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.

Genesis 0

Isabelle Nicou Genesis 0 (2007)
Back in March, I opined that Nicou's Paresis wasn't likely to be Amphetamine Sulphate's chart smashing hit single for all that it constitutes an astonishing debut. Genesis 0, on the other hand - Nicou's second novel to be translated from the French - may be another thing entirely. It demonstrates the same forensic level of attention to existential and biological detail - so beautifully realised that it almost hurts - and yet its purpose is driven and absolutely clear, and to the point of reminding me - because apparently I'd forgotten - that this was what proper novels used to look like before everything expanded to five-hundred page bloaters with the author's name in raised silver type. This is the sort of thing Penguin should be publishing now rather than whatever the fuck it is they actually do publish these days.

Genesis 0 - and that's zero rather than the fifteenth letter of the alphabet - inhabits pregnancy and in doing so explores territory I only seem able to recall having encountered in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and, to a much lesser extent, The Abortion by Richard Brautigan. Given where we all came from, without exception, this seems a ridiculous oversight on the part of world literature, so possibly it's just me. Obviously, I've never found myself with child, but I'm particularly close to someone who has, so a lot of Genesis 0 seems painfully familiar in its documentation of the fundamental changes to one's existence which occur when the periods shut down; and it's nice to find the subject approached without any of the customarily sappy shite about ribbons.

I don't know if we're still bothering to use the term transgressive fiction here, but if so, Genesis 0 proves it to be a redundant label risen above the waves only because the alleged mainstream of literature has devolved so far from doing what it should do. It's by no means an easy read and it demands that you pay attention, but masterpiece honestly doesn't seem too great an accolade.

Paresis

Isabelle Nicou Paresis (2002)
I imagine the deal of translating an entire novel from its original language - in this case French - must be a colossal headache, and one which more or less guarantees that the work had to be pretty special in the first place in order to warrant translation. Paresis, Nicou's first novel, certainly seems to qualify, and we should be doubly glad because, being fairly esoteric and philosophical, I doubt this one is likely to be Amphetamine Sulphate's chart smashing hit single - which I state as a judgement on the audience rather than the book.

Once again, I know what it's about, or know what I think it's about, but am unlikely to be able to furnish any description which really does it justice because, put simply, you just have to read the thing. I've noticed a degree of griping on social media of late along the lines of Amphetamine Sulphate having settled into a rut of publishing transgressive confessionals and not much else. The accusation doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, and Paresis is something else altogether for what that may be worth - existential philosophy as approximately linear fiction and so, I suppose, sort of traditional in that respect. Nicou seemingly spent many years studying phenomenology and so seems a good fit for the imprint, given the number of titles which have explored the gulf which divides the human body and our understanding of the same.

To clarify in more tactile terms, there's a lot of self-harm here, all mixed up with sexuality, self-loathing, and all that good stuff, despite which it defies almost all of the convenient categories which might be proposed by such ingredients. I'm not sure it's even what people usually mean by transgressive as I found only the final paragraph truly disturbing in isolation. There's masochism, although that may be too loaded and misleading a term, and as with most Amphetamine Sulphate titles, it's not really about the sex so much as it is about the power, or lack thereof, and is therefore in an entirely different class to bullshit such as the Story of O. I guess the bottom line is that Paresis pulls the reader through the sensations and memories of its narrator as she falls to pieces, affording a delirious limited view such as might be seen between bandages, and so allows us to understand perspectives which might otherwise send us all running for the hills; and it does all this in just over a hundred pages.

I'm hugely impressed.