is, at the same time, exactly how people write descriptions all the time anyway. What's interesting about it is that the basic construction is NOT unusual, does NOT breach normal standards of how to create a French sentence, does NOT seem odd or call attention to itself. This same thing is true of thousands of sentences throughout the narrative, including direct descriptions of A***, of A***'s charms, of A***'s body. That's why it's interesting to write this way: not the strange and unexpected, but rather the heightened awareness of what you're doing anyway. If it were down to language alone, I'm not sure most readers would ever have even noticed that there is a constraint at work.
My beforehand knowledge also made me hyper-aware of certain types of thematic content: our narrator and A*** have an unusual relationship in many of those ways that makes society take notice of a couple, and these seem somehow both more and less important in light of the fact that one, seemingly important, relationship classification device is never available to us, and yet the story remains more or less the same. The two lovers are from different races, different classes, there is an age difference between them, and they also experience individual differences of temperament that make them fight, particularly towards the end. This mix of individual characteristic and societal category is also true of all relationships, all descriptions of all people, and somehow leaving one big description out makes that all the more abundantly clear. It also gives passages like these an additional layer:
Je n'avais cure ni des remous ni des alarmes que mon attachement à ce qui paraissait ma parfaite antithèse provoquait. On fit mention devant moi de son inconsistance, de sa légèreté, de la multiplicité de ses aventures, de l'impossibilité à se l'attacher sûrement. On me prévint charitablement que je n'étais pas "son genre", non plus que de la même espèce.
_______________________________________________________________
http://www.bookforum.com/review/14775 (on this, note also that A*** is also a character in La Jalousie).
Ok, the above review is extremely troubling. The reviewer cites the afterward written BY THE TRANSLATOR, claiming:
As Ramadan notes in her afterward, the narrator does many things through the streets of Paris—s/he “wanders, descends, ascends, climbs, strolls, promenades, returns, roams,” and so on—not because Garréta is averse to putting things plainly, but because, Ramadan points out, if s/he simply “went” somewhere, the past tense in French would require agreement and thus allocate a gender to the subject. Je suis allé, for a man; je suis allée, for a woman. Garréta has to adopt the imperfect, a past tense used for recurrent actions, and so the narrator becomes the sort of person who is always inventing habits.
The only problem is, this is simply not true. The book, like so many French literary works, is written in the passé simple, which is not a compound tense and does not give away the gender of the grammatical subject in its construction. If the passé composé were used, many of the potential other verbs cited above -- monter, descendre, and retourner -- would all take être as well, and do not make good examples of avoiding it in favor of avoir verbs, so its unclear how these substitutions are meant to get us out of our grammatical problem. In addition, there is no more frequent use of the imparfait here than in any other French narrative; I think the translator perhaps does not understand the difference between, say, "je ne tardai pas" and "je ne tardais pas", which I find quite shocking for someone who has set herself up as expert enough to translate a literary text.
I seriously wonder about the quality of the translated text (which I have absolutely no plans to acquire and read).
Also, and I think this is partly a context of crankiness about other things*, I really, really wish people would just stop talking out of their collective ass, in general, and about France in particular. I don't know why, but this problem seems somehow to touch on our whole idea of "culture" and "foreign" and "difference"; a discourse which, at one and the same time, insists on cultural relativism for practices as horrific as FGM, and yet feels free to condemn France for stuff like liberté d'expression, as though it weren't a foreign culture at all. This, of course, wraps all the way around a full 360 degrees into the racism it's meant to be avoiding, suggesting that while developing countries have "cultures", western democracies, and especially the US, have a neutral, normal, outside observer thing happening that exempts us from the same relativity that we are so quick to embrace. In essence, black people have a culture, white people are anthropological observers. France, and Europe more generally, gets caught in the center of this, any differences make us not progressive enough (NEVER are we in any way better, perish the thought), but too allegedly white to be afforded the cultural difference discount**. And, of course, everybody is a soi-disant expert.
_________________________________________
*Notably, an in-depth discussion of which Proust translation is the "best" one by people who don't read any French. Now, I get that you might have criteria other than faithfulness for a good translation -- that the style be pleasing to you in your native language, that the prose be easy to read and accessible and not clunky, that the critical apparatus be helpful and provide you with an adequate context. But, even then, you're looking at reading several versions of a really long ass book in different translations in order to come to the conclusion that one is really better than the other, at which point the effort involved strikes me as a major waste of time, time that you could actually spend stating to learn the actual language. (Also, if I may analogy you all for a minute, a bit like having a tasting to determine the best brand of industrial snack cake. Do it if you like, and there may be genuine differences in quality, but please don't tell me you're engaged in the same kind of gourmet activity that leads people to study for years to become a sommelier.)
In any case, it seems to me on the translation front, that we all pick what is available, what is currently in fashion, or what seems ok from a casual skimming. Which is fine, but isn't expertise. I think the same overconfidence that leads people to talk out of their ass about things they know nothing about is an ingredient here, as is status conscious pseudo-intellectualism. End result? Crankiness.
**You know, there's a side issue here too about the difference between breadth and depth of knowledge and experience, and the colossal self-deception involved in thinking that it's a bigger and better accomplishment to read one book from every country than it is to really know a single literary tradition, and to love it deeply, particularly if that tradition is not getting the cultural difference discount, but as I have typed a screed and not yet put forth an opinion of the actual novel, perhaps it's time to draw a bath and go back to reading it. Spoiler: it's much more enjoyable than any of the discourse surrounding it, though I am unable to vouch for the English language translation.
