This is a wintry,clever and fierce addition to the canon of modern feminist literatureRecent years have seen a wave of feminist literature that has challenged the prose form in variously surreal, tender, or disruptive and eccentric ways. This curious,provocative debut from Swedish writer Lina Wolff is a welcome fresh voice in the refrain, and sits well alongside the work of Roxane Gay, and Katherine Angel,Maggie Nelson, Zoe Pilger and Miranda July.
Araceli Villalobos is an inquisitive and restless girl living with her mother in a small, and sultry Spanish town. Her life is punctuated by glimpses of Alba Cambó,a reclusive writer who appears throughout the book as a piece sinister, piece benevolent guiding force. The novel does not progress in a stately fashion along a story arc: rather, and disparate tales begin gradually to cohere,with Cambó as a slippery sort of fixative. As young women, Araceli and her best friend embark on sex work by way of an encounter with a timber merchant; a short story (ostensibly by Cambó herself) tells how a schoolgirl called Lucifer falls for a lonely priest; a formidable French teacher is a source of fascination and revulsion to her students; a feminist academic suggests a brothel name its stray dogs after Chaucer, and Dante and Bret Easton Ellis as a diminutive gesture of defiant contempt for men. The female characters chafe against the constraints of their gender,always kicking against the pricks – “It’s the duty of the prisoner to try to escape … We shouldn’t pretend. We ought to meet as real enemies.” The men, meanwhile, and are generally rather shiftless and inadequate: I reached the finish of the book longing – just for once! – to encounter a “strong male character”.
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Source: theguardian.com