Reviews with content warning for Death - Confessions of the Fox

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Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

15 reviews

infinite_harness9030's review

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challenging reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

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marioncromb's review against another edition

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challenging informative inspiring mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

It's an impressive book, i appreciated the anticolonialist, anticapitalist, trans centred and affirming (albeit magically rather than plausibly optimistic) lens.

I wanted to love this as much as i loved LOTE, which has similar alternate-history vibes but I just didn't. i personally found the obtuse academic style prose referencing Derrida etc in the sort of language that is only understood by philosophers to be alienating and a bit of a slog to get through. I understand that it makes sense for the realistic characterisation of Voth, and is realistic for the metapremise of the novel, but still, I didn't really enjoy the interjections/the personal story within the footnotes. I know that you don't have to like the characters to like or appreciate a work of art but it was an issue for me here. I often love the tangents of footnotes (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell my loveeeee) and i did appreciate the ways in which the stories mirrored each other. However I was half-expecting from this mirroring

the manuscript to have been written /by Voth/ due to the sheer coincidence of finding this very relatable manuscript on a niche topic they study whilstthey are having a life crisis due to their breakup. which i guess in a metatextual sense it /was/, by /Rosenberg/, but it wasnt in the world of this book which made it lack in-universe plausibility. Or maybe it was just one meta- too far for me

Another personal issue i had with the book was its idea of queerness was often too easily found though queer sex, queer bodies, more than through all ways of being/loving/not-loving that are othered by society. As an ace person i just didn't relate to the horniness in the book that was often posited as some universally relatable and transformative queer experience. This is not to say that it shouldn't have been so horny, it is an important part of the characterisation and indeed of the queerness of the book.

I enjoyed more the stories within the story: enjoyed learning about the Fen-Tigers and enjoyed the imagined paradise society of the Maroons. The little details of Jack's woodworking/technical knowledge.

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felishacb's review

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adventurous challenging emotional informative mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

This novel is an experimental, wild ride. The story features a trans and/or intersex character and is told by a trans scholar and professor. The basis of the novel is the true legend of a historical figure, a white English man named Jack Sheppard whom I had never heard of. In CONFESSIONS, Rosenberg, a trans author, queers the story and imagines Jack as a gender-expansive thief.

Footnotes tell the story of the narrator of sorts who is translating and interpreting the tale. They are also dealing with a faceless entity who wants to control the translation and treats Jacks's transness with an otherness. These layers give Rosenberg the opportunity to comment on queerness, as well as class, colonialism, and power.

Another main character based on reality is Bess who in this book is an Asian sex worker. Bess offers a safe place for Jack and teaches him more about class revolution by sharing her own family's tragic story. Her lived experience could connect with Jack's own experience of class oppression (and queer repression) and inform him on how it intersects with racism.

Although it is fiction, this book serves as a powerful reminder that trans people (and people of color) have always been here and have always been the main characters in their stories even if their history is lost or never told.

Towards the last third of the novel, I did find myself not picking this up as much. But the authors voice and perspective kept me wanting to see how this story ended and what nuggets of truth they would share.

From the book: "All history should be the history of how we exceeded our own limits."

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ellenigrace's review

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4.5

I much preferred the narrative about Jack & Bess to the footnote narrative about Dr Voth, but the latter didn't spoil the book for me and in some places did add to it. I didn't like that

the collective group of queer editors

wasn't expanded on - for the sake of how much it was touched on it could have been left out, for me.

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caseythereader's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Thank you to One World Books for the free copy of this book.

- CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX is one of the strangest, most fascinating books I’ve ever read. I loved the structure, with the body of the book being the “lost manuscript” and the footnotes being the professor telling his story alongside the manuscript.
- There is so much going on here, I hardly know where to start. Everything from the historical erasure of trans people to the prison industrial complex is pinpointed and torn down in a frenzy.
- For me, things got a bit muddled at the end of the book, but overall this book is well worth the trip there. Do pay attention to those content warnings though, as it’s pretty grossly graphic throughout.

