RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksWhile Cârneci seems to draw upon Hélène Cixous’s and Luce Irigaray’s post-structuralist feminism, she also reiterates Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that one isn’t born a woman, but one becomes one through the role imposed upon her by society ... Like her French predecessors, Cârneci attempts to challenge not only the rapport between man and woman, but an entire mode of perception. In this sense, her feminism seems to be her own (personal) creation—at times, existentialist, at times, mystic, her goal is, ultimately, to understand the infinite of the universe, which encompasses the small and insignificant body of the narrator ... Feminism aside, Cârneci is, in the end, an original writer and a masterful stylist, whose mastery of language comes vividly across through Sean Cotter’s dexterous translation. Her stylistic ingenuity is felicitously rendered by her translator, as in this case ... Her novel transgresses feminist ideology, proposing a vision that implies a change in human perception, a vision attempting to unify the outside and the inside, the object and the subject of all human experience[.]
