A review by chillcox15
Sphinx by Anne Garréta

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.