A review by travisclau
Sphinx by Anne Garréta

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.