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carbs666's review

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Deeply researched and lovingly crafted, this book is like nothing I've ever read before. Confessions layered on top of confessions, the inherent queerness of the disobedient archive, funny and insightful and personal footnotes, unreliable and fantastical and multiplicitous narration, a utopia outside of time, an escape. It's good. You have to read it.

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octopus_farmer's review

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hopeful lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I liked the conceit - in many ways this is what i wanted The Starless Sea to be. I was almost annoyed by the researcher at times but came around on him. I also loveddd how the footnotes and related readings are all real texts! However, there’s a fair amount of piss that at times is kinky.

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perpetualpages's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging funny hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

CWs: references to parental abandonment; descriptions of indentured servitude; physical assault, injury, and graphic descriptions of blood and surgery; misgendering; racism; mentions of anxiety and compulsive tendencies; and references to contagious disease

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bookishkoala's review

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

I found this book deeply meaningful and relatable. It’s a radical reimagining of an infamous London jailbreaker as trans with a modern trans academic offering his commentary under an oppressive, capitalist university.

It dissects capitalism at its beginning (1700s) and end (present) and talks about the history and importance of community and resistance in facing down colonialism and capitalism. I cried at the end.

I haven’t connected with a book so much in a long while.

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tachyondecay's review

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adventurous challenging emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book was recommended to me by a comment on my Goodreads Review of For Today I Am A Boy. As I said in that review, we need more trans people telling trans stories. Confessions of the Fox is exactly that: author Jordy Rosenberg is a trans man, the frame story protagonist is a trans man, and the protagonist of the inner story is a trans man. More incredibly, however, this book does something For Today I Am A Boy could never do: it offers a thoughtful and compassionate meta-narrative on the struggle to create a continuity of trans community and identity despite the attempts to erase us from history.

Dr. R. Voth is a literature professor at an unnamed university. At a sale of manuscripts and books from the university’s library (throughout the story, Rosenberg parodies how universities these days are increasingly becoming public–private partnerships focused more on generating revenue than generating or safekeeping knowledge), Voth discovers a manuscript purporting to be the true story of 18th-century thief Jack Sheppard. Sheppard, aka “Honest Jack,” is a real person about whom some literature has already been written, and Voth mentions these other depictions in his annotations. The book we’re reading, then, is supposedly this manuscript, with footnotes coming to us from the voice of Voth. The major revelation early in the book is that this manuscript is the only one that even hints that Jack is a trans man. For Voth, also a trans man, this is a big deal. But the motif of connection and community doesn’t stop there….

You could just read the story within (“the manuscript” if you will) straight through, skipping the footnotes, as if it were an accurate representation of the life of Jack Sheppard. The manuscript is a fun tale all of its own right, tracing Jack’s life from his indenture with a cabinetmaker all the way to a spectacular confrontation with Jack Wild, a thief-turned-thiefcatcher. There’s resourceful, smart-talking sex workers and credulous constables and all sorts of characters to keep you entertained. Moreover, Rosenberg openly challenges the whitewashing of this period of London. His London is historically accurate in that it includes many people of colour from all over the world while also acknowledging the presence of racism.

However, the power of this book comes from how Rosenberg uses intertextual and meta-fictional conceits to create a conversation in which the reader is a silent yet integral participant. Each layer of the story has its own, unique voice. The main story, the manuscript itself, is chock full of 18th-century vocabulary. (Indeed, when I first picked it up, I was nervous its verisimilitude would be too daunting—fortunately, Rosenberg knows how to strike a balance.) As a professor of 18th-century literature himself, Rosenberg is spectacularly positioned to write such a manuscript. He has Voth chime in to interpret for us, sometimes with just one-word translations of slang, but just as often with longer explanations or references to other (real) scholarship. In this way, the conversation begins.

The manuscript is earnest, humorous, and very sexually explicit (albeit in an 18th-century mode). That last part actually made me a bit uncomfortable, not really my cup of tea, but if you are looking for 18th-century descriptions of making out and having intercourse, then yeah, you need this book. (There are also some fairly oblique references, both in the manuscript and the footnotes, to how testosterone affects the size of the clitoris; I like how Rosenberg drops in these little touches that a cis person might overlook but a trans person is likely to notice right away.) Voth’s annotations, in contrast, are the voice of a harried and cynical university prof at the end of his rope, both financially and emotionally. When Sullivan, the enigmatic representative of a pharmaceutical research company, joins Voth in the footnotes in ALL CAPS to harangue the professor as he works, this adds yet another layer to the conversation: the reader gets the sense that every word here is being surveilled by a third party, and in a way, we too feel under surveillance.

