What do you think?
Rate this book
Aliens & Anorexie
Ende der 1990er-Jahre fliegt Chris Kraus, die Figur dieses Romans, nach Berlin, um ihren Film »Gravity & Grace« auf einem Festival zu zeigen. Nicht auf der Berlinale natürlich, die das Filmprojekt über Hoffnung, Verzweiflung und quasireligiöse Ekstase nicht annehmen wollte, sondern nur auf einem kleinen Festival, für das sich niemand interessiert. Chris ist gescheitert. In ihrem Liebesleben sowieso, jetzt noch in ihrer Kunst und bald sicher auch in ihrem Denken. Während das neue Jahrtausend vor der Tür steht, wartet sie auf E-Mails ihres SM-Partners, der gerade in Namibia einen Hollywoodfilm dreht. Hilfe suchend wendet sie sich erneut Simone Weils Klassiker »Schwerkraft und Gnade« zu, der sie vor Jahren zu ihrem gefloppten Film inspirierte. Chris versinkt immer mehr im Leben und Denken der französischen Philosophin. Ausgehend von deren Askesepraxis sieht sie in der Anorexie eine Möglichkeit, den eigenen verhassten, dysfunktionalen Körper ein für alle Mal zu verlassen. Durch die Auseinandersetzung mit Ulrike Meinhofs theoretischem Werk, Paul Theks Kunst und Aldous Huxleys Drogenerfahrungen gelingt es Chris, ihre Perspektive auf das eigene Scheitern und Sein zu verändern.
255 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
213 people are currently reading
8421 people want to read
About the author
Chris Kraus
77 books922 followersChris Kraus is a writer and critic. She studied acting and spent almost two decades making performances and experimental films in New York before moving to Los Angeles where she began writing. Her novels include Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. She has published three books of cultural criticism—Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Where Art Belongs, and Social Practices. I Love Dick was adapted for television and her literary biography After Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) and Penguin Press. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Kraus held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in 2019 and was Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College between 2020–2024. She has written for various magazines and has been a coeditor of the independent press Semiotext(e) since 1990. Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability, and dazzling speed and has been translated into seventeen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 190 reviews
April 22, 2020
Connections. Juxtapositions. Narrative. Non-sequitur. Personal essay. Lies. Fiction. A screenplay novelization. Philosophy. Citation, reference, and allusion. Confession. A bulimic writer purging words from a mind that wants to empty itself, become alien, de-create. Sex. Phone sex. S & M. Writing as abstinence. Writing broken down into compartments and mixed, jumbled.
I begin reading this on the airplane, the eleven-hour flight to Frankfurt from San Francisco, during the pretend nighttime, after the meal and I had finished Frank Harris's The Bomb. I write this review in Florence, after the seven hour layover, the short hop over the alps, the largely sleepless real night, in the haze of the jet lag I seem to experience every year upon my return to my adopted home. Usually the lag devastates me for at least a week. I will make it work for me this time. This time.
Chris Kraus's novels (?) are the purest seduction. Her forms punk me every time. I am her bitch reader, slave boy. My gender inconsequential in English. Not so in Italian. De-create gender through reading and writing? Bitch boy/master girl. Author/reader. Where do novels go once you've read them?
The people. Character sketches, the narrator--honest, sincere, seductive. The push/pull of the world. Empathy and escape. To be all of it, to fix suffering, or to rise above, in a spaceship and be alien. Aliens know--Earthlings never do. We wallow in ambivalence--what other choice do we have? It's a matter of degrees.
"Gavin Brice" was a perfect little post-script/coda. The screenplay novelization "Gravity and Grace" should have been a preface--I yearned to be back in "Aliens & Anorexia" while reading it, the jet-lag deepening, the 90+ degree afternoon heat relentless, my body wanting to sleep, wanting to wake, conflicted, struggling to understand and adjust. In-between trains.
I begin reading this on the airplane, the eleven-hour flight to Frankfurt from San Francisco, during the pretend nighttime, after the meal and I had finished Frank Harris's The Bomb. I write this review in Florence, after the seven hour layover, the short hop over the alps, the largely sleepless real night, in the haze of the jet lag I seem to experience every year upon my return to my adopted home. Usually the lag devastates me for at least a week. I will make it work for me this time. This time.