March 18, 2016
i'm so glad that i was never a francophile.
the whole conceit of this book - what a way to avoid dealing with very real issues. (though, not saying that it would deal with them, or deal with them well, look how the book deals with the inter-racial aspect of the romance).
also our ~*genderless*~ narrator....
'I could no longer bear the assault of this ambient vulgarity. Behind the simulacrum of festivity and opulence, I witnessed the most sordid trafficking and seediest machinations, sheepishly disguised. The four months I stayed on in Paris were a calvary for me: the obligatory visits to this cloacum were nauseating."
the level of pretension and ~*ennui*~. the character is coded as just another embittered & pretentious french man in a long history of books revolving around embittered & pretentious french men tbh.
the whole conceit of this book - what a way to avoid dealing with very real issues. (though, not saying that it would deal with them, or deal with them well, look how the book deals with the inter-racial aspect of the romance).
also our ~*genderless*~ narrator....
'I could no longer bear the assault of this ambient vulgarity. Behind the simulacrum of festivity and opulence, I witnessed the most sordid trafficking and seediest machinations, sheepishly disguised. The four months I stayed on in Paris were a calvary for me: the obligatory visits to this cloacum were nauseating."
the level of pretension and ~*ennui*~. the character is coded as just another embittered & pretentious french man in a long history of books revolving around embittered & pretentious french men tbh.
June 20, 2015
one of only a handful of female members of the esteemed oulipo, french novelist anne garréta is the first amongst them to have a work translated into english. sphinx, published when she was only 23, was garréta's first novel - written 14 years before she was invited to join the workshop of potential literature. despite it pre-dating her membership in oulipo, sphinx is, as fellow oulipian daniel levin becker points out in his wonderful introduction, nonetheless, a "consummately oulipian" work.
written without denoting the genders of either the narrator or the narrator's lover (referred to simply as "a***"), garréta forces the reader to consider a host of issues relating to sexuality, gender, identity, stereotypes, biases, preconceived notions, etc. a startling tale with unexpected plotting, sphinx is constantly impressive, especially as shifting tones complement different settings and milieus separated across a decade. garréta's prose, exquisite and lyrical, often contrasts itself against the dolorous narrative. as emma ramadan reminds the reader in her translator's note, garréta's novel was a remarkable feat in its original, given the constraints of french grammar and gendered language (and speaking of remarkable feats, ramadan's translation is quite the accomplishment).
sphinx, while indeed a love story, is also a powerful, unique work of literature that challenges as much as it captivates. garréta's novel is one likely to reverberate long after the reader has finished (and finally caught his/her breath).
written without denoting the genders of either the narrator or the narrator's lover (referred to simply as "a***"), garréta forces the reader to consider a host of issues relating to sexuality, gender, identity, stereotypes, biases, preconceived notions, etc. a startling tale with unexpected plotting, sphinx is constantly impressive, especially as shifting tones complement different settings and milieus separated across a decade. garréta's prose, exquisite and lyrical, often contrasts itself against the dolorous narrative. as emma ramadan reminds the reader in her translator's note, garréta's novel was a remarkable feat in its original, given the constraints of french grammar and gendered language (and speaking of remarkable feats, ramadan's translation is quite the accomplishment).
sphinx, while indeed a love story, is also a powerful, unique work of literature that challenges as much as it captivates. garréta's novel is one likely to reverberate long after the reader has finished (and finally caught his/her breath).
the strange sensation of always feeling as if i were at the dreadful edge of some imminent break... this sentiment is the very foundation of all that is intractable in me: a sort of inebriation, bitter from drawn-out solitude, the inevitable tendency toward a final disenchantment with all idylls. and i can't explain why, or how. i've never expected much from those i love. i would have given all, conceded all, pardoned all the wandering of anyone who accorded me the space and time for my discreet tenderness. so much did i fear smothering those i cherished that i never made a fuss, which was doubtless the reason for my repeated falls and defeats. i carry my silence - this constant withdrawal into a suffering that i thought of perhaps mistakenly as immoderate and obscene - as a cross that has never promised any redemption, a calvary without deliverance, an involuntary sacrifice made in vain.
February 8, 2018
Two bits were just far too unbelievable to not pull me out of the story. Two words for those that have read it: septic tank. What the fuck? Brilliant passages and damn important intentions, though.
May 12, 2024
Viens no tiem gadījumiem, kad drēbes - koncepts, valoda, domas -, lai cik foršas, man tomēr īsti nespēja nosegt paša stāsta kārno miesu.
August 4, 2022
straight up this book sucks lmao. right away let me just say that just bc it's a revolutionary piece of queer literature does not mean it's a GOOD piece of queer literature and it was also written by a white French person in the 80s babes. this shit is not holy and I will be shitting on it at book club next week.
the writing is well done at times (some very beautiful descriptive language and i get its a feat to write a genderless french novel) but mostly over the top and oh my god so pretentious (having to look up words every page in order to read a book is NOT a good thing!! it makes it incredibly inaccessible and truly so unenjoyable. like this wasnt a few big words this shit was regularly obscure and sooooo unnecessary.), and the narrator is beyond unlikable (i love an unlikeable and unreliable narrator in a book but it HAS to serve a purpose or be done in such a way that it holds meaning or shows contrast) they're actually incredibly racist!! fetishizing the Black love interest, manipulative as fuck, and so self congratulatory when it comes to their interactions w the Black community. (maybe I'll update w quotes later but currently I don't even want to open this book up again lmao)
SPOILERS BELOW
the fact that they spend the whole book fetishizing Black people and culture and then take control of A's mothers death as if she doesn't have family in the city??? and they also claim a bunch of shit before the family is contacted??? and then how they're murdered by two "dark skinned" men who mug them???? like it was so far beyond an unlikable character. this was straight up unbearable to me and so blatantly racist and there's no point. like there is no lesson or big idea. it's just a shitty person being shitty and making everything about them. like I HATED this book lmao. I HATED it. AND THEY SAY THAT THEY CANT REMEMBER THE WORDS TO A BLUES SONG BC MAYBE THEIR "SOUL ISNT BLACK ENOUGH YET". get out of here.
