RaveThe National\"Rather than creating an Oulipian ‘constraint’, Sphinx highlights the already gendered nature of the French language, and of French society: ‘Were there really women who wore these blood-red bodices, purple garter belts, and sheer lace thongs?’ Garréta’s narrator wonders, passing a seedy Pigalle shop. A theology student turned DJ, s/he lives in a world that is utterly gendered, but in which gender is so performative that it can be put on and off easily by either sex. The trick of the text is to see what genders your imagination conjures … Ironically, Garréta’s narrator attempts personal redemption by ‘writing’ the book we’re reading, in which memories are recounted not as order, but as brief, fleshly experiences, answering Garréta’s first-page teaser: ‘Why do I always live only in memory?’\
Elena Ferrante
RaveThe GuardianLenú and Lila are not so much written on the body as through negotiations with its image, like Lila's glamorous wedding photo, which recurs as a traded totem until Lila does violence to her own image, resurrecting it as a piece of art. Creation is destructive, for Lila especially … Ferrante writes with a constant case of ‘dissolving margins.’ Her descriptions pursue details of forms until their centres cannot hold … Ferrante is a master of the unsayable. Words go under water, surface, disappear again. If Lenú minds her language, Lila says what she likes, but nothing that can be published.