Chris Kraus's novels (?) are the purest seduction. Her forms punk me every time. I am her bitch reader, slave boy. My gender inconsequential in English. Not so in Italian. De-create gender through reading and writing? Bitch boy/master girl. Author/reader. Where do novels go once you've read them?
The people. Character sketches, the narrator--honest, sincere, seductive. The push/pull of the world. Empathy and escape. To be all of it, to fix suffering, or to rise above, in a spaceship and be alien. Aliens know--Earthlings never do. We wallow in ambivalence--what other choice do we have? It's a matter of degrees.
"Gavin Brice" was a perfect little post-script/coda. The screenplay novelization "Gravity and Grace" should have been a preface--I yearned to be back in "Aliens & Anorexia" while reading it, the jet-lag deepening, the 90+ degree afternoon heat relentless, my body wanting to sleep, wanting to wake, conflicted, struggling to understand and adjust. In-between trains.
February 22, 2010
I never realized Aliens was the least popular of Kraus's "torpor" trilogy, but it's my favorite. It's the one where she assembles a radical philosophy of sadness. I love that. I reread it because it was snowing a lot where I live.
December 6, 2019
I love chris Krauss, and I loved the part about Simone weil, but she speaks of so many different things, it´s hard to follow sometimes. Still it´s a great book and the combination she does is pretty unique, theory, with fiction, with performance. Definitely on the Chris Kraus side, always.
December 31, 2022
My girl for life. Rambling for 200 pages and then forces you to read the script of her movie that everybody hates!
August 4, 2017
I love all books by Chris Kraus. But Aliens & Anorexia holds a place in my heart far beyond all others.
December 30, 2016
Before she became the groundbreaking theorist / novelist / detourned-conceptual-memoirist she is today, Chris Kraus was the maker of deft, smart experimental films, culminating in her rarely-seen, under-acknowledged feature Gravity and Grace. The film took its title from Simone Weil but explored the modern emptinesses waiting to be filled by cult membership and the aimless but determined pull towards art. It didn't do well with audiences, critics, or festivals, it seems, and both the unwieldy production process and last-ditch distribution attempts at the Berlinale's satellite film market become mordantly despairing episodes here. But moreso, since this is Chris Kraus, they become the jumping-off points for conceptual studies of art and life, Simone Weil and Ulrike Meinhoff, philosophies of culture, body, and desire, S&M, performance art, and starvation. It's difficult to explain exactly how it all works, but it works with extreme elegance here. Even better than her first novel (and etc) I Love Dick, and far far ahead of the attempted Amazon series thereof (though I find the existence of that highly interesting in its own right).
February 2, 2021
I struggled with this book more than I would like to admit. I think the problem is that it’s quite inconsistent... either that, or its sort of stream of conscious/random free associations are just too unkempt for me. This is at its best when it is chronicling the life and work of Simone Weil, I think, but gets too bogged down in excursions into the lives of random curators and people Kraus met at a party. It’s also very clear that its target audience is exclusively academics, which I guess is OK, but it really does feel exclusionary at times? There’s also kind of a weird relationship to privilege and wealth, such that I can’t tell whether Kraus is mocking herself or not. That said, there are some really beautiful and evocative passages that I have fervently marked and underlined.
August 27, 2008
it's sort of like reading a really involved blog. it's an effective and interesting piece of writing. basically, the protagonist is shopping a film that sounds like a dispassionate mess of pretension while thinking back to shooting it. this is interspersed with a biography of simone weil and a rambling narrative about sado masochism and phone sex lines.
it's kind of bitchy and present. it's interesting, the way that the post y2k era can seem retro despite being written like the hyper modernity it seemed like at the time. technology is dating every second...
it's kind of bitchy and present. it's interesting, the way that the post y2k era can seem retro despite being written like the hyper modernity it seemed like at the time. technology is dating every second...
