Venus Rising in Vengeance
New York City is also a main character, as is Mexico City — NYC’s third-world dark mirror, conjoined twin, or ectogenic economic dependant. The action occurs in apartments, airplanes, libraries, and prisons — areas of sex and death, travel and connectivity, information and memory, carcerality and punishment; postmodern spaces of insularity, voyeurism, containment, and self-referentially. Ximena’s geography creates a modern mythical space of the city in which its characters enact a reification of their sexual and economic experiences — the self in constant pursuit of the mundane in the alien space of the world at hand. Ximena is the embodiment of being here and being there — the fetishized object economically empowered, the narrator and narratee, the murderer and the murderee.
Steve Finbow on Hillary Raphael‘s latest.