I just finished reading Raven Leilani’s Luster: a novel (FSG, 2020) and it felt like a punch in the stomach. Another cliché for good measure: I devoured it in a period of under 24 hours. But it feels significant that both of my clichés are alimentary in nature, considering Edie’s (the narrator and protagonist) IBS which feels like it both is and isn’t a metaphor for her inability to fully metabolize her experiences over the course of Luster.
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In Poupeh Missaghi’s trans(re)lating house one (Coffee House Press 2020), Missaghi is a student of doubles: art and activism, author and character, dreams and waking life, English and Persian. She conjures an open text which is self-reflexive without being performatively meta-, whose ongoing (auto)interrogativity invites readers into a generative space of question. trans(re)lating house one could be called a testimonial fiction, in conversation with the tradition of investigative poetics. Missaghi invokes Bolaño’s 2666, particularly its parade of dead, and Maggie Nelson’s Jane: a Murder graces the bibliography, but I was reminded also of Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers in that both authors project testimony through a fictive gel. Truths arrive smuggled in, as contraband, that might otherwise be stopped at the border, had they been sent as truth.
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After horrible few days (a week? what is time) during which the next book to read passionately didn’t make itself known to me, this morning I picked up Adrienne Maree Brown’s Pleasure Activism, which Britt brought into the house after it came out (Britt is often a few steps ahead of me and I like that). Yes, I know—I’m the last person on my block. Maybe I’ll start watching Game of Thrones now har har. I don’t usually write about books until I finish them, but something about that smacks of mastery, so I thought it would be good to challenge myself to write from a place of incompletion—of process over product—making this a construction site with a hole cut into the plywood, letting you peak inside.
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