August 17, 2025
Ufff a ver … entiendo el afán de escribir una novela rizomatica y creo que podría funcionar pero a veces ha sido too much para mi. Me da la sensación que la complejidad solo pretende alardear al lector nicho capaz de pillar todas las referencias más que a construir algo de verdad. Y mira que hay referencias de arte que me han interesado, pero el final ha sido simplemente aburridissimo y casi no lo termino. Solo por la referencias a Simone Weil ya le tengo que dar 2 estrellas, me parece fascinante y desde luego que voy a indagar en su pensamiento. Eso al menos me lo llevo. Por otra parte si creo que tiene una perspectiva de género bastante perspicaz por lo que hay bromas y guiños finamente colocados pero no le bastan para salvar el resto. Eran demasiados términos complicados que no he entendido. Me hubiera gustado ahondara más en ciertos temas como afrontar la derrota cuando presenta su película.
July 10, 2024
Jag gillar Kraus stil. Hon är så konstig och de fula och stört insnöade reflektionerna är mer sympatiska i sig än vad hon faktist lyckas ge svar på.
Att bryta ner sitt jag för att nå en transcendental äkthet är en spännande tolkning av självskadebeteenden så som anorexia. Jag uppfattar det som att anorexia som fenomenologiskt problem har kommit längre än då hon skrev detta, vilket gör att jag ger boken 4 stars även om det finns en hel del vaga och ifrågasättbara resonemang.
Att bryta ner sitt jag för att nå en transcendental äkthet är en spännande tolkning av självskadebeteenden så som anorexia. Jag uppfattar det som att anorexia som fenomenologiskt problem har kommit längre än då hon skrev detta, vilket gör att jag ger boken 4 stars även om det finns en hel del vaga och ifrågasättbara resonemang.
February 23, 2018
Part art criticism, part biography, part memoir, part sadomasochism philosophy (or D/s as Kraus often abbreviates it).
This is a real tour de force exploration of Kraus' philosophy and life lived. I learned so much from her: About the art of Paul Thek, about philosophy and life of Simone Weir, about Kraus' film Gravity & Grace, and about her epistolary D/s romance with "Africa". For that, I say "thank you, Chris. This was great!"
The thread that ties these parts together is a specific kind of failure; a rebuke or rejection from the peers from which validation is sought. It explores what it means to create something of meaning, and then digs into the (superficial) reasons that meaning can be so easily overlooked, even spurned, or just forgotten. It seems Kraus tries to define empathy, or more so, missed opportunities for it (that comes across especially in the "Africa" D/s epistolary).
And this is fiction though, not non-fiction, and not memoir. It's not for everybody. I'd say avoid if you need coherent plot in your novels. But if your thing is just smart, insightful, philosophical, playful writing...
This is a real tour de force exploration of Kraus' philosophy and life lived. I learned so much from her: About the art of Paul Thek, about philosophy and life of Simone Weir, about Kraus' film Gravity & Grace, and about her epistolary D/s romance with "Africa". For that, I say "thank you, Chris. This was great!"
The thread that ties these parts together is a specific kind of failure; a rebuke or rejection from the peers from which validation is sought. It explores what it means to create something of meaning, and then digs into the (superficial) reasons that meaning can be so easily overlooked, even spurned, or just forgotten. It seems Kraus tries to define empathy, or more so, missed opportunities for it (that comes across especially in the "Africa" D/s epistolary).
And this is fiction though, not non-fiction, and not memoir. It's not for everybody. I'd say avoid if you need coherent plot in your novels. But if your thing is just smart, insightful, philosophical, playful writing...
July 1, 2020
Okay, okay I only finished 3/4 of this. I pride myself on finishing books even when they’re shite but in this case life is just too short. No idea what she’s on about.
February 29, 2024
what was shawty on lol
June 20, 2025
La gente que le teme a los alienígenas es sumamente puritana.
June 22, 2018
You love the book and cannot quite say why. It's the sort of book that is bought on a whim at MoMA PS 1, where else, and then tucked safely in the bookshelf, to be whisked out at random 4 years later at a moment of emotional crisis, riffled through and found deeply engrossing. It is digressive, it is sublime, it is philosophical, it is beautiful, it is, above all, profoundly sad. And you feel better after reading it, though you would not be able to explain quite what it was about.
February 21, 2022
A novel about failure, empathy, and sadness, with a cast of characters that includes Simone Weil, Paul Thek, and the author herself.
