Droll, mischievous and wonderfully intelligent confection, a Modernist riposte to the vacancy (absence) of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, in which Gabriel Josipovici has a walk-on role and the protagonist imagines himself as Caspar Friedrich’s Wanderer AND Roy Scheider in Jaws in the same instant and someone wears a Clarice Lispector frock. It all begins with a mother telling a bedtime story, yes, yes, a scene of sadistic psychic violence like none other. Brilliantly witty. Deploys many of the Modern erotic positions: sex and text, love as desire for absence, and self as ghost (we all have that sense of the self being something that haunts itself). The teaser below accurately describes love and art, or maybe not. By Andrew Gallix who edits 3AM Magazine.
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Your heart still skips like a trip of jackrabbits in the Arizona desert, where we carved our names on a bench close to the abyss. But when I look at you, well, I just feel dead inside. It has to be like this and no other way; otherwise it wouldn’t be art, would it? I’m in love with Jay now: I feed him mini Milano cookies and give him snug harbor. Anyway, I was never quite all there, was I? Long before we met, I was a character in one of your stories — ‘Sweet Fanny Adams.’ Young man goes looking for girl of his dreams in order to break up straight away. ‘At last,’ he says upon meeting her, ‘I have found my sense of loss.’ See? I haven’t forgotten. I started off as fiction, and to fiction I have returned. Our relationship was only a movement towards my disappearance. I am your sense of loss: the self-effacing subject of your work…”
“Emilie…” said Valentin.
“When you say my name, you retain nothing of me but my absence. And nobody is present behind these words I speak.”
Read the rest at Fifty Shades of Grey Matter | ANDREW GALLIX.