Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

  Taken once more from my file of “books Harneet arbitrarily told me to read but was somehow right about,” this review will focus on Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval. It’s a slim volume that focuses on a Norwegian woman, Johanna, moving to the fictional town Aybourne, Australia, to study biology. When she arrives, she finds herself in awkward social situations, edged out of housing by her Canadian counterparts, before eventually finding a room in a slightly renovated warehouse (or is it an old brewery where a girl drowned?). She moves in with Carral, who has a free and easy demeanour that Jo finds unusual and somewhat enticing (for example, that she freely talks while peeing). Their space has two mezzanines and paper-thin walls. This is important for reasons I’ll get into later. The novel recounts Johanna’s experiences with Carral and the strange, erotic charge between them.

A few months ago I read Nudités féminines. Images, pensées et sens du désir by Laurence Pelletier and I can’t help but feel that Paradise Rot would be of profound interest to philosophers of the body and its image. From the initial pages of the book, there’s a sordidness that permeates everyday moments—Jo rides on the subway, where a man’s pants have fallen down and his penis dangles out and is supported by others, who then throw him out at the next stop. There’s also a moment where Jo contemplates her urine in the bowl and mourns flushing that vibrant yellow colour. Throughout the book, Hval crafts that mix of the vile and the poetic; that which we consider disgusting is described with poetic detail while still maintaining an unpalatable aura.

Part of this is tied to Johanna’s seeming hypervigilance and hyper awareness of all that is sensual. Remember that Johanna and Carral live in a place where barriers and boundaries are largely non-existent. The ad that Johanna responds to lists the room as “.quiet.” with periods on both sides, which incentivizes her. After she moves in, that quietness forms the context for a sensitivity to sound verging on the superhuman. She senses Carral’s movements by sound alone: even Carral scratching her pubic hair gives Johanna a complete image. The synesthesia throughout the book (seeing through sound, the permeability of touch, etc.) is evident throughout. As one example, Johanna’s neighbour Pym has forced himself upon her and she recalls the words from a book that Carral continually reads and then notes the following:

Next to me Carral was trying to separate the pages of Moon Lips. She must have got to the part with the stain. Once she’d slid a knife between the pages and they came apart, she turned the page and sighed softly. The article in front of me displayed colourful images of thick mushroom stems and caps, but I couldn’t read at all anymore, just sat and listened to her breath, guessing how far she’d got. I didn’t notice her moving until her face almost touched mine. (90)

There is a pattern of Johanna listening to the sounds and simply sensing what Carral is doing. The fact that she can sense where she is in a book simply by the page turns demonstrates this deep connection (or at least projection) between Jo and Carral. Later on, Johanna “sees” Carral having sex with Pym, despite the fact that there is a wall between them. Based on sound, Johanna imagines their position and she can sense that Pym is taking Carral from behind, and knows that her and Carral are making eye contact as he takes her. It’s implausible, of course, but in the context of the book it feels like it’s absolutely real, absolutely plausible.

As I mentioned earlier, the book is loaded with an erotic charge. One of the things that makes the book so charged is its ambiguity; it certainly seems that both Jo and Carral are lesbians, but Carral continually talks about having sex with men and Jo has never had sex at all. When people meet Jo and Carral, they assume they are together, but they have to continually assert that they are just roommates—this despite the fact that Johanna notes several times that she senses Carral’s nipples under cotton even when they are not visible. Meanwhile, Carral keeps showing up in Jo’s bed, sometimes naked. You’re never quite sure, and throughout the book both of the women have sex with the same man at different times, and yet it feels like they’ve been together by transitive property.

There’s an odd permeability to them. To return to the novel mentioned above, Moon Lips, it is a trashy romance Carral continually reads. She says how she studied serious literature but now all she reads is trash where women have sex with tough men and possibly monsters. Johanna reads some of the book and finds a sticky page. Presumably, Carral was masturbating and some stickiness from her hand transferred to the page. When Johanna touches it, it seems to linger on her—as if sex is contagious.

Before discussing contagion, I want to take a digression into the idea of eroticism by making reference to two other authors. First, in Camera Lucida (I think) by Roland Barthes, he talks about the most erotic photograph he knows of. It’s a picture of a naked boy with his arm stretched out towards the other end of the frame; all of our typically “sexy” parts are out of frame, and the picture has its erotic charge based on what it does not show. Similarly, in Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, there’s a discussion of looking through a hole in a sheet and seeing only bits of the woman on the other side a little at a time. There’s also discussion about how film could not show sex, so there’s a woman who takes a drink from a tea (I think?) and then the man drinks from the same glass, placing his lips on the same place she kissed (I might have this backwards). There’s no direct contact between them, but that’s what makes it so charged. Jenny Hval seems to take the same approach; the less direct the sex, the more powerfully it tunnels in.

Going back to the idea of contagion, it does seem to be critical to the text. The permeability of Jo’s consciousness and the synesthesia of the text reflects that. Johanna’s studies in biology take a particular interest in mycology, which then manifests in her apartment when a mushroom grows from a gap where the bathtub meets the wall (and also takes on phallic imagery, of course). Early in the book, Jo and Carral acquire an excess of apples and have an erotic exchange of eating them and biting through the skin and so forth. Then, throughout the rest of the book the apples are rotting in a compost bin, melting and decaying. Towards the end of the book, the two central characters start to rot together; Carral breathes onto Jo’s back and she feels spores growing in her. After Carral has sex with Pym, she seems to absorb his freckles into her skin. When Carral and Jo kiss, Jo gives an account of how they are sucking Pym out of each other and exchanging him between them. The house where they live seems to flood and mould and reach its tendrils to grasp onto Johanna. It’s like she becomes fused to the house and it gets increasingly surreal, so much so that the ending is deeply symbolic but also deeply ambiguous.

Carral and Jo fuse together in a really interesting way. Partway through the book, Johanna tells Carral a story where a “tough girl” at school tells her that people get pregnant by laying down together (as they are laying down together). Jo knows that she can’t actually get pregnant laying next to another girl, but because the girl is so tough she starts to believe it and gets dressed. She tells this story to Carral, but then much later there’s an incredible scene where Carral starts telling the story as if it is an anecdote from her own life. She starts telling the story and Jo says, “Yes, but that happened to me.” Then, Carral tells the story in more detail, adding points that Jo never said—but the details are right. It’s surreal and stunning and eerie. Jo later dreams “of