First published in 2000, Chris Kraus's second novel, Aliens & Anorexia, defined a female form of chance that is both emotional and radical. Unfolding like a set of Chinese boxes, with storytelling and philosophy informing each other, the novel weaves together the lives of earnest visionaries and failed artists. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness; the artist Paul Thek; Kraus herself; and “Africa,” Kraus's virtual S&M partner, who is shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest woods to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her own low-budget independent film.
In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus makes a case for empathy as the ultimate perceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor “self-esteem.” Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body altogether: a rejection of the cynicism that this culture hands us through its food. As Palle Yourgrau writes in the book's new foreword, “Kraus's rescue operation for aliens like Weil from behind enemy lines on planet Earth is a gift, if, in the end, like all good deeds, it remains—as Weil herself would be the first to insist—a fool's errand.”
2.5 Stars
That was absolutely not my cup of tea.
I could get the message in some places, but the writing style was so jumbled and confused. At least that's how I perceived it. But I can see a lot of people loving this.
First published in 2000, Chris Kraus's second novel, Aliens & Anorexia, defined a female form of chance that is both emotional and radical. Unfolding like a set of Chinese boxes, with storytelling and philosophy informing each other, the novel weaves together the lives of earnest visionaries and failed artists. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness; the artist Paul Thek; Kraus herself; and “Africa,” Kraus's virtual S&M partner, who is shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest woods to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her own low-budget independent film.
In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus makes a case for empathy as the ultimate perceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor “self-esteem.” Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body altogether: a rejection of the cynicism that this culture hands us through its food. As Palle Yourgrau writes in the book's new foreword, “Kraus's rescue operation for aliens like Weil from behind enemy lines on planet Earth is a gift, if, in the end, like all good deeds, it remains—as Weil herself would be the first to insist—a fool's errand.”
2.5 Stars
That was absolutely not my cup of tea.
I could get the message in some places, but the writing style was so jumbled and confused. At least that's how I perceived it. But I can see a lot of people loving this.
March 27, 2022
It took me a minute to get used to Kraus’ highly referential style. Once I did, I really enjoyed this book!
Aliens & Anorexia is a collage of reflections on.. well, too many things to list. Sex, work, aliens, god — that kind of stuff. My favorite bits of the collage were the pieces about sadness, empathy and derealization/selfhood. And Kraus’ biographical expositions of Simone Weil’s life and work were so, so good.
There is a very raw tension between cynicism and hope in Kraus’ writing. In addition to the many other thematic and philosophical tensions that a&a so deftly holds, I think this is what made the book so captivating to me. That, and Kraus’ general smarts and insight.
Here’s my only warning: Kraus is a very intense and challenging thinker, and so she deals with intense and challenging realities. This is by no means an easy or ‘comfortable’ read. If that sounds like your cup of tea, or if you like auto-theory vibes (e.g. Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts), I might recommend giving this book a read. If you can’t stomach a somewhat hefty dose of cynicism and intellectual ennui, you could probably skip this one.
—
“To tell a story is an act of love. The teller reaches deep inside the listener’s mind and offers rest and order where there would otherwise be none. The fairy tale does not deny the chaos of the universe. Rather, it offers the chance, the possibility, that in a less than perfect world, it might still be possible to do something that’s good.”
Aliens & Anorexia is a collage of reflections on.. well, too many things to list. Sex, work, aliens, god — that kind of stuff. My favorite bits of the collage were the pieces about sadness, empathy and derealization/selfhood. And Kraus’ biographical expositions of Simone Weil’s life and work were so, so good.
There is a very raw tension between cynicism and hope in Kraus’ writing. In addition to the many other thematic and philosophical tensions that a&a so deftly holds, I think this is what made the book so captivating to me. That, and Kraus’ general smarts and insight.
Here’s my only warning: Kraus is a very intense and challenging thinker, and so she deals with intense and challenging realities. This is by no means an easy or ‘comfortable’ read. If that sounds like your cup of tea, or if you like auto-theory vibes (e.g. Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts), I might recommend giving this book a read. If you can’t stomach a somewhat hefty dose of cynicism and intellectual ennui, you could probably skip this one.