also how A had to LITERALLY DIE in order for the narrator to do any real self reflection ,,,, like ,,,, literally killing off the Black love interest for .000001% self awareness .... not worth it.
the writing is well done at times (some very beautiful descriptive language and i get its a feat to write a genderless french novel) but mostly over the top and oh my god so pretentious (having to look up words every page in order to read a book is NOT a good thing!! it makes it incredibly inaccessible and truly so unenjoyable. like this wasnt a few big words this shit was regularly obscure and sooooo unnecessary.), and the narrator is beyond unlikable (i love an unlikeable and unreliable narrator in a book but it HAS to serve a purpose or be done in such a way that it holds meaning or shows contrast) they're actually incredibly racist!! fetishizing the Black love interest, manipulative as fuck, and so self congratulatory when it comes to their interactions w the Black community. (maybe I'll update w quotes later but currently I don't even want to open this book up again lmao)
SPOILERS BELOW
the fact that they spend the whole book fetishizing Black people and culture and then take control of A's mothers death as if she doesn't have family in the city??? and they also claim a bunch of shit before the family is contacted??? and then how they're murdered by two "dark skinned" men who mug them???? like it was so far beyond an unlikable character. this was straight up unbearable to me and so blatantly racist and there's no point. like there is no lesson or big idea. it's just a shitty person being shitty and making everything about them. like I HATED this book lmao. I HATED it. AND THEY SAY THAT THEY CANT REMEMBER THE WORDS TO A BLUES SONG BC MAYBE THEIR "SOUL ISNT BLACK ENOUGH YET". get out of here.
also how A had to LITERALLY DIE in order for the narrator to do any real self reflection ,,,, like ,,,, literally killing off the Black love interest for .000001% self awareness .... not worth it.
March 6, 2016
A really nice mood piece of writing here. Anne Garréta gives the nighttime life of Paris and Manhattan a nice smokey touch, as this is a tale of lovers, one is a combination of professor and DJ, and the other lover is an American dancer in Paris. What we don't know is the gender of either of the two. Which must have been hell for the translator Emma Ramadan to do, since the French language has very strong genderistic touches to their language. In all honesty, as I was reading, I was imagining that the lovers were women, and I'm not sure if it was just a stupid knowledge of knowing the author is female, or somehow the nature of the two main characters. Garréta wrote this novel when she was 25, and she became a member of Oulipo five years after she wrote "Sphinx." One can sense the playfulness of the language as well as the no gender specific of the two characters, but it's not as experimental as Georges Perec for instance. The story reads as a doomed love story, a very smart and textured text, but one that conveys the loss of a presence.
January 11, 2016
Anne Garréta was the first female Oulipan, albeit this novel was written in 1986 immediately before she became a member. Arguably the English translator Emma Ramadan merits admission also on the strength of this translation alone.
Fellow Oulipan Daniel Levin Becker highlights in his introduction the case of a French critic who read Perec's La Disparition and gave it a lukewarm review in Les Nouvelles litteraires, without noticing it's now famous Oulipan constraint, the absence of the letter E. The book:
"takes place in a world from which the letter E has gone mysteriously missing, so it's not like there weren't clues.
His gaffe points out a pitfall with the potential to trip up even the most meticulous litterateur: reading an Oulipan novel without knowing the precise way in which it is Oulipan. Did I say pitfall? I might have meant windfall."
Ideally the reader will start an Oulipan novel ignorant of the constraint but it will gradually become clear, but it is almost impossible to discuss the novel without revealing it. So much of this review must, by Goodreads convention, be concealed by a giant spoiler alert. I failed to avoid foreknowledge and suspect my reading experience was a little diminshed as a result, not least as it would likely have revealed something about my own cultural preconceptions.
That being said, Sphinx is, as Becker says, "the rare riddle that only makes you think harder after you know the answer.", and I would add also the rare case where translation actually adds to the novel, by giving, as we shall see, another dimension to the riddle.
Of course the other key consideration for any Oulipan novel - and the one most commonly failed - is the opposite. If the reader was unaware the novel was even Oulipan, does it stand-up otherwise on its pure literary merits? From this perspective, the mediocre review in La Nouvelle litteraires as much about Perec's novel as about the careless critic.
Here my view is mixed. The usual trap of Oulipan novels is that they are written by mathematically rather than lyrically minded authors, and read like it. Sphinx is a torrid love story and Garréta's prose is, unusually for an Oulipan work, vivid perhaps even lurid. Becker describes it as "baroque" - which the novel's narrator, referring to a baroque Church, expands to "excessive decorative style and outrageous ornamental magnificence." For example:
"Ephemeral, this body was undeniably ephremal. I was overwhelmed by despair, vague and distant; i barely discerned the cause, buried as it must have been in ancient memory, abruptly rekindled and fighting to return, to take hold and actualise itself in a vision. Ephemeral - a word that i heard pronounced as a murder, as an image before my eyes, floating, tearing the veil: a living and funereal abrasion coming to break on the surface of anamnesis."
