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Originally Posted by Severian

I started to read this at one point, when I was about 18. I'm not sure if it was my mindset at the time — wanting to be a writer of the deconstructionist persuasion, and probably looking for a style that would hide my total lack of confidence in my own creativity — but I was reading the weirdest things I could get my hands on, and definitely looking for something.

However, I dropped that book like a bad habit (the kind that you actually want to drop because it doesn't afford you any fleeting sense of euphoria to make its badness worthwhile). Jesus fucking Christ. If I had a souped up time machine I'd go back and convince myself never to pick it up, paradox be damned.

I will never read that ... thing. That's a promise.

maybe at 18 you weren't ready to realize her freedom and playfulness and punk rock ways right along her literary and theorethical depth. i certainly wasn't.

but this time around i'm having a blast with her. on the one hand she skewers the absurdity of gender roles and the cruelty of economic social relations, on the other hand she concocts an absurd and rambling melodrama, and then she proceeds to have her way with language and literary history, from the rudiments of writing to allusion to quotation to analysis to overt plagiarism. genius.

it's a book about desire, and oppression, and the misfortune of being born a human and a woman to boot, and be cursed with intelligence, and a struggle for freedom, and as bataille would put it--about evil, which is a return to childhood.

it's a brilliant book, but because it's such outsider art it's also very easy to misunderstand. i have no patience with moronic academics that interpret it like she's literally 10 years old fucking her literal father. it's poetry, motherfucker (fatherfucker?), not journalism, and so it's loaded with metaphor and symbolism and allegory and since it's actual art and not a fucking pamphlet it is wonderfully ambiguous. but anyway-- don't read those academic papers. she's got some great interviews out there instead.

in any case-- it's the only fiction book that i've been able to stomach in a very long time. it's so refreshing to find something so completely different. i'm surprised i'm liking it so much.