Stricture

by Isabelle Nicou

A dizzying, kaleidoscopic work of filial obligation, literary mentorship and childhood dreams of alien abduction.

"In Harry’s suburban house, cluttered with books and stacks of papers, time was bending in an elliptical orb that never failed to constrain me during the few months broken by vacations and interruptions—several, for Harry was often invited abroad—where I went once a week to, as my famous mentor put it, “assist” him.

"Around 9:30 in the morning, after he had come—often still in pajamas over which he put on a putty-colored raincoat—to look for me at the train station in his white Fiat Panda, after we had a cup of coffee in the kitchen and greeted his wife who was leaving for her job in Paris, in the fifth arrondissement, just a few streets over from my studio, I had to climb the stairs and get started."

Suffused with eroticism and troubling despair, Stricture is the work of a major talent at the very height of her considerable powers.

Genres: Fiction

168 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

What, you might very well ask, is the esoteric connection between KING LEAR, Jules Verne, Martin Heidegger, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, the daughters of Sigmund Freud, BLOW-UP, Alfred Hitchcock, and CHARLIE'S ANGELS? Damned if I know, but Isabelle Nicou helpfully collects the dots for us in her unclassifiable book STRICTURE, which functions both as a Shakespearean eulogy towards her relationship with a dead mentor and also as Gallic science fiction.

[Danielle Chelosky · Rating 5 out of 5]

isabelle nicou’s work has always felt haunted, detached, and otherworldly—and ‘stricture’ dives straight into these textures while reckoning with masochism, grief, the ego, the commodification of art, and the frequent human need for escape. in the same way that the unnamed narrator becomes inexplicably, powerfully enamored with her abusive literary mentor because of his lack of affection, what is enticing about nicou’s work is how much she withholds by using such a concise and distant voice, very much like annie ernaux. she strings the reader along with her darkness. reading her work feels intimate and severe. as always, her insights and revelations about love are staggering: “How could I have said to you: ‘I love you very much too, and that’s why I’m not going to say or show it because if it is spoken, then it would no longer ring true, sounding instead like a request for a public knighting for gratification that I refuse a priori to preserve my resolute personality?’” it’s intense outbursts like this that hit like a gut-punch after so much aloofness. ‘stricture’ is a testament to how often love and obsession are just insecurity and trauma in disguise; it is an inquiry into the way art and meaning continuously get tainted by egos and capitalism; it is a complicated elegy; it is a brief abduction that leaves the reader feeling irrevocably changed.

[Ben Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I dreamed of a radical Elsewhere, out of this world, and pinned my hopes on it. Never would I have preserved the desirable status of an object by delaying pleasure.”

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think a lot of this went over my head, but around halfway through the weight of our narrator’s grief shines through so powerfully that all the previous rumination on alien abductions fell sharply into focus. The tennis match between Sigmund Freud and his daughters and the comparison between Anna Freud, Cordelia, and Charlie’s Angels covertly spells out a masochistic view of attachment that is both pitiful and relatable. I’m sure the word games and the genuine psychoanalytic content went unnoticed in my reading.

[David Kuhnlein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stricture doesn’t name Jacques Derrida, but after reading an interview Nicou did with Philip Best, I’d put my money on Derrida being the unnamed “you” the narrator addresses, which becomes doubly interesting (not only in voyeuristic pleasure, but) because the text seems to play with Derrida’s notion that linguistic meaning cannot be made without the context of its opposite. Think of the narrowing medicalized title, and how when we look at the text what we find are a series of missives that are ever dilating, erupting with meaning, endlessly dehiscent.

(full review in Beyond the Last Estate)