And she very successfully avoids the risk of the constraint making the prose and the story artificial. The wonderful thing, even once you spot the constraint, is to see how natural the writing is - it's very difficult to spot the boundaries.
Against that, from a purely personal point of view, this isn't a novel I would otherwise have read. I found the prose over lurid and the narrator's thoughts (the paragraph above being an example)
dramatised beyond what the details of the story seemed to warrant. A more obviously overblown example follows - and unfortunately this in part may reflects a translation decision, itself indirectly driven by the Oulipan constraint (see below):
"The whole dialectic of reason, the confused potage of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful was suddenly overthrown, tossed into the impetuous cloacum of a world that breaks through old barriers and overflows its first cradle, twisting and restless with tumults and tremblings provoked by these unseen, submarine restraints."
Ultimately, I fear I enjoyed thinking and writing about the novel (see post spoiler alert below) more than reading it.
The novel takes it title from the song Sphinx by Amanda Lear, which A*** performs on the stage of a nightclub and which speaks to their story:
"I can't stand the pain
and I keep looking for all the faces i had
before the world began.
I've only known desire and my poor soul will burn into eternal fire.
And I can't even cry,
A sphinx can never cry.
I wish that I could be
a silent sphinx eternally.
I don't want any past
only want things which cannot last.
Phony words of love
or painful truth, I've heard it all before.
A conversation piece,
a woman or a priest, it's all a point of view."
Overall, 5 stars for the concept and the translation but a weak 3 for the underlying novel (and Ramadan's deliberate decision to use overblown language)
Fellow Oulipan Daniel Levin Becker highlights in his introduction the case of a French critic who read Perec's La Disparition and gave it a lukewarm review in Les Nouvelles litteraires, without noticing it's now famous Oulipan constraint, the absence of the letter E. The book:
"takes place in a world from which the letter E has gone mysteriously missing, so it's not like there weren't clues.
His gaffe points out a pitfall with the potential to trip up even the most meticulous litterateur: reading an Oulipan novel without knowing the precise way in which it is Oulipan. Did I say pitfall? I might have meant windfall."
Ideally the reader will start an Oulipan novel ignorant of the constraint but it will gradually become clear, but it is almost impossible to discuss the novel without revealing it. So much of this review must, by Goodreads convention, be concealed by a giant spoiler alert. I failed to avoid foreknowledge and suspect my reading experience was a little diminshed as a result, not least as it would likely have revealed something about my own cultural preconceptions.
That being said, Sphinx is, as Becker says, "the rare riddle that only makes you think harder after you know the answer.", and I would add also the rare case where translation actually adds to the novel, by giving, as we shall see, another dimension to the riddle.
Of course the other key consideration for any Oulipan novel - and the one most commonly failed - is the opposite. If the reader was unaware the novel was even Oulipan, does it stand-up otherwise on its pure literary merits? From this perspective, the mediocre review in La Nouvelle litteraires as much about Perec's novel as about the careless critic.
Here my view is mixed. The usual trap of Oulipan novels is that they are written by mathematically rather than lyrically minded authors, and read like it. Sphinx is a torrid love story and Garréta's prose is, unusually for an Oulipan work, vivid perhaps even lurid. Becker describes it as "baroque" - which the novel's narrator, referring to a baroque Church, expands to "excessive decorative style and outrageous ornamental magnificence." For example:
"Ephemeral, this body was undeniably ephremal. I was overwhelmed by despair, vague and distant; i barely discerned the cause, buried as it must have been in ancient memory, abruptly rekindled and fighting to return, to take hold and actualise itself in a vision. Ephemeral - a word that i heard pronounced as a murder, as an image before my eyes, floating, tearing the veil: a living and funereal abrasion coming to break on the surface of anamnesis."
And she very successfully avoids the risk of the constraint making the prose and the story artificial. The wonderful thing, even once you spot the constraint, is to see how natural the writing is - it's very difficult to spot the boundaries.
Against that, from a purely personal point of view, this isn't a novel I would otherwise have read. I found the prose over lurid and the narrator's thoughts (the paragraph above being an example)
dramatised beyond what the details of the story seemed to warrant. A more obviously overblown example follows - and unfortunately this in part may reflects a translation decision, itself indirectly driven by the Oulipan constraint (see below):
"The whole dialectic of reason, the confused potage of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful was suddenly overthrown, tossed into the impetuous cloacum of a world that breaks through old barriers and overflows its first cradle, twisting and restless with tumults and tremblings provoked by these unseen, submarine restraints."
Ultimately, I fear I enjoyed thinking and writing about the novel (see post spoiler alert below) more than reading it.
The novel takes it title from the song Sphinx by Amanda Lear, which A*** performs on the stage of a nightclub and which speaks to their story:
"I can't stand the pain
and I keep looking for all the faces i had
before the world began.
I've only known desire and my poor soul will burn into eternal fire.
And I can't even cry,
A sphinx can never cry.
I wish that I could be
a silent sphinx eternally.
I don't want any past
only want things which cannot last.
Phony words of love
or painful truth, I've heard it all before.
A conversation piece,
a woman or a priest, it's all a point of view."