This interplay among Voth, the manuscript, Sullivan, the reader—it creates a unique third layer to the story, one that exists in the liminal space between manuscript and annotation. The crux is simple: all of our narrators are unreliable. The original author(s) of the manuscript could be lying to us, or mistaken, about anything—and indeed, Voth speculates a few times that parts of what he’s reading were added later, in the 19th century or even far more recently. Voth’s annotations are unreliable—I don’t think he’s intentionally misleading us, but his verbose oversharing makes it clear that his emotional stability is in question. Any annotations of a work are bound to be subjective, and Voth’s will be particularly subjective. Add to this the pressure created by the surveillance from Sullivan—there are moments in the text where Voth deliberately obfuscates details from the manuscript or withholds information from Sullivan, from us, or from both Sullivan and the reader.

In this way, Rosenberg replicates for lay readers what scholars like himself and his fictional avatar must grapple with on the regular: the harried and scattered nature of archival research. Reading Confessions of the Fox is as close as most of us will get to trying to piece together the truth from a series of damaged, edited manuscripts of suspect provenance while a dean and a private corporation breathe down our necks, wondering what profit is to be found in the deed.

Yet by leaning into the unreliability of his narratives, Rosenberg also creates a space in which to explore the possibilities of trans history and community. As I mentioned earlier, Rosenberg makes references will escape the notice of all but the most careful, astute cis readers even as they wave red flags at trans readers. This starts at the end of Voth’s editor’s note that functions as a prologue:

I took the manuscript because I could not help but take it once I realized it was trying to communicate something. Something just for us. And if you are reading this, then you know who I mean.… Even if I were saying … that this is a code, they will never be able to read it. There are some things you can see only through tears.

The moment I read those lines, I knew the “us” was referring to trans people. This is not just a book with trans characters and by a trans author; it is a text that comments on the need for a sense of community among trans people that acknowledges our existence throughout history. Voth believes the manuscript is a message to other trans people; he in turn attempts to find a way to safeguard and preserve that message.

The interaction between Voth and Sullivan underscores why Voth believes the manuscript needs safeguarding—Sullivan’s company is interested in a pharmaceutical secret they believe the manuscript can reveal. This secret happens to be related to Jack’s trans-ness. In this way, Rosenberg underscores an anti-capitalist theme that runs throughout the novel in a variety of ways but basically boils down to you can’t trust the Man, because the Man will use you up and spit you out for profits. For us trans people, we know this acutely in the fascination society has with medical transition—when we aren’t erased, we are portrayed as spectacle, poked and prodded and asked about our genitals and surgeries. The visibility of trans people under capitalism is desirable only when that visibility can be commodified for cis consumption or benefit. Rosenberg reifies this in the manuscript in Voth’s hands, and Voth’s decisions towards the end of the novel are based entirely on pushing back against this idea.

Put it simply, Confessions of the Fox is a story for us. For trans people. Yes, cis readers, you can still enjoy this book! There is a lot of entertaining stuff in here. But this book speaks to trans people, and it does it not through the standard narrative of transphobia and cissexism that often permeates the portrayals of trans stories in our media but rather through a rich set of storytelling devices that invite the reader to participate in this conversation. I was just asking for books with trans protagonists by trans authors, and optionally, that weren’t focused on being trans! I thought some trans historical fiction sounded like a great idea. Did I ever get more than I asked for here!

This is a smart book. Sometimes, smart books are designed to show off an author’s erudition at the expense of reader’s ego. Confessions of the Fox doesn’t do this. This is one of those rare gems of a novel that is incredibly clever in its construction and deep in its philosophy yet doesn’t rub the reader’s nose in those things. Rather than running ahead and insisting we keep up, it joyfully lifts us up and carries us along. The journey it takes us on is not always a happy one, but it is incredibly worthwhile.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

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