Genesis 0

by Isabelle Nicou

As soon as my eyes close, I’m besieged by waves of blood. A piece of flesh floats in with the tide. No panic, only silence and then the sound of the bloody debris when it comes crashing into my wall. I’m a rampart. An enclosure. A stronghold. Very strong, and I’m afraid of nothing. Certainly not of blood, of its stench of warm entrails and iron dust.

Tomorrow I’ll gain what life will lose: defeat of my body – of the teeming power of the body – that will disgorge its excess of blood and return me to myself, alone, cut off from all lineage and with no line of descent. Being done with this tension in my breasts. Done with the stigmata of your existence and all those that pass through me in the place where you cling. Done with being possessed like this, double-stitched, overlocked, woven into a web that covers me like a shroud. Tomorrow, it’s the women in my family, their tide of hemoglobin A, that I’ll abort. Once the pills are absorbed, I would wait to be delivered. Alone. Free of all lineage and with no line of descent. Eternal. The genesis and the lack. The apocalypse and its angel. Now and forever. The point zero. O.

108 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2007

Reviews

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

“As soon as my eyes close, I’m besieged by waves of blood. A piece of flesh floats in with the tide. No panic, only silence and then the sound of the bloody debris when it comes crashing into my wall. I’m a rampart. An enclosure. A stronghold. Very strong, and I’m afraid of nothing. Certainly not of blood, of its stench of warm entrails and iron dust.”

(p. 63)

I’m 2 for 2 with Isabelle Nicou. Both this one, Genesis 0, her second novel, and Paresis, her first, were compact, elegant, brimming with harsh brilliance that came out of nowhere and absolutely knocked me out. This is harrowing, troubling, haunting, unapologetic, gorgeous stuff. Highly recommended to adventurous readers with strong constitutions.

[Josh Doughty · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I don’t want anything more than what already is, I want everything to be instantly frozen in formaldehyde, and not step down from it. That the flesh never starts to slice, renew or putrefy. Simply. For eternity. “

The entire plot is a massive anxiety-driven build up for the unknown. When something is constantly on your mind and you venture into every Avenue. Every outcome.

This was a tough read for me personally, but I cannot recommend Isabelle Nicou enough.

I am patiently waiting for Stricture to fall into my hands in the future.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Isabelle Nicou is an introspective, self-interrogating writer in the mode of her French predecessors, Marguerite Duras and Annie Ernaux. In this terse novel, the narrator Elizabeth is a 30-year-old actress whose career has stalled, such that after years of acting, she is still only landing minor roles, such as Aricia in Racine’s Phèdre). Also stalled is her four-year relationship to Simon, a neuroradiologist, who seems to put in 18-hour days, seven days a week—when he’s in town. Worse, he doesn’t attend the plays Elizabeth acts in, and seems to have platitudinous attitudes towards the arts in general.

Career and relationship going nowhere are enough to reinforce the negative messages from her mother she grew up listening to, and still does, a mother who finds her own daughter to be a mistake and finds nothing of value in the work Elizabeth does. (Her father merely ignores her.) All-in-all, a bad time to get pregnant.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[David Kuhnlein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genesis 0 is lithe, bite-sized, religious -- a consecrated host.

I couldn't help but be reminded of Hervé Guibert's To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Similar formal elements, emphasis on medicalized death, acting, and a thematic return to childhood.

Will certainly read her other work.

[Tyler Barney · Rating 5 out of 5]

the word unmade flesh. an immaculate concept deftly executed.

[meow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dam that baby thing did not want to eject… ~women be getting straight up possessed by offspring. That’s so freaky

Who is the bf fucking I’m wondering…

Maybe … The book is the real baby this whole time… one that Elizabeth shan’t discard, a baby carried to term and out and about

I’m gonna buy more Isabelle nicou books

Reads like autofiction how the (realist) narrative sequence follows like a journal with forays into waxing philosophically. Nicou’s method is more surrealist than explicitly philosophical tho, more Christian than skeptic.

Some further reading I want to do before my next read of this book: read the Racine play *Phèdre*… study up on the four gospels… google methods of abortion…

[Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2021/0...

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

God damn another banger, Nicou cannot miss.

[James Alfred · Rating 5 out of 5]

Agonising. It is so dense with metaphor. Fluid with the human condition, the female condition. Fundamental project and power. The enslavement to will and happenstance at once. A book everyone who questions the organic nature of natalism must read. A book everyone who questions their own nature, the nature of their loved one's and their mother's should read. Beautiful.

[Hsu Jui-Ting · Rating 3 out of 5]

Immaculately rendered but a bit fatiguing even at its brevity. To its credit, the cold clinical abstraction of Nico's precedents is there in apt display, but the sense of interrogation that dogs much French postmodernist literature is slightly obscured for cheap self-criminations.