—
“To tell a story is an act of love. The teller reaches deep inside the listener’s mind and offers rest and order where there would otherwise be none. The fairy tale does not deny the chaos of the universe. Rather, it offers the chance, the possibility, that in a less than perfect world, it might still be possible to do something that’s good.”
January 23, 2026
Sorpresa grata esta autora. Es un libro que leí con el fulgor de mis vacaciones y coincidió con un momento de mi pensamiento en el que me interesa la vida artística después del fracaso. Imposible no identificarse con Chris Kraus, escribe desde su experiencia in individual pero es muy consciente de cuánto de esta experiencia rosa eso que llamamos universal. Su escritura es tan inteligente y es tan apasionada de sus obsesiones que no solo te motiva a obsesionarte con por ejemplo Simone Weil o Paul Thek -o de ver su película "gravity and grace"- sino que también te humaniza temáticas por fuera del consumo nostálgico. Me gusta que se haga cargo de cierto patetismo propio y ajeno, que no le tenga miedo a los sentimientos y que no use un discurso de autoayuda para tal. Es fascinante el uso de la sustancia biográfica para explicar algo de estos mundos marginales tan en auge en los 2000 -y casi 26 años también- como la anorexia y los aliens, lejos de discursos repetidos e hipócritas pero lo mejor del libro es toda su travesía como directora de cine independiente, el background de ese mundito pseudointelectual, caótico y desquiciante. Es una escritura temática que no te hace sentir incomoda ni pretende que lo entiendas todo, genera cierta tristeza porque no hay confort pero tampoco ensoñaciones vanas y más cuando propone una mirada lucida sobre los mundos intelectuales, eso que para algunos también pasa en la vida.
September 19, 2021
Dit was de tweede roman van Chris Kraus die ik las en ik ben onder de indruk van haar stijl: Zeer gefragmenteerd en schaamteloos intellectualistisch, maar nooit te onpersoonlijk of academisch. Erg boeiende auteur.
Read
February 7, 2023rlly liked this glad i read it so slow but also just writing this to say that my memory of this book will forever be tied to reading it whilst freezing my ass off for 3 hours on the pavement in front of the electric ballroom one winter afternoon in january lol
February 13, 2026
Chris Kraus, rakastan sinua kirja kirjalta enemmän.
February 13, 2026
Majorly fell apart towards the end, but still awesome.
July 6, 2023
Based on the amount of quotes I underlined in this book it is safe to say that Kraus is a poet.
It took me a while to get comfortable with this book. After "I love dick" the expectations were high and I have to admit, this book started to convince me of its potential as soon as we had the same format of the previous: the email exchange between Kraus and the phone sex dude (forgot the name by now).
This book seems to be somewhat autobiographic and therefore captivating at the level of intimacy. The analogies to Simone Weil and the book title (as much as the alien lady which name i cannot recall) wrap up everything together. I am very eagered to read Weil right now as well.
Beautiful quotes:
"By this time my entire body felt like it was made of glass. I was dying of exposure"
"The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell..."
"She wants to lose herself in order to be larger than herself. A rhapsody of longing overtakes her. She wants to really see. Therefore, she's a masochist."
"This men were crocodiles in clubchairs, conductors of controlled experiments in chaos."
"As if, beneath the onion-skin of personalities, there lies the gleaming uncorrupted Human Soul."
"I'd call myself a "feminist" but I just couldn't do it. Because I'd been sad so long I could not believe in merely personal salvation (...) Why should women settle to think and talk about just femaleness when men were constantly transcending gender?"
"It was an epistemological joke, a metaphor for the interrupted mental flow when memory becomes nostalgia."
"And yet we admire and appreciate wealth's symbols without acknowledging wealth's abstracted sadism - WHAT, and at WHAT COST?"
"Aldous Huxley spent eight hours tripping out on mescaline Simone Weil spent twenty years tripping out on content and casuality.ALIENS & ANOREXIA. Is it any wonder that she starved?"
"The panic of altruism is something like the panic of starvation."
"It is despair that triggers mental illness"
"The sleepless eager disconnected lonely"
"History, barely visible but shuddering underneath the translucent skin of the present."
