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rat_enthusiast 's review for:
Girls Against God
by Jenny Hval
challenging
dark
funny
Somewhere out there on the internet is a tweet or tumbler post or comment that goes “Even if we could read minds, I don’t think we would be able to understand it”. I suspect that’s even more true for creatives and artists, especially those whose work is abstract and nontraditional.
Have you ever seen a drawing of a person who’s thinking a lot, and the artist illustrates that by drawing chaotic black squiggles? I can best describe this book as a black-metal witch trying to fit decades worth of chaotic-black-scribble-thoughts into a narrative structure. That is to say, it’s less of a straightforward story and more of a series of long, complicated thoughts and experiences, real stories bleeding into metaphor, time more of another color to paint with than a solid construct. I can’t deny that this approach meant I had to reread just about every other paragraph to figure out what was going on and what was being said on even the most basic level.
In other books, I might have found this pretentious, or at least amateur; similar to reading a student’s script or novel and feeling like they were being paid per metaphor. But there’s something so earnest here. It doesn’t feel like Hval or our narrator are taking smug joy in confusing readers (an impression I have gotten from some books before), but as if they’re desperate to create art that will finally allow someone to understand them. And for as much as this book reads like a long train of unrelated, disorganized thoughts, there’s a lot more put into the ordering and progression and development than I first thought. I can’t lie: a pool full of aspic did make me emotional by the end.
This definitely is not for everyone. And it didn’t even fully work for me. I still found a lot of it just too far on the artistic and abstract to connect with, but do we really need to fully understand every word to appreciate something? This book made me feel like I was sinking into the mind of someone else, slowly melting into them like a body horror abomination, our sensory nerves blurring into one another. As close to reading another person’s thoughts as I feel I can get.
How do you describe something abstract as… who you really are? I mean, deep down. For the most part, we define ourselves on our actions, words, relationships. Concrete things we can point out or simply describe. But most of us feel as if no one knows who we really are, deep down, the small part that feels as if other living beings only ever scrape. How do you describe that? How do you describe something so abstract that you can’t relate it to a physical object, a single event or even a series of them, a single line of poetry or a couple metaphors? It has no color, no taste, no noise… or maybe all of those, constantly, all the times. If there really is a “deep down” to us, then it’s made up of thousands of experiences and small moments and books we read and songs we heard and people we met and dreams we had and the big decisions and the small decisions and the scent of the summer air where we were raised. How do you describe something that can’t be recorded as data, either quantitative or qualitative? And if something can’t be observed through normal, scientific means… doesn’t that make it magic?
That’s what this book is. And even if it’s not always a perfect read, when it works, it’s beautiful.
(Also, I think this is my favorite depiction of magic from a philosophical perspective. I usually hate the dichotomy between science and magic, because if you live in a world where magic exists, that is science. Science is the study of the things that exist. If something exists, it can be studied (even if we don’t yet have the tools to do so). If ghosts are real, they are a scientific phenomenon. If aliens are real, if magic is real, if God/god(s) is/are real, all of that now exists in a world, and is therefore science. Something doesn’t stop being science just because it goes against current theories.
But by creating a world where magic both does and doesn’t exist, Hval has created magic that truly transcends science. I’m not sure if it would actually work in a more narrative story, but philosophically it’s really interesting to think about, and it works perfect for this story)
Have you ever seen a drawing of a person who’s thinking a lot, and the artist illustrates that by drawing chaotic black squiggles? I can best describe this book as a black-metal witch trying to fit decades worth of chaotic-black-scribble-thoughts into a narrative structure. That is to say, it’s less of a straightforward story and more of a series of long, complicated thoughts and experiences, real stories bleeding into metaphor, time more of another color to paint with than a solid construct. I can’t deny that this approach meant I had to reread just about every other paragraph to figure out what was going on and what was being said on even the most basic level.
In other books, I might have found this pretentious, or at least amateur; similar to reading a student’s script or novel and feeling like they were being paid per metaphor. But there’s something so earnest here. It doesn’t feel like Hval or our narrator are taking smug joy in confusing readers (an impression I have gotten from some books before), but as if they’re desperate to create art that will finally allow someone to understand them. And for as much as this book reads like a long train of unrelated, disorganized thoughts, there’s a lot more put into the ordering and progression and development than I first thought. I can’t lie: a pool full of aspic did make me emotional by the end.
This definitely is not for everyone. And it didn’t even fully work for me. I still found a lot of it just too far on the artistic and abstract to connect with, but do we really need to fully understand every word to appreciate something? This book made me feel like I was sinking into the mind of someone else, slowly melting into them like a body horror abomination, our sensory nerves blurring into one another. As close to reading another person’s thoughts as I feel I can get.
How do you describe something abstract as… who you really are? I mean, deep down. For the most part, we define ourselves on our actions, words, relationships. Concrete things we can point out or simply describe. But most of us feel as if no one knows who we really are, deep down, the small part that feels as if other living beings only ever scrape. How do you describe that? How do you describe something so abstract that you can’t relate it to a physical object, a single event or even a series of them, a single line of poetry or a couple metaphors? It has no color, no taste, no noise… or maybe all of those, constantly, all the times. If there really is a “deep down” to us, then it’s made up of thousands of experiences and small moments and books we read and songs we heard and people we met and dreams we had and the big decisions and the small decisions and the scent of the summer air where we were raised. How do you describe something that can’t be recorded as data, either quantitative or qualitative? And if something can’t be observed through normal, scientific means… doesn’t that make it magic?
That’s what this book is. And even if it’s not always a perfect read, when it works, it’s beautiful.
(Also, I think this is my favorite depiction of magic from a philosophical perspective. I usually hate the dichotomy between science and magic, because if you live in a world where magic exists, that is science. Science is the study of the things that exist. If something exists, it can be studied (even if we don’t yet have the tools to do so). If ghosts are real, they are a scientific phenomenon. If aliens are real, if magic is real, if God/god(s) is/are real, all of that now exists in a world, and is therefore science. Something doesn’t stop being science just because it goes against current theories.
But by creating a world where magic both does and doesn’t exist, Hval has created magic that truly transcends science. I’m not sure if it would actually work in a more narrative story, but philosophically it’s really interesting to think about, and it works perfect for this story)