Paradise Rot, Jenny Hval

[rushthatspeaks]

Continuing to blog the books I read in June.

I was in the Brookline Booksmith with sovay a few weeks back, on our way to a showing of A Hard Day's Night at the Coolidge, and I saw this book in the Pride display. I immediately wondered if it was the Jenny Hval with whom I am familiar, i.e. the musician whose Apocalypse, girl is high on my list of Greatest Albums. I have been trying to teach myself to write about music so I can write about that album for literally years, which hasn't worked yet. It was indeed that Jenny Hval, who apparently also does fiction, so I wouldn't leave the shop without it.

In a time-honored tradition among Scandinavian pop musicians, Hval sings in English, but, it seems, writes prose in Norwegian. This is the first of her works to be translated, by Marjam Idriss. I don't know enough about Norwegian as a language to know whether Hval's style translates and if so how, but I have no complaints about Idriss' English prose, which is both pretty and spare, stripped-down and forcefully delicate. Length-wise, this turns out to be a novella in English, though I think it's considered a novel in the original, and it has that classical 'A Novel' subtitle, which is odd to see on such a skinny book.

As for the content: Jo comes from Norway to get her undergraduate degree in biology at an English university. It's never explained why she wanted to go to a foreign country, or how she selected her school, as there is no particularly attractive professor or program there, and the town itself is northern and industrial and bleak. Seeking a flatshare, Jo winds up moving into one of the most singular buildings I have ever encountered in literature, with a housemate, Carral, who has no boundaries whatsoever. Which is also, sort of, the issue with the building.

And Carral and Jo fall into each other, in a way as intentionally off-putting as it clearly is consuming for them. It's not a healthy relationship, except that there are ways it makes each of them into more of her best self. It reminds me of some relationships I saw in college; at a women's college, if your partner is also there, you can move in together at a fairly early phase of the partnership, and there were several couples I knew who roomed together and who started sharing clothes, schedules, everything, so that you never encountered one without the other and they were referred to as a portmanteau noun, x-and-y. They'd look alike, have the same haircuts, the same majors, and they'd use the royal we when speaking, oh, we'll get back to you, we think this, we think that. I'm not saying this is always and inevitably the kiss of death, but none of those relationships that I ever knew of survived more than a year or so before imploding, with total destruction of everything inside a wide event horizon. Jo and Carral are clearly doing that, but in the murky way where Jo isn't even clear that she's a lesbian yet, which makes it all even more complicated and difficult. The entire endeavor is complicated even further by something I know from reading interviews with Hval, which is that she is something of a Freudian and straight-up believes in the existence of the death drive as Freud describes it. This almost sends her text psychologically off the rails entirely, but doesn't quite.

This is a book that would be very different if Hval had much experience with science fiction and fantasy. I'm not sure it would be better, or worse, but it would be different. Because this is definitely the supercharged air of a book crammed full of symbolism, symbolism which draws attention to itself, metaphor so thick on the ground that it keeps nearly spilling into the territory of the impossible. The apples, for example: Carral acquires a massive bag of apples which were being thrown away, and both she and Jo take single bites out of some of them, and then they start rotting, and it takes forever for anyone to take them out to the compost, and then there's a hard freeze and they have to bring the compost inside, so they're stuck in an atmosphere redolent of rotting apples all winter, each with one bite taken out. I mean, with that sort of thing and the title, we are almost falling into the territory of allegory here, honestly.

