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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/HVAL | 31480011405997 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lawrence Public Library | FIC HVA | 31549004803440 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A genre-warping, time-travelling horror novel-slash-feminist manifesto for fans of Clarice Lispector and Jeanette Winterson.
Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her work, things start stirring themselves up. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begin cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. And awful things happen in aspic.
Jenny Hval's latest novel is a radical fusion of queer feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, writing and art.
"Strange and lyrical. Hval's writing is surreal and rich with the grotesque banalities of human existence." -- Publishers Weekly
"The themes of alienation, queerness, and the unsettling nature of desire align Hval with modern mainstays like Chris Kraus, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Maggie Nelson." -- Pitchfork
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hval's incendiary genre-bending novel (after Paradise Rot) is part meditation on art, sexuality, religion, and feminist theory, and part supernatural horror. In the present, the narrator watches a documentary about a black metal band shot in 1990 and reflects on her girlhood in southern Norway in the early 1990s, when she yearned to express hatred for the fundamental Christian culture that surrounded her ("When they say 'I'm a pRacticing chRistian' their guttural Rs make it sound as though the consonants have gone through purgatory"). In college, she resists the oppression of academia and a male-dominated music scene. Seeing no path to becoming a performer in the male-dominated black metal scene, the narrator forms a coven in Oslo, with whom she performs and documents rituals such as sacrificing "art-babies" made on a 3-D printer and bathing in a ram's urine. Throughout, Hval, an experimental musician herself, employs a dirge-like repetition of themes (feminist rage prominent among them), which enlivens her witchy visions and sets the stage for a reincarnated Edvard Munch, on the run from the vengeful subject of his painting Puberty. Hval's fascinating exploration is not for the faint of heart, but those who like it dark will find this right up their alley. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
Girls Against God, the second novel from acclaimed Norwegian musician Jenny Hval, is set in 1990s southern Norway, a place known for its "rainy climate, synthetic drugs and gracious reservation", but also hostile to anyone who isn't straight or white - even the kids who like grunge music are racists. "White revolution and Jesus revolution, Nazi punk and evangelist grunge, swastikas and purity rings, midmorning gruel, pimple pus, egg whites, cream of white, semen." In contrast, Hval sings in praise of shadows. She begins with an unnamed narrator studying a documentary about the corpse-paint-wearing Norwegian band Darkthrone, who helped birth the country's emergent black metal scene. A diligent student of film, she scribbles a few notes: "Short, enigmatic and ugly video riffs on details from boring Norwegian landscape." But the music, with its growled vocals and Stygian cosmology, is the necessary antidote to her bland surroundings. Paradise Rot, Hval's first novel, was a lurid hothouse of a thriller about a female student's sexual awakening, likened to the "theory fictions" of Chris Kraus and Maggie Nelson. Girls Against God starts out like the teenage diary of an unrepentant suburban goth, a self-designated "Gloomiest Child Queen" who is in love with hate ("I hate God", "I hate the Christian Democratic party"). Are these the early outpourings of a Valerie Solanas-style misandrist? Or will this be a vinegary coming-of-age story, a Scandinavian version of Daniel Clowes's graphic novel Ghost World? Soon the story starts skipping about - between high school in the late 90s, when the narrator started her own metal band, a stretch at university in Oslo and New England in the mid-2000s, and an ill-defined present where she is living in a self-declared coven with two other women, Venke and Terese. Plot and chronology are less important than the mini-manifestos and rousing riffs. There's a consistent sense of loss about the way black metal has "washed itself clean of subculture, the way social democracy rinsed off socialism", how the internet is "no longer a mystical dimension but a rhythmic imitation of life". Darting between rapidly escalating psychodrama and cultural critique, addressing the reader directly, presenting some passages in the form of visual diagrams: Hval knows that she risks incomprehensibility. That's precisely her book's gambit - and its fearless credo. At one point the narrator recalls her writing professor in the US objecting that the short story she's submitted