Book review: When the stink in the garden of Eden

the Young girls and kroppsupplöst infiniteness is not an uncommon theme in samtidslitteraturen. Thus, novels and collections of poetry where the heroine seamlessly invaded or engulfed by nature and oscillates between the human and the animalistic. Authors who write in this manner usually aim to portray the slippage in identity. The girls tend to often be gurleska, that is to say, the female template for cuteness driven to groteskerier and violence, in rebellion against the requirement to be a Good Girl.

Unfortunately, I can find the actual genre at times begins to approach the klichéartade. It is the way it goes when a world becomes discharged, when the authors believe that the grip itself – not how it is portrayed – is the point.

the back of the Norwegian author Jenny Hvals new book ”the Cocoon” – now in responsive English translation by Jenny Högström – I will therefore first suspicious. Oh no, I think, not a young girl to write about ”queer desires” and warped sensuality and, with Jonas Thentes words, treats the reader as if he or she would be BUP. Certainly there is every reason to continue researching in the queering of desire, or more accurately, I would say that all the requests are both queer, disturbing and even dangerous. But you must realize that it is no longer possible to do it in the same way as it has been done so far. It is no longer enough that the boundaries ”are broken up between the bodies and plants, dream and reality” and that ”everything flows together, as well as organic.” The shape need to be further developed.

Jenny Hval has all the conditions, because she is terrible språkskicklig. No doubt that she can create suggestive transformation. When the young biologistudenten Well travelling as an exchange student to the fictional town of Aybourne we leave quickly, the realism behind the us, and is sucked into an increasingly distorted world.

”Little Jo”, as the protagonist is called, is conspicuously childish in the beginning. She may feel extremely insecure in the English language, almost as if she had been in Japan with rudimentary language skills, which creates an estrangement as a few nordic young people are so truly alienated. In addition, spinning her around in the symbolically charged city with a lumpy map – gps seems she may not have heard of.

she of the slightly older Carral, who lives in a giant old factory building, a hangar, without the normal walls and ceilings. In line with the half-erotic, half-disgusted gränsupplösningen between the two women, and eventually with their male neighbor Pym, transformed the factory into ”A rotten and stinky the garden of Eden”. Jo is studying mycology is no coincidence, because the fungi, mold, mildew, moss, and rotten apples soon begins to live his own life in the humid heat. ”It felt as if the brewery had been turned into a big, wet tank waiting to Carral and I would begin to decay.

A cocoon can be comfortable, but also claustrophobic, and in many ways is the novel a dead end, despite the fact that the want to shop on the development. The more that happens, the abstract becomes the process. It initially feels close and intimate, transformed towards the end into a beautiful construction, as if the content, rather hiding behind the form than evolving out of it.

What saves the book is not the ”story” or insights, but are themselves detaljsensualiteten and observation: ”I was no longer on the mattress, but rolled over the rough träplankorna in the mezzanine. Inside the head was the echo of a muffled creaking, it must be the thud of my body hit the floor. The sound formed a long, dark spiral staircase of sounds that I fell in.”

kokongens alternative reality without necessarily discover anything new, only that it is so mind-boggling and utflippat to be in Hvals make-believe world. A fascinating book, therefore, if you take it for what it is – an experiment with a linguistic suggestion, rather than innovative research on the unsecured desire.