But it's also too weird a book for allegory. Jo's subliminal sexual awareness of the ways that men around her objectify her, and her even more subliminal awareness of the way she objectifies other women, are perfectly naturalistic, and the house itself-- it's too overdone for a metaphor, you couldn't get away with it. Let me quote:

With its open spaces, ladders and plasterboard walls, the factory is little more than the skeleton of an apartment. The ceiling-- which makes for a silver-grey, gloomy sky-- is several metres high. By the kitchen table in the middle of the cube, an iron post runs like a spine from floor to ceiling. Under the ceiling, thick old beams are coated in silverfish and dust. On three of the room's sides, mezzanines have been built, halfway up each wall. Two of these are small decks framed by particle board walls. They face each other on the north and south sides. On the east wall is an open mezzanine with a railing. It's big enough to serve as a living room and contains a television, a sofa, and pillows on the floor. A staircase leads here from the kitchen. Carral stores old things under the mezzanine: stiff sheets, a dishwasher, tinned food and old broken wooden chairs. The bathroom is in the west and has a toilet and bathtub, fenced by the same thin particle board walls as the mezzanines. The boards reach just over our heads and next to the bathroom is a ladder that leads up to a small balcony on the roof of the apartment next door.

A mattress in the northern mezzanine, next to the bathroom, is my bed. Across from me, above the entrance, is the mezzanine where Carral sleeps, and under it hangs an old chandelier that jingles when she turns in bed. Standing on the raised platform of my bedroom I can see above the boards and down into the kitchen, across to the open mezzanine and, if I stretch, right down to the toilet seat in the bathroom.

This is both an entirely possible thing to happen to a poorly converted factory and a setting which might as well be thrusting its inhabitants together like dolls and shouting 'WEIRD PSYCHODRAMA GOES HERE'. The blurring between space and space, function and non-functional, the total lack of privacy of any sort but the pretense of it available through the stretch of empty air everyone treats as though it were a boundary, the eventual lack of distinction between the building's interior and the winter outside... it all walks that edge between plausibility, symbolism, and symbolism so reified that it almost loops back not to meaning what it appears to signify, because it's all too obvious.

I am still not entirely sure whether the denouement goes supernatural, but Jo certainly feels and perceives the eventual evolution of the house and Carral into an almost cosmic-horror personification of self-obliterating rot. Which may honestly just be her perspective, because by that point they're so far beyond the realms of reasonable relationship that it wouldn't surprise you if either of them demanded an exorcism. (Though it's hard to say how much Jo guesses that she's as much a daemon lover to Carral as Carral is to her.)

So this is quite good, and some of the imagery, particularly around the building itself, will stick with me for a long time. It's only... I worry about the Freudianism. Because Freudians, confusticate them, tend to think that all lesbian relationships are like this, that women are just genteel emotional black holes who in too close contact with each other spiral downwards. (No, Sigmund, not every neurosis you had was generalizable to fit the rest of the planet, and now here we all are.) Which is to say, this is the sort of book where I rather wish the author had inserted a less destructive lesbian relationship into the background, so that I am certain she is clear that they exist. As it is, this story falls, if not pondered over-closely, into the realm of the lesbian vampire story, a set of cliches which, if played without subversion at this point in history, cause me to grit my teeth and mutter something about how, fond as I am of Carmilla, this was all said before 1900, and does not require reiteration.

I'd be concerned about the book coming across as actually homophobic, except that it's so very clear that boundaries and the lack thereof are the important parts. As, in this sort of suddenly intimate relationship, they are.

Also, it's entirely out of season, but the descriptive language really made me want a good apple.

Now only three major books which require thought to write about left for June.

Comments

[sovay]

(Though it's hard to say how much Jo guesses that she's as much a daemon lover to Carral as Carral is to her.)

How much does the book know?

(No, Sigmund, not every neurosis you had was generalizable to fit the rest of the planet, and now here we all are.)

I had never before mentally classed Freud and Lovecraft, but now here we are.

Good luck with the apple.

[batdina]

Between you and Sovay my music collection, not to say my literature consumption, has changed quite dramatically.

Which is to say "thank you".

[lokifan]

This sounds fascinating! And very much the kind of thing I'd like, if only because while I entirely agree with you about how it would've been great to have a less-destructive lesbian relationship in the background, I've got more patience for lesbian vampire stories as a thing.