"When we were a rare animal
Newly human beasts of prey
It was one big God-hunt
We were free and easy
And we lived in skies of uncertainty
We were at large in time"
"What do I belong to
Soul or chromosome
Boundaries and bloodshed
Earth seems so far from home"
It took me a while to get comfortable with this book. After "I love dick" the expectations were high and I have to admit, this book started to convince me of its potential as soon as we had the same format of the previous: the email exchange between Kraus and the phone sex dude (forgot the name by now).
This book seems to be somewhat autobiographic and therefore captivating at the level of intimacy. The analogies to Simone Weil and the book title (as much as the alien lady which name i cannot recall) wrap up everything together. I am very eagered to read Weil right now as well.
Beautiful quotes:
"By this time my entire body felt like it was made of glass. I was dying of exposure"
"The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell..."
"She wants to lose herself in order to be larger than herself. A rhapsody of longing overtakes her. She wants to really see. Therefore, she's a masochist."
"This men were crocodiles in clubchairs, conductors of controlled experiments in chaos."
"As if, beneath the onion-skin of personalities, there lies the gleaming uncorrupted Human Soul."
"I'd call myself a "feminist" but I just couldn't do it. Because I'd been sad so long I could not believe in merely personal salvation (...) Why should women settle to think and talk about just femaleness when men were constantly transcending gender?"
"It was an epistemological joke, a metaphor for the interrupted mental flow when memory becomes nostalgia."
"And yet we admire and appreciate wealth's symbols without acknowledging wealth's abstracted sadism - WHAT, and at WHAT COST?"
"Aldous Huxley spent eight hours tripping out on mescaline Simone Weil spent twenty years tripping out on content and casuality.ALIENS & ANOREXIA. Is it any wonder that she starved?"
"The panic of altruism is something like the panic of starvation."
"It is despair that triggers mental illness"
"The sleepless eager disconnected lonely"
"History, barely visible but shuddering underneath the translucent skin of the present."
"When we were a rare animal
Newly human beasts of prey
It was one big God-hunt
We were free and easy
And we lived in skies of uncertainty
We were at large in time"
"What do I belong to
Soul or chromosome
Boundaries and bloodshed
Earth seems so far from home"
January 27, 2018
It's clear after reading this book why Chris Kraus is the art world's favorite writer - this was indeed an interesting collage of experimental fiction mixed with memoir/essay/thesis.
The book is a unique reading experience, switching back from diary entries, to straightforward memoir, to emails, to thesis arguments, philosophy essays, art history, and topped off with a screenplay/film treatment. It was difficult to switch between what felt real (and was surely autobiographical) to treatise-like essays where you don't know whether to trust the research (or even if these referenced characters are actually real people) to obviously fictional film writing.
That difficulty never let me know for sure where I, the reader, stood in relation to the narrator or the developing action in the novel. Kraus can clearly write very well, speak intimate universal truths, and engage me during personal retellings of recent history, but loses me when she switches gears seamlessly into another genre or medium or direction - which happens often. The characters are fascinating, most of them well developed, but without much reason for me to care for the long term - it's hard to attach yourself to anything in this novel.
I'd like to read her more popular, I Love Dick, but I wouldn't likely revisit this novel. It felt like I was in Ben Lerner's universe, but over my head. I'd need to come to this with a better grip on the art under discussion to get more out of it.
The book is a unique reading experience, switching back from diary entries, to straightforward memoir, to emails, to thesis arguments, philosophy essays, art history, and topped off with a screenplay/film treatment. It was difficult to switch between what felt real (and was surely autobiographical) to treatise-like essays where you don't know whether to trust the research (or even if these referenced characters are actually real people) to obviously fictional film writing.
That difficulty never let me know for sure where I, the reader, stood in relation to the narrator or the developing action in the novel. Kraus can clearly write very well, speak intimate universal truths, and engage me during personal retellings of recent history, but loses me when she switches gears seamlessly into another genre or medium or direction - which happens often. The characters are fascinating, most of them well developed, but without much reason for me to care for the long term - it's hard to attach yourself to anything in this novel.
I'd like to read her more popular, I Love Dick, but I wouldn't likely revisit this novel. It felt like I was in Ben Lerner's universe, but over my head. I'd need to come to this with a better grip on the art under discussion to get more out of it.
