Lou

At first I didn't like the writing style and felt like it was trying too hard to be cryptic and mysterious, but then the mystery hooked me. I read the entire thing over the course of a transatlantic flight.

I also wasn't a fan of Richard from the other books of the series, but somehow this ended up being my favourite one of them. Maybe it's because Cyprian is so much fun! The pacing was great, the sex scenes were sexy, and it tied up the series nicely.

Despite the title, this book isn't really about transness at all, though the author's transness certainly informs it. The best way I can describe it is a retrospective on the Covid-era through a revolutionary leftist lense, written as a mixture of essays, poems, and autobiographical narrative. Which in itself is interesting, since I had yet to come across a retrospective on the pandemic with genuinely novel points to make, not the same tired cliches (it was "unprecedented", etc. etc.) I've also noticed a certain unwillingness in myself to engage with writing about the Covid-era, because I'd prefer to pretend it had no effect on my life whatsoever and simply move on. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Dysphoria Mundi, despite it's heavy focus on the Covid era, didn't bring out those feelings of avoidance and memories of the rhetoric of the time. It felt like the kind of retrospective that can only happen once a certain amount of time has passed.

Now for the bad. I didn't care at all for the writing style. I found that the author's copius use of deliberately provocative and badly defined terms like "pharmacopornographic" and "petrosexoracial" to describe anything and everything was both annoying and heavily obfuscated his meaning. I'm all for making up terminology to better communicate a point, but this wasn't it. My favourite chapters were either the more autobiographical ones, or the ones where he made narrower and more pointed arguments, like the one on historical monuments. Unfortunately, this was not the majority, and as a result there were several points where I just gave up and skipped ahead to the start of the next chapter. The author also clearly likes to make philosophical observations out of wordplay, which at times felt clever, and at times made me roll my eyes. This book is clearly intended for a particular audience, and even as a university educated trans person with leftest views, I don't seem to be that audience. Which makes me wonder what the point of this book is in a revolutionary sense. I don't think I'd dissuade someone who's interest this book piques from giving it a try, but for me it was mostly a slog.

Beautifully illustrated graphic novel with a dreamy tone. Clearly written with a trans audience in mind. I'm not sure I "got" everything (probably because my french isn't perfect), but worth picking up for the illustrations alone.

Beautiful prose, but the lack of any plot made this tough to finish. I also never really bought into the main character, who felt very, "woman written by a man." I suppose this book has some interesting things to say about nostalgia and modernization, but I found I Served The King of England by the same author a far better read.