Few Things Are Necessary
As if following the family tradition, the heroine runs over ‘numerous versions of hatred towards that man who attracted me and who I did not know’. The next day, standing naked before this stranger, ‘she does not want tenderness’: all she wants is to experience everything she missed while shut away from the world; she has to get it over and done with, immunise herself for life. The physical and the emotional must remain apart. The man ‘bears down on her with violence. Every move with violence. Every caress.’ He hardly talks, doesn’t take off his uniform. ‘She feels pleasure in the disgust. I don’t like it, I don’t like it, she thinks. Yet she does it all the same. She no longer has much time.’ The voyage over, the stranger who taught her a lesson in adulthood ‘disappeared as if he had never existed… As if I had not existed.’ Abandoned by its passengers, the Proleterka looms behind like a mausoleum.
Anna Aslanyan reviews Fleur Jaeggy‘s Proleterka.
Mike Corrao in Conversation with Vi Khi Nao
With Gut Text being so focused on its relation to the organism, its attempts at becoming, I needed the text to have this spatial quality. It needed to knowingly exist in the physical world. I never want the reader to forget that they’re holding this corporeal object. Moments like the fattest period (which is fatter than any period that Microsoft would let me make normally) or the layered “text” of ff, felt ritualistic during their construction. Like I was very delicately organizing these ceremonial elements. Or building a stone altar.
Vi Khi Nao interviews Mike Corrao.