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.

Invisibility: A Manifesto

Audrey Szasz Invisibility: A Manifesto (2020)
As always with Amphetamine Sulphate titles, it takes me a few pages of settling in before I feel I have some sort of handle on what I'm reading or what I might reasonably expect from the text. Most of them seem to end up doing something completely different, but I actually quite like that, at least providing I've achieved an understanding of what the hell I'm letting myself in for. Invisibility: A Manifesto seemed to establish itself as a Surrealist novel, or at least novella, quite early on - capitalised Surrealist as in Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and those guys as distinct from more lazy contemporary understandings of the term usually amounting to not much more than the juxtaposition of disparate images. Invisibility: A Manifesto seems to tap into something of the human subconscious and, as such, presents questions rather than the definitives one might expect from something calling itself a manifesto; and, for what it may be worth, there's some fairly stark juxtaposition of disparate images going on, but clearly nothing arbitrary.

Principally we have the contrast of author as wholesome child detective in the general mode of an Enid Blyton character, although not clearly drawn, with atrocity, murder, fucking, and framing of victims, although thankfully rendered with a degree of honesty thus disassociating itself from low-calorie goth versions of the same contrast - all those wearyingly mental versions of Alice which have kept Tim Burton in Cure reissues over the years. The contrast drawn up by Szasz are genuinely affecting, and possibly a clue to the title: the victim abused as powerless, worthless, and yet whose victimhood constitutes both the real power and value in the equation; so we have elements which simply won't be jammed together, and perhaps in the resulting interference pattern, the subject becomes invisible, blending in with the background from either angle.

Hopefully that makes sense to someone. At least that's how Invisibility: A Manifesto reads to me. I'm sometimes a little uncomfortable with the idea of the victim as the one with the power because while it may be philosophically useful, I'm not convinced it works in real life, which is why, I would suggest, Pauline Réage's Story of O is honestly just a massive pile of wank (and not even good for that); although this, much shorter work does some of the same thing, but succeeds simply through an elevated self-awareness, meaning it knows what it's doing, even if I don't. I think what this amounts to is another Amphetamine Sulphate title mapping the disparity between the real and its interpretation, which is always welcome, not least because this one takes a quite different narrative approach to others I've read.

Most of the above comprises impressions picked from the text and should probably be best regarded as me scrabbling around, from which you should take that Szasz certainly provides plenty of material from which such conclusions, or possibly completely different ones, may be drawn, which is, I suppose, inevitable with any exploration of the subconscious; so it's at least as rich, fertile, and shocking as anything Max Ernst ever painted, and is additionally a lot more coherent than I may have implied here.

Disturbing for all of the right reasons and very satisfying.

Cop one here.

Story of O

Pauline Réage Story of O (1958)
I'd heard of this one mainly as something contentious customarily mentioned as a novel which should have been banned in the same sentence as Naked Lunch and Lady Chatterley's Lover, so naturally I was curious as to what it was and why. Story of O, so it turns out, is a mucky book, specifically a mucky book of obvious appeal to patrons of sex dungeons. I'd say it's in the tradition of de Sade except I haven't read enough de Sade to make such a statement with any sort of authority, particularly as I get the impression de Sade's writing had some philosophical dimension and I'm not convinced that the same can be said of O. The novel was originally written as a series of letters from Anne Desclos to her lover, Jean Paulhan, publisher and something of a big cheese in French literary circles. Paulhan, an admirer of de Sade, had apparently suggested that de Sade's work could only have been written by a man, so the Story of O seems to have been an attempt to refute his claim.

The story, such as it is, relates the progress of a woman identified only as O as she is sexually enslaved and dominated by her partner, then by others to whom her partner gives her as a gift. O is repeatedly humiliated, whipped, bound, tortured, pierced, and branded, reacting to each new imposition with a combination of fear and gratitude, until the tale ends with the suggestion of a final, seemingly unpublished chapter in which she asks to be killed. It's extremely well written, and initially erotic, but I suspect you probably have to be really into this stuff to get something out of it; which I'm not, so after a while I began to find it dull and repetitive; then again, I've tended to find fetishists of most persuasions dull and repetitive, just as I find anyone who assumes that you're as fascinated by their thing as they are, a massive bore.

The introduction hints at the possibility of Story of O being read as a spiritual discourse, likening all the whippings and negation of O's self to religiously inspired mortification of the flesh or asceticism, but I don't really buy it any more than I buy there being much common ground which The Castle of Otranto shares with the music of Alien Sex Fiend. This leaves us with mostly just the flogging, the coercion, and the reduction of the main character to a series of three holes into which men thrust their mighty choppers. This, according to Jean Paulhan's introduction, perfectly captures the true nature of woman, the thing she most desires, which is clearly bollocks as Andrea Dworkin is my witness.

Whilst we can police sexual deeds in the hope of limiting incidences of, for one example, those who shag kids, it's probably a waste of time policing - or even frowning upon - whatever happens to turn other people on. Nevertheless, I find the Story of O a little too lacking in flavour for my own tastes, not specifically in terms of what it does, but what it does in combination with apparent literary aspirations, when it's really just Fifty Shades of Grey intercut with scenes of Dakota Johnson considering herself spoilt by the Ferrero Rocher passed around at the ambassador's reception. Story of O is a two-hundred page letter to Fiesta, but without the honesty, enthusiastic squelching, caravan holiday in the Lake district, or anyone asking us to imagine their surprise; but worse than that, it's just very boring.