Overall, 5 stars for the concept and the translation but a weak 3 for the underlying novel (and Ramadan's deliberate decision to use overblown language)
April 28, 2019
To say that I HATED this book would be a gross understatement. I was incredibly intrigued by the oulipian writing style and had never heard of it. I was also very curious about how she would approach writing the main characters without announced gender. From about page 30 I started to feel that the narrator is a narcissistic psychopath without any redeeming qualities. I don't feel as though the author masked the genders well (the narrator was obviously a male to me, while A**** was either female or an effeminate male.) I cared nothing for any of the characters and hoped that their conclusion was exactly what happens. I found the narrative to be (I made a list because I was getting so frustrated with the book I was screaming in my head and needed some form of outlet for my exasperation): pompous, convoluted, intentionally disjointed and obscure, there is no rhyme or reason for her plot twists, lack of pronouns pointless since gender seems very clear for both sexes, taking way too long to go anywhere, contrived angst more like petulant child, and bipolar.
Do not, I beg of you, waste your time on this novel. If you're picking this up because of the lack of pronouns aspect, read Written on the Body. It is much, much better. God! It's going to take me days to get over the time wasted on this book and I only finished it because of my book group.
Do not, I beg of you, waste your time on this novel. If you're picking this up because of the lack of pronouns aspect, read Written on the Body. It is much, much better. God! It's going to take me days to get over the time wasted on this book and I only finished it because of my book group.
September 3, 2015
The narrator decides to return part time to the university theology studies that he had abandoned shortly before he fell into the world of cabarets and chic nightclub DJing. He will write his thesis on the apophatic tradition.
This (apophasis) is an approach to knowing and understanding God that uses only what can be identified as what we don't or can't know about God. A negative approach. Which is just what Garreta does here by denying us knowledge of the gender of either the first person narrator or the loved character. Of course the French author used very different tricks than the translator, to meet the constraints of the two languages, as described in the translator's afterword.
Interesting, although a bit too French for me in the chapters of deepest introspection.
This (apophasis) is an approach to knowing and understanding God that uses only what can be identified as what we don't or can't know about God. A negative approach. Which is just what Garreta does here by denying us knowledge of the gender of either the first person narrator or the loved character. Of course the French author used very different tricks than the translator, to meet the constraints of the two languages, as described in the translator's afterword.
Interesting, although a bit too French for me in the chapters of deepest introspection.
September 2, 2016
a little more in awe of this than that i really fell for it. still, such a remarkable feat.
August 16, 2025
DNF on p. 200 of 230. (I read a 2019 Grasset reprint; this book was originally published in 1986.) Yeah so this is really racist!
I bought it years ago because I heard what is clearly THE selling point of the book - that it was written without ever communicating the narrator’s gender, which given French grammar is somewhat tricky. And the plot is described as - narrator of potentially mysterious gender falls in love with dancer named A***… which I will admit I absolutely assumed meant this was going to be about lesbians. Or at least more-or-les(s)bians. (I acknowledge this is the bias *I* bring to the table.)
Then this book sat on my shelf for years. I picked it up because I suddenly got really sick of the anglophone mentality & anglophone literature, and I wanted to read something different.
Unfortunately……… this book was a great reminder that English people suck, yes, but French people ALSO suck. Look I know I’m an American, we’re not known for being thoughtful and aware (or generally not sucking), but damn this book is irredeemably racist in such a delusional, French-specific way. You’re telling me you’re obsessively in love with this dancer - how do you describe her? Black skin. Sexy hips. Big lips. Unintellectual. Good with her body. Instinctual. Did you mention sexy, because you’re mentioning it again. You and she are such opposites - you’re highly educated, have family money, are intellectual. When she takes you to her hometown, New York, you insist on her giving you a tour of Harlem. You’re moved by how shitty it is, and you like the feeling. She’s uncomfortable, which you notice but never address. You just keep being obsessed with her until she dies in a freak accident that’s not *not* your fault, at which point you do everything in your human power to make her death about you.
I could go on!
Also the gender reference avoidance thing totally misunderstands gender - it’s taking out the pronouns but leaving every other detail about how people present themselves & move through the world & are reacted to by those around them. Like - if you’re trying to conceal gender, in what universe would you specifically need to point out when your club-goer protagonist deviates from their routine to go to a club “homosexuel”? Hard to think of how Garréta could have missed the point more.
I really cannot believe people have ever discussed this book positively. I wish I could remember where I saw it recommended so I could go back and tell them just how wrong they were.
I bought it years ago because I heard what is clearly THE selling point of the book - that it was written without ever communicating the narrator’s gender, which given French grammar is somewhat tricky. And the plot is described as - narrator of potentially mysterious gender falls in love with dancer named A***… which I will admit I absolutely assumed meant this was going to be about lesbians. Or at least more-or-les(s)bians. (I acknowledge this is the bias *I* bring to the table.)
Then this book sat on my shelf for years. I picked it up because I suddenly got really sick of the anglophone mentality & anglophone literature, and I wanted to read something different.
Unfortunately……… this book was a great reminder that English people suck, yes, but French people ALSO suck. Look I know I’m an American, we’re not known for being thoughtful and aware (or generally not sucking), but damn this book is irredeemably racist in such a delusional, French-specific way. You’re telling me you’re obsessively in love with this dancer - how do you describe her? Black skin. Sexy hips. Big lips. Unintellectual. Good with her body. Instinctual. Did you mention sexy, because you’re mentioning it again. You and she are such opposites - you’re highly educated, have family money, are intellectual. When she takes you to her hometown, New York, you insist on her giving you a tour of Harlem. You’re moved by how shitty it is, and you like the feeling. She’s uncomfortable, which you notice but never address. You just keep being obsessed with her until she dies in a freak accident that’s not *not* your fault, at which point you do everything in your human power to make her death about you.
I could go on!
