Girls Against God

I picked this up during a Verso Books sale, and I was not disappointed. I can't even begin to describe the book, which has a point of view that is complex in its structure, as well as the meaning in that point of view being complex. Sometimes it feels like a memoir, sometimes like a movie treatment, and sometimes a wonderful modern deconstructionist story, which on the face of it I usually wouldn't love. But Hval pulls it all off wonderfully, and I want to go back and read it again at some point.

The blurb I read said “time-travelling horror story and a fugue-like feminist manifesto “ Which was not at all helpful. There is no time travel, no real horror (as I understand it - certainly some discomfort perhaps, I can see this giving people the squicks around the feces scenes). I would say this is about art and creation and magic and hate and language. The last 2-3 chapters are very art house film.

This was an interesting read, but to be totally honest, I felt like I was reading Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto that someone mislabeled on the shelf. I know that it's a semantics issue to draw this line, but this is a manifesto through the lens of a novel, not a novel with existential or political themes. This was not... a horror novel. This is not what I signed up for. I mean the fiction was so light in its importance and so rarely relevant that at one point it got kind of frustrating and confusing when it came back up, because I was still navigating whatever proclamations were happening earlier.
I've read literature that was taught in Queer Theory classes and enjoyed it, but this just rubbed me the wrong way the whole time I read it. Despite that, I can't pretend it isn't sharp and the prose isn't beautiful and lilting through it's theorizing.