is too "angry and messy, incoherent". She was left feeling tethered and tamed. What she wants, she says later, is an "escape route from structure and rhetoric". "I don't just write to analyse," she declares, "Analysis can so easily become judgmental, categorical and clean-cut." She finds inspiration - and a kind of queer companionship - in films such as Derek Jarman's Jubilee that reveal "the gaps in our consciousness, the restrictive framework of our daily lives". But here, as on other occasions, Hval speaks in the knowing academese of a PowerPoint presentation on autofiction. Could any invocation of radical aesthetics be less erotically inviting than the following call to arms? "I desire a ritual, multidisciplinary, intricate form of expression where technique and genre and subjectivity and other predetermined systems are subordinate to the community, or the desire to hate together." There's still a lot that is endearing and even riveting about Girls Against God. Hval is unembarrassable, talking about her "wet dream of writing myself into a story". She's still in touch with the zealotry of adolescence. ("I want to take part in a chaos of collective energy. I want to be in a band.") Like the French philosopher Luce Irigaray, she explores ideas of what a feminist or radical language would sound like, exulting in the power that a new laptop gives her to junk Norwegian diacritics (the moment she turns it on, "I can feel my body tingling, as if I've woken up from a plastic surgery that has removed my old features and made my face unrecognizable and impenetrable"). Most distinctive is her embrace of magic, ritual and blasphemy as tools to reimagine daily life ("I want the rock club to become a Zen temple, a medieval castle or, preferably, a Witches' Sabbath"). Blasphemy, she insists, bypasses the conservative fixation with nativism, gender hierarchies and received wisdom; instead it "shows us a crack in this reality, through which we can pass into another, more open meeting place ¿ Blasphemy looks for new ways of saying we." By the close of Girls Against God, the boundaries between reality and film, the corporeal and the fantastic, the coagulated and the fertile have all dissolved. The novel has journeyed from melodramatic teenscape to horror-saturated social panorama. A story that had seemed pointedly provincial has now sprouted universal wings. "I can be a virus," speculates the narrator. "The virus sometimes causes a slow disintegration, rotting social democracies and nation states. The disease it causes spreads through the body and constructs a pattern for a new shape. It's a communal, painful language that can infect us all."
Kirkus Review
An obliquely experimental stream-of-consciousness novel. It's almost impossible to say what Hval's latest novel is about. It's not even clear that it is a novel. An unnamed narrator delivers a monologue that touches on, among other things, Norwegian black metal, Edvard Munch's painting Puberty, porn, avant-garde film, and witchcraft. The narrator grew up in the 1990s in southern Norway, where she found herself nearly stifled by religious and social conservatism. The best parts of the book are her extended analyses of these topics, as when she writes that "Maybe the only way an artist can escape capitalism and patriarchy today is to use art to disappear as an individual." But there are far more passages that don't really make any sense at all. In these moments, Hval seems to aspire to an absurdist surrealism that she never quite reaches: Her narrator is too constrained by her own anger and frustration to achieve humor or even whimsy. It's not just that it's difficult to follow her thought processes; it's that in throwing off every convention of fiction--and memoir, and scriptwriting--the book becomes almost entirely solipsistic. Every image, phrase, and reference winds up referring only to the narrator herself, and one wonders if, in the end, she's become even more constrained than she was to begin with. Astute observations are marred by extended passages of evasive, self-indulgent prose. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Norwegian musician Jenny Hval's second novel (after Paradise Rot, 2018) is part fever dream, part manifesto, and part nostalgic reminiscing, with a hefty dose of feminist and queer theory for good measure. Spanning the decades between the early 1990s and present day, an unnamed narrator leads the reader through a labyrinth of the history of Norwegian death metal, witchcraft covens, and strict Protestant childhoods. Chaotic yet ordered, Hval dives deeply into the process of self-discovery as the narrator wrestles with religious dogma and its myriad restrictions. Themes of music and magic, of the power of the body and the voice, wind and repeat with a rhythm that feels familiar and also unnerving. Hval's language is visceral and haunting, corporal and carnal. Recommended for fans of the weird and challenging and for readers who really want something different.