RavePitchforkParadise Rot, the newly translated debut novel from experimental Norwegian musician Jenny Hval, centers around a stranger come to stay ... Paradise Rot is an odd microcosm inside an ordinary world, something so enclosed that it might go unobserved if you didn’t know where to look. It is, in many ways, a novel about finding and then choosing a self; it also shows the pull of unexpected queer desire and the dismantling of boundaries that draw requires. But most of all, in the way that a microscope reveals an unsettling truth about the familiar (that it’s teeming with life you never expected), Paradise Rot is hard to forget.
Emma Cline
MixedFlavorwireThis novel will be familiar: it’s definitely a coming-of-age story, and also a story set in a well-mined period of the recent American past. But it transcends both, not just because Cline’s writing lets us linger on every detail, but because she reorients the narrative toward a person we haven’t heard all that much from yet, and gives readers access to the comprehensible subjectivity of a person whose equivalents have seemed incidental until now. How many Evies were there at the real Spahn Ranch, drawn in by the thrill of belonging but made into accessories in every sense of the word? The story told in The Girls may take place around the periphery of a crazy crime, but it doesn’t linger on the narcissistic maniac who perpetrates it, because, it turns out, not everyone is interested in orbiting him.
