Paradise Rot
by Jenny Hval
translated by Marjam Idriss
First posted April 2019
I miss how on-point book recommendation walls at certain bookstores were for me in NYC. Here in SF, most don’t seem to have the same lit taste as I do, though I appreciate broadening into more LGBTQA+ texts, as well as a lot more east Asian diaspora novels.
I saw a new Jenny Hval book a few weeks ago on a rec wall, and was tempted, though I didn’t particularly enjoyed this one. Someone that works in a bookstore does, though.
When the apples first appeared within the text of Paradise Rot, the Edenic allusions were clear and they bolstered the vibe that Paradise Rot would be another hazy literary fiction novel, where things happen more as metaphor—the art of writing or conscious existence or something equally haughty—than as events in and of themselves. The title and pretty cover serve as unique draws, and seeing it on a staff recommendation shelf catapulted it to the top of my list much faster than algorithmically recommended digital suggestions might (sorry not sorry, goodreads).
The main tension throughout the story was waiting for the Gregor Samsa metamorphose or Luciferian Fall—the protag Johanna’s interest in mycology foreshadowing her or her new roommate Carral becoming creatures fed by rot and decay:
As winter settled in outside, we were set upon by summer inside the brewery, as if the walls separated not only the inside from the outside, but divided two different climates. On the floor grass grew along the furring. Yellow moss patches grew from the cracks in the cement. White spiders spun shining fur around the beams, and, because of a spreading layer of greenish-white mould, the breadcrumbs on the kitchen counter grew into a little carpet. I tried to trim the tufts and wash away the crawling maggots, but Carral cuddled up against me, took the washcloth and the scissors from my hands, and shook her head.
And urine. A surprisingly frequent discussion of urine. The metaphors were either dense (or I am), didn’t translate from Norwegian, or didn’t exist at all. The internalized rot—perhaps the normalcy of Johanna’s life outside the apartment contrasted with the fetid decay within shows, showed the precarity with which we all live? Internal strife against external placidity? The mysterious unknowability of another person’s mind? The inevitability of death? Circle of life? I’m grasping here. Carral, though, I do not know her—what Milton-Lucifer-Eve-Snake-Apple-Adam analogue she is meant to be—at all. I can’t pin this book down.
So I suggest you just read it. I say that not simply to make my job of reviewing it easier than flailing around for five thousand words and coming to the same muddled conclusion anyway, but because it defies description with its Mulholland-Drive-mixed-with-a-Björk-song flair. I think you’ll pull out what you bring in. I came with directionless curiosity, and left with exactly what the staff card at the Haight’s Booksmith foretold: “feeling a bit off.”