Scan barcode
peggy_racham's review against another edition
They hide a corpse in a septic tenk to avoid the club being closed by the police. A person dies and first thing they think is lets hide him
uuuultraviolennnnt's review
adventurous
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
“i was suffering as no one suffers anymore in this century; my sensibility was outmoded in the extreme”
my own love will remain baroque, painful at its peaks, insurmountable in it’s largeur
travisclau's review
5.0
An incredible tour-de-force of writing by one of France's best. As one of the first full-length novels written by a female Oulipian to be translated into English, Sphinx grapples with desire in ways that echo Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Barnes' Nightwood, and Lorde's Zami in its exploration of the minutiae of intimacy and erotic experience. While many of us come to the novel well-aware of the novel's Oulipian constraint, Ramadan's translation captures the textual richness and play of genderlessness in the novel. We do not get to witness Garreta's ingenuity in circumventing the problem of inherently gendered language in the French, but we feel the resonances of its force in the way that we leave the novel still unsure about the narrator and A***'s genders. As the translator and many critics have noted, the novel exceeds the conventional language for desire. It manages to rewrite and expand desire under conditions that would seem to limit it. Garreta's novel should definitely find more places on LGBT and feminist/queer literature syllabi in the future -- I have rarely encountered novels that so deftly fuse issues in those fields with the question of the textual and representation.
chillcox15's review
4.0
Sphinx is a fantastic novel about love and longing that balances the impressionistic and the analytic, so it feels like both a mood piece and a creative essay, without shortchanging either side of that equation. It falters a bit, I feel, in how it talks about race, but that is not necessarily the primary point of the work. Much is made in writing/talking about this novel as an Oulipean experiment of removing gender connotations from A***, the love interest of the main character, and a mark of success of the book is how little that is brought to bear on my reading. Sure, I'll stop and think about how I would interpret this or that paragraph if I knew if the character was femme or masc or strictly nonbinary, but it doesn't contort itself to get out of any particular context, remaining graceful in its indeterminacy.
johnbradley2's review
4.0
Past the initial conceit, the story is a bit shallow and the writing is overly pretentious. Interesting though, and maybe worth your time since it's so short.
birgits_bookshelf's review
4.0
Fast read, good written, interesting new approach to main characters to conceal their gender
clubceaczar's review
4.0
A genderless love story between a DJ and an American dancer set in Paris’ nightlife. So very French. So melancholy. So much ennui. How the author manages to write a love story without using gender pronouns in French (a language that uses masculine and feminine words) blows my mind!!
This book is for the literary buffs.. the writing is absolutely beautiful.
This book is for the literary buffs.. the writing is absolutely beautiful.
nicfavic23's review
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.5
adam613's review
4.0
"I was captivated by the idea of a struggle with no stakes other than my own satisfaction. I was experimenting without any restrictions, embarking upon the basics of a new language that no one had taught me; I was the master and the student, but the apprenticeship of this new science was not a form of autodidacticism. Rather, I was discovering rules as I went along, establishing what had always existed without any basic precepts. Each night I was giving a speech in this unknown, unformulated language, unaware that I was deviating from a specific practice that so many others had followed before me."
"Had I ever been capable of loving without suffering? And what was I suffering from, exactly?"
The Oulipo is a loosely associated group of French writers and mathematicians that seek out new potentials for literature using constrained writing techniques. What makes Anne Garréta's work so unique is the absence of pronouns to describe A***, the object of the narrator's affection and exploring this innovative method makes Shinx a memorable feminist, LGBT/queer piece of literature with many universal themes. What this does is leave plenty of room for the reader to form their own image of A*** and play with the language we've grown more than attached to.
"Back then my strategy was to lose myself in order to find myself, which today I understand to be a mysticism; however, I had been deluding myself for so long that once I finally came to that realization, my life had already dissolved into waiting vainly for a death that was equally vain."
Written in 1986, and translated to English for the first time in 2015, Sphinx is the tale of the life of a relationship that starts in the clubs and cabarets of after-hours Paris. In the second half of this book, Anne Garréta crushed my soul and left me feeling all sorts of existential dread over concerns of the heart of the narrator as well as my own. Constructing ephemeral passages, Sphinx sliced me open with the narrator's vulnerability and writing prowess of beautifully crafted prose. Don't let the idea of experimental literature throw you off, Sphinx is accessible and its bursts of ecstasy and bouts of melancholy will leave you shattered and left to pick up the pieces.
"I am assailed by indifference. I had thought that I would never be able to grow tired of loving, but one night I woke to an absence of love and felt no torture: it was the absence of this torture that truly scared me, that tortured me."
"Had I ever been capable of loving without suffering? And what was I suffering from, exactly?"
The Oulipo is a loosely associated group of French writers and mathematicians that seek out new potentials for literature using constrained writing techniques. What makes Anne Garréta's work so unique is the absence of pronouns to describe A***, the object of the narrator's affection and exploring this innovative method makes Shinx a memorable feminist, LGBT/queer piece of literature with many universal themes. What this does is leave plenty of room for the reader to form their own image of A*** and play with the language we've grown more than attached to.
"Back then my strategy was to lose myself in order to find myself, which today I understand to be a mysticism; however, I had been deluding myself for so long that once I finally came to that realization, my life had already dissolved into waiting vainly for a death that was equally vain."
Written in 1986, and translated to English for the first time in 2015, Sphinx is the tale of the life of a relationship that starts in the clubs and cabarets of after-hours Paris. In the second half of this book, Anne Garréta crushed my soul and left me feeling all sorts of existential dread over concerns of the heart of the narrator as well as my own. Constructing ephemeral passages, Sphinx sliced me open with the narrator's vulnerability and writing prowess of beautifully crafted prose. Don't let the idea of experimental literature throw you off, Sphinx is accessible and its bursts of ecstasy and bouts of melancholy will leave you shattered and left to pick up the pieces.
"I am assailed by indifference. I had thought that I would never be able to grow tired of loving, but one night I woke to an absence of love and felt no torture: it was the absence of this torture that truly scared me, that tortured me."