In my last year of A Levels I approached my English teacher in search of book recommendation.
She looked at me and asked whether I wanted to read something in which she described as ‘strange and slightly disturbing’ but in a good way. To me, ‘in a good way’ was intriguing and so when she placed the one hundred and sixty page novel Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval in my hands, I began to read it as soon as I got home. With no summary of the plot, not that the one that was on the back could have prepared me for the novel, I read it in one sitting.
Plot: Paradise Rot follows Jo, the novel’s protagonist, as she navigates living with an older woman in a bizarre, almost privacy-free environment. Hval places particular emphasis on Jo’s heightened awareness of her own body, in particular the excrition of bolidy fluids, and senses, creating an atmosphere that is both deeply personal, intimate and unsettling. With elements of biblical imagery, as suggested by the title that references Milton’s Paradise Lost, the novel, although very short, has a long lasting impact.
When I got to university, as a part of my modes of writing class, we were asked to write a poem in the style of ‘Found in …’ taking phrases and words from a text and making it into a poem. So naturally, I chose the one text that had the most interesting moments of imagery and visual language.
To this day, this is the poem I show anyone who asks me for a ‘strange and slightly disturbing’ book recommendation:
Found in Paradise Rot, by Jenny Hval
Ladders and plasterboard walls
Skeleton of an apartment
Thick beams, iron post, runs like a spine
Raw and porous
No paint,
No wallpaper anywhere
Naked.
Filling out the silence,
noises took over
Yawning, chewing, shattering, shutting
Taking a bite
Teeth met resistance in the flesh
Push in further
‘a worm that eats apple cores,
sometimes drowns in the juice’
Concrete walls
‘So far, I’m good’
Bubbling between her teeth
Fruit flesh dissolving
Foam begins.
We are readers, although we might not like to admit it, do tend to judge a book by it’s cover. With modern cover art designs, illistrations or photography, the aesthetics of books can draw us to picking up a book and running to the counter to buy it. Hval’s covers, whether it was the US or UK editions, are instantly inticising, with rotting fruit or plants hidden in shadows.
Once I was finished with Hval’s work, I came across Brat by Gabriel Smith. This, to my delight, was another novel that I will add to my ‘strange and slightly disturbing’ genre.
Gabriel Smith’s Brat was another novel that I simply could not stop thinking about after I read it. Like Hval, Smith focuses alot on the body imagery, in particular the peeling of skin as the narrative unfolds. The novel is deliberately constructed in a way that makes you question the reliability of the protagonist Gabriel, his mother and your own perseption of what everything means or what it may symbolise.
Plot: Tasked to clear out the old family home by his cruel brother, Gabriel’s psychological state of mind begins to deteriorate. Reading the manscripts that keep changing and the terrfiying man that appears in his garden, nothing seems right.
Now, I love an unlikable character. I have always found the most flawed characters the ones in which are the most unforgettable due to how human they truly are.
I have to talk about Ottessa Moshfegh and her wonderfully ‘strange and slighting disturbing’ novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. To put it blankly, I loved this novel. It was something that I had never read before and made me look how to construct a protagonist who is so unlikable, and at times insufferable, but so fascinating.
“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking
consciousness.” – My Year of Rest and Relaxtion
Plot: The novel follows an unnamed woman living in New York City, who uses a mix of drug perscriptions to sleep for a year. However, it turns out that we can not run from our trauma and she faces a darker truth when finally having to confront reality.
Disclaimer! Make sure to check any trigger warnings before reading the following texts above.