November 3, 2023
I both liked this book and also hated the main character. I'm not really familiar with Kraus enough to understand if this was a memoir (if so I'm sorry to be a bit harsh in my review) or fiction (autofiction?) but this felt very disjointed but not in a good way. I don't feel this was a good invoking of Simone Weil and ironically feel Weil would have loathed this book. Crazy or not Weil was extremely interested in the outer-world and active participation in trying to eradicate suffering (at least in her intent) we all know how she would have felt about consumerism, neoliberalism and the art world.
This book is both self absorbed and self aware. It was mixture of anguish, self loathing but also genuinely interesting pondering that also plagued David Foster Wallace. There were parts of the book that I found really interesting; sex & food, Simone Weil, the depressed in Berlin part.
I had zero connection to the last section (which I am assuming is a narrative version of her film) Gravity and Grace. It just didn't do it for me and I'm guessing that's why it was rejected from mostly everything (sorry Kraus 💔). The motif of the alien was also meh, I get what she was aiming at but it still never connected me fully and just doesn't fit (to me) in with Simone Weil's philosophy. Yes I understand she was teased as being an "alien" but nothing really successfully connected that in with Weil and everything else.
I really liked that there was a reading list at the end!
This book is both self absorbed and self aware. It was mixture of anguish, self loathing but also genuinely interesting pondering that also plagued David Foster Wallace. There were parts of the book that I found really interesting; sex & food, Simone Weil, the depressed in Berlin part.
I had zero connection to the last section (which I am assuming is a narrative version of her film) Gravity and Grace. It just didn't do it for me and I'm guessing that's why it was rejected from mostly everything (sorry Kraus 💔). The motif of the alien was also meh, I get what she was aiming at but it still never connected me fully and just doesn't fit (to me) in with Simone Weil's philosophy. Yes I understand she was teased as being an "alien" but nothing really successfully connected that in with Weil and everything else.
I really liked that there was a reading list at the end!
December 28, 2024
most touching food-averse passages around p. 140 - "anorexic girls regard their mother's lives with horror. they will starve themselves in order to avoid a female life, i.e., a life that's drained and compromised and stunted" - OR - "anorexia is a rejection of the female role, a life in service to the needs of others." control, concern with pleasing others, a reliance on others, starving for attention, "the anorexic girl as a simpering solipsistic dog" - passive aggressive decampment towards a non-corporeal form. appreciate kraus's analysis although it's jarring next to her usual harsh sexual (and not sensual) interludes - various ways of escaping the body, waiving healthy boundaries for an all too fluid and permeable existence. bruising easily. aliens too. this book really has it all
January 20, 2026
Is it destiny to have aliens & anorexia fall into my lap?
Not especially, I ordered it myself and then for a friend. This was good, took especially long to finish, considering I have read many books in between finishing this one that I started over a year ago. Maybe I read it slow to savor it. Chris Kraus is great and she unexpectedly weaves many timelines, stories and allusions together to sort of expand your world. She speaks like an artist and her world is so head-y existential but also pleasurable. I would definitely recommend! Um yea— 5/5 stars!
Not especially, I ordered it myself and then for a friend. This was good, took especially long to finish, considering I have read many books in between finishing this one that I started over a year ago. Maybe I read it slow to savor it. Chris Kraus is great and she unexpectedly weaves many timelines, stories and allusions together to sort of expand your world. She speaks like an artist and her world is so head-y existential but also pleasurable. I would definitely recommend! Um yea— 5/5 stars!
December 12, 2007
new narrative, if i'm using that term correctly. collagistic, memoirish. a lot of philosophy (Simone Weil, especially) and other meaty kind of stuff mixed in with the day to day. borrows from deleuze in her formulation of anorexia as an active stance, "the rejection of the cynicism that this culture hands us through food" (163). the citation of which is a reality check as i need to go write my paper FOREAL.
December 30, 2024
https://winterlief.blogspot.nl/2016/0...
(such a beautiful mess.)
(such a beautiful mess.)
April 25, 2020
me reading this now was divine timing. "sadness is the thing i'm moving towards. some recognition of it as a philosophical position" 4.5
Displaying 1 - 30 of 190 reviews