Also the gender reference avoidance thing totally misunderstands gender - it’s taking out the pronouns but leaving every other detail about how people present themselves & move through the world & are reacted to by those around them. Like - if you’re trying to conceal gender, in what universe would you specifically need to point out when your club-goer protagonist deviates from their routine to go to a club “homosexuel”? Hard to think of how Garréta could have missed the point more.
I really cannot believe people have ever discussed this book positively. I wish I could remember where I saw it recommended so I could go back and tell them just how wrong they were.
July 25, 2022
"The Eden held a certain power over me; I was helpless against it. Before I went to work at night, I would spend two hours there, from ten to midnight. The troupe very quickly adopted me: they asked for my opinion on their makeup and confessed to me all their little dramas. I liked to let myself be brushed by naked skin, by boas and feather fans. I liked to watch as a face transformed under the stroke of a pencil and the touch of a brush, the line of a drawn eyebrow, the shape of an accentuated cheekbone. This living exhibition turned me off of antiquities; the odors of perfume and sweat were missing at all the museums I visited" (8).
"To distill music, to set bodies in rhythm, was to be the priest of a harrowing cult. Once I realized that, all I could do was drift, asking myself why I was there, besides the chance that had brought me the poisonous ease that had ensnared me. Then again, why leave? It was so easy to think of this crossing over as a trial of purification through the mud. I would have had to pretend to look all over for some kind of calling, knowing full well that there was nothing to find, and that it would all end in horror and silence" (10).
From the translator's note: "Because writing with constraint does not add up to being constrained by your writing. Rather, it means bending your text to accommodate your ideas, interrogating the words of your language and finding out how they can be used to feed your whims" (124).
"Jeanne had an outdated idea of high society: she both feared nocturnal adventures and admired this newfound luxury, this idea of a life of partying that only old money or the nouveau riche could afford. The difference between a nightclub like the Apocryphe and a cabaret or shady dive on the Place Pigalle remained obscure for her. She saw how easy it was to pass from socialite to has-been, from night owl to washed-up, and she feared for me a fate worse than death and its torments" (26).
"My eclecticism pushed me to ignore differences and transgress against exclusions; I entered indiscriminately into clubs that were gay or straight, male or female. I didn't mind whether the place was a notorious dive or a hideaway of respectable sharks" (30).
"What did I get out of spending all my time with someone with whom I shared no social, intellectual, or racial community? That was precisely the question troubling them. Black skin, whit skin: our looks were against us. Our intimacy went against the mandate dictating that birds of a feather flock together. And this impossible clash of colors produced the general opinion that this was an unnatural union" (36).
"To mix with company that derives its life force from the desire to show off is to confine oneself to the enslavement of the ogler; I was disgusted by this pagan and idolatrous Mass, its adepts, its servants, and its totems" (42).
"A club does not get filled every night with only the chic clientele. Because there are a paltry number of remarkable characters--they are remarkable only because their number is paltry--a mass of individuals of lower distinction are allowed into this sanctuary, a privilege through which they are made to feel honored" (51).
"That night I realized something: they pronounce their desiderata, demanding (without really caring) some record, in order to prove that they have a right to be in this milieu where the arbitrary reigns. It's their sole ontological proof, their sole cogito, their foundation and justification. I want, therefore I am; I need, I breathe. I spend money, they must grant my desire, considering my demands in light of the value that I offer. I pay to exist; the tribute, delivered in kind or in cash, buys the recognition of my right" (51-52).
"My strategy was to inspire incertitude; I derived pleasure in imbuing these souls with doubt by not playing into their pathetic ruses. Che vuoi? I was leading them to the brink of an essential anxiety. My reply was always 'maybe.' It was a dangerous game that exposed me to the disapproval, disrespect, or insidious resentment of the people to whom I denied the assurance of being a subject. Each night I would have to confront this great panic of individual desires that were in reality desires for individuation, for furious revindication. Sometimes I would try--utterly in vain but with a perverse pleasure--to make them understand that the sum of individual desires does not add up to the happiness of all. That when it comes to the music in a club the law of the majority is ineffectual; that neither democracy nor aristocracy, nor even oligarchy, is a possible regime for a coherent musical set. I would argue that a good DJ is one who, rather than simply responding to repetitive wishes that are consciously formulaic and elementary (such and such a record, such and such a song, subconsciously manages to fulfill an unknown desire by creating a unity of something superior to adding up so many records, so many requests. To appease is not the same as to fulfill" (52).
"I concluded that making love without laughing was as bad as gifting a book written in a language the recipient does not know" (62).
"To distill music, to set bodies in rhythm, was to be the priest of a harrowing cult. Once I realized that, all I could do was drift, asking myself why I was there, besides the chance that had brought me the poisonous ease that had ensnared me. Then again, why leave? It was so easy to think of this crossing over as a trial of purification through the mud. I would have had to pretend to look all over for some kind of calling, knowing full well that there was nothing to find, and that it would all end in horror and silence" (10).
From the translator's note: "Because writing with constraint does not add up to being constrained by your writing. Rather, it means bending your text to accommodate your ideas, interrogating the words of your language and finding out how they can be used to feed your whims" (124).
"Jeanne had an outdated idea of high society: she both feared nocturnal adventures and admired this newfound luxury, this idea of a life of partying that only old money or the nouveau riche could afford. The difference between a nightclub like the Apocryphe and a cabaret or shady dive on the Place Pigalle remained obscure for her. She saw how easy it was to pass from socialite to has-been, from night owl to washed-up, and she feared for me a fate worse than death and its torments" (26).
"My eclecticism pushed me to ignore differences and transgress against exclusions; I entered indiscriminately into clubs that were gay or straight, male or female. I didn't mind whether the place was a notorious dive or a hideaway of respectable sharks" (30).
"What did I get out of spending all my time with someone with whom I shared no social, intellectual, or racial community? That was precisely the question troubling them. Black skin, whit skin: our looks were against us. Our intimacy went against the mandate dictating that birds of a feather flock together. And this impossible clash of colors produced the general opinion that this was an unnatural union" (36).
"To mix with company that derives its life force from the desire to show off is to confine oneself to the enslavement of the ogler; I was disgusted by this pagan and idolatrous Mass, its adepts, its servants, and its totems" (42).
"A club does not get filled every night with only the chic clientele. Because there are a paltry number of remarkable characters--they are remarkable only because their number is paltry--a mass of individuals of lower distinction are allowed into this sanctuary, a privilege through which they are made to feel honored" (51).
"That night I realized something: they pronounce their desiderata, demanding (without really caring) some record, in order to prove that they have a right to be in this milieu where the arbitrary reigns. It's their sole ontological proof, their sole cogito, their foundation and justification. I want, therefore I am; I need, I breathe. I spend money, they must grant my desire, considering my demands in light of the value that I offer. I pay to exist; the tribute, delivered in kind or in cash, buys the recognition of my right" (51-52).
"My strategy was to inspire incertitude; I derived pleasure in imbuing these souls with doubt by not playing into their pathetic ruses. Che vuoi? I was leading them to the brink of an essential anxiety. My reply was always 'maybe.' It was a dangerous game that exposed me to the disapproval, disrespect, or insidious resentment of the people to whom I denied the assurance of being a subject. Each night I would have to confront this great panic of individual desires that were in reality desires for individuation, for furious revindication. Sometimes I would try--utterly in vain but with a perverse pleasure--to make them understand that the sum of individual desires does not add up to the happiness of all. That when it comes to the music in a club the law of the majority is ineffectual; that neither democracy nor aristocracy, nor even oligarchy, is a possible regime for a coherent musical set. I would argue that a good DJ is one who, rather than simply responding to repetitive wishes that are consciously formulaic and elementary (such and such a record, such and such a song, subconsciously manages to fulfill an unknown desire by creating a unity of something superior to adding up so many records, so many requests. To appease is not the same as to fulfill" (52).
"I concluded that making love without laughing was as bad as gifting a book written in a language the recipient does not know" (62).
April 5, 2017
ok, i wanted SO badly to love this book. i really did. the writing is beautiful - i very much commend emma ramadan for her work on this translation. it's overwrought, yeah, but that's part of its charm. i'm a sucker for misery and unending ennui. & i can see how writing a gender-neutral novel in french would give you a lot of difficulties that a non-gendered language wouldn't.
but i just can't take any more of this
anyway. my rating isn't because i thought this book was mediocre, but because i had a lot of different opinions in vastly different directions. 2 stars for the spoiler, and 4 stars for the technical quality of the writing. also, if you're lgbt and thinking about reading this, please read the spoiler before making your decision - i wish i'd known.
but i just can't take any more of this
anyway. my rating isn't because i thought this book was mediocre, but because i had a lot of different opinions in vastly different directions. 2 stars for the spoiler, and 4 stars for the technical quality of the writing. also, if you're lgbt and thinking about reading this, please read the spoiler before making your decision - i wish i'd known.
February 9, 2016
Set in the nightclubs of Paris, the genderless novel recounts an affair between a cabaret dancer and a DJ. I saw a lot myself in the protagonist-- simultaneously attracted to his/her nocturnal existence but defeated by ennui. The way Garréta describes the unusual intimacy of people who live at night is very moving and perceptive. I've never read it described so perfectly. Alternating between a monastic life of theological study and a hedonistic one of rubbing shoulders with drug addicts, mobsters, and dancers with slick bodies, the protagonist experiences over and over again the ephemerality of pleasure, beauty, and of course, life. Melancholy pervades the story with a few short-lived glimmers of ecstasy, every now and then. I feel this story could take place at any time-- the fin de siècle, the 1920s, 1950s, now. If you like the world of Brassaï, Anaïs Nin, and Henry Miller, this is the book for you.
Garréta is one of the few female members of OuLiPo, an experimental French literary collective that creates literature based on restraints (Raymond Queneau founded it with François Le Lionnais in 1960; Italo Calvino and Georges Perec were other members.)
Garréta is one of the few female members of OuLiPo, an experimental French literary collective that creates literature based on restraints (Raymond Queneau founded it with François Le Lionnais in 1960; Italo Calvino and Georges Perec were other members.)
April 21, 2022
Beautiful language without a doubt, but I cannot give more than two stars to a book that features a Black body through a lens of fetishization. There's nothing empowering about reading a person's supposed "great love" when that love is described as such:
"That night, A*** was wearing a black shirt and white pleated leather pants that showed off a firm behind. A***'s hair, shaved not long ago for the show, was beginning to grow back, materializing as a light shadow. That face, thus restored to its pure nudity, appeared without interference, without anything that could deceptively modify its proportions or veil its imperfections. Its features had retained nothing of A***'s African origins, except for a barely perceptible, sensual HEAVINESS OF THE MOUTH."
now wait one minute.
A***, the object of desire, is a dancer (and also likely a sex worker) who is quite literally treated like some wild, untamed force that the (white) narrator wants to tame. No matter how groundbreaking this book tries to be, the treatment of a Black person as a concept and not a human being was very disappointing.
"That night, A*** was wearing a black shirt and white pleated leather pants that showed off a firm behind. A***'s hair, shaved not long ago for the show, was beginning to grow back, materializing as a light shadow. That face, thus restored to its pure nudity, appeared without interference, without anything that could deceptively modify its proportions or veil its imperfections. Its features had retained nothing of A***'s African origins, except for a barely perceptible, sensual HEAVINESS OF THE MOUTH."
now wait one minute.
A***, the object of desire, is a dancer (and also likely a sex worker) who is quite literally treated like some wild, untamed force that the (white) narrator wants to tame. No matter how groundbreaking this book tries to be, the treatment of a Black person as a concept and not a human being was very disappointing.
January 1, 2022
I get that it is a linguistic feat, especially in French, to not reveal gender through language. I was told that this book was a non-binary love story but it's a book about death with some linguistic constraints.
Only two characters (the protagonist and their love interest) are not explicitly gendered through language, but the vast majority of characters are binary and referred to as such. There were some instances that identified the white protagonist as a man, and from reviews I can see I'm not alone.
I also struggled with the treatment of race. At first the narrator seems unknowingly racist, but at the end it is the author exposing a big red flag.
The book, translation, or at least the narrator is overly pretentious- I had to define at least one word on each page, thank you Kindle for making this less painful.
Only two characters (the protagonist and their love interest) are not explicitly gendered through language, but the vast majority of characters are binary and referred to as such. There were some instances that identified the white protagonist as a man, and from reviews I can see I'm not alone.
I also struggled with the treatment of race. At first the narrator seems unknowingly racist, but at the end it is the author exposing a big red flag.
The book, translation, or at least the narrator is overly pretentious- I had to define at least one word on each page, thank you Kindle for making this less painful.
September 28, 2021
3.5 ish, maybe?
wonderful writing, absolutely no plot, insane literary experiment for the grammar nerds. A Reading Experience™, tbh.
wonderful writing, absolutely no plot, insane literary experiment for the grammar nerds. A Reading Experience™, tbh.
January 23, 2024
I thought about giving 3 stars, but the second half of the book was too bad! First, I read it in French, so it’s interesting to see the challenge of writing without attributing gender to the main characters and the author did that in a very smart way! Other than that you know very well who is who, cause the gender is not in the grammar, but it’s in the behaviour, in the way the main characters are treated in the different spaces, no woman would go through some situations with the same facility as one of the characters!
Now, my main issues: certainly the author did not think that a black person one day would read such an “intellectual” book, she was wrong! I did the exercise to think about the French mindset at the time she wrote it, but even though some things aged badly to be very nice. I thought maybe it was written like this causa the main character was a French bourgeois and it reflected this social group mindset, but the last pages just make me think, ok the author has the same issue.
Other than that, the romance was poor! Tell my why the main character was in love with A*** other than their awesome sexy body? By the end I didn’t know any relevant thing about A*** other than their career, their amazing dance skills, the lack of interest for art (because apparently dance is not art) and that it was a Afro American person. The love for her is not explained, it sounds only as sexual obsession cause A*** was the opposite, the unacceptable by the society… in the end you don’t care what happen with them. I could care less!
I saw in many comments “you can feel yourself in the Parisian night life”, you couldn’t been wrong, I lived in Paris for 10 years, and other than know the Eden was around Pigalle, many times I felt lost in space and time, I was trying to understand where the story was happening, and it sounded so not right many times. And last comment, all the philosophical part of the book was a big NO! It was in a moment that I didn’t care with the main character anymore and it looked only like words with no purpose only to fill the paper.
Now, my main issues: certainly the author did not think that a black person one day would read such an “intellectual” book, she was wrong! I did the exercise to think about the French mindset at the time she wrote it, but even though some things aged badly to be very nice. I thought maybe it was written like this causa the main character was a French bourgeois and it reflected this social group mindset, but the last pages just make me think, ok the author has the same issue.
Other than that, the romance was poor! Tell my why the main character was in love with A*** other than their awesome sexy body? By the end I didn’t know any relevant thing about A*** other than their career, their amazing dance skills, the lack of interest for art (because apparently dance is not art) and that it was a Afro American person. The love for her is not explained, it sounds only as sexual obsession cause A*** was the opposite, the unacceptable by the society… in the end you don’t care what happen with them. I could care less!
I saw in many comments “you can feel yourself in the Parisian night life”, you couldn’t been wrong, I lived in Paris for 10 years, and other than know the Eden was around Pigalle, many times I felt lost in space and time, I was trying to understand where the story was happening, and it sounded so not right many times. And last comment, all the philosophical part of the book was a big NO! It was in a moment that I didn’t care with the main character anymore and it looked only like words with no purpose only to fill the paper.
September 14, 2018
This book is a treasure. It has changed the way I think about writing, the way I want to write, changed how I think about love affairs and the way we frame them in our storytelling. I also love the idea of the Oulipo.
If you read it, don’t read reviews and don’t read the back cover. Read it pure. Otherwise you will inevitably miss its great achievement. And it will be a massive loss.
If you read it, don’t read reviews and don’t read the back cover. Read it pure. Otherwise you will inevitably miss its great achievement. And it will be a massive loss.
September 8, 2017
The whole "is it a guy or a girl" would go basically unnoticed if the back of the book and every article didn't keep at it. The parts about DJing were the most interesting, and if you've ever had to talk to a DJ you know how low a bar that is.
May 15, 2019
A genderless love story that forces us to consider gender, love, language and death. The afterword by translator Emma Ramadan highlights the achievement of Anne Garetta in doing this in an especially gendered language, French, and enables a deeper understanding of the text.
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