Stricture

Isabelle Nicou Stricture (2022)
Here's another which qualifies as a proper book, with bits I didn't understand and everything; although to be fair, Nicou's prose - or possibly Kaycie Hall's translation from the original French - is precise and clear in its description of people, events, and the ambiguous or even fantastical means by which they are associated. I'd say it's this last aspect which fosters the atmosphere of a waking dream, which leaves us unsure as to what we've just read.

Nicou's seemingly pseudo-autobiographical character is a young woman attempting to make sense of having been in thrall to her mentor, a professor of philosophy; and the existential hinterland of her musing as she strives to break free draws associations with King Lear, the science-fiction of Jules Verne, and alien abduction, amongst other examples of magical thinking. It's a cloud of shifting meaning somehow rendered in sharp focus which remains nevertheless quite difficult to describe beyond listing a few of the sign posts. Probably inevitably, reading Stricture felt a little like reading Sartre's Nausea - albeit without the undercurrent of revulsion - which possibly may say more about how little French literature I've read than it does about what Nicou was trying to do; but, for what it may be worth, I kept reading Stricture because it felt as though I was getting a lot from it, even if what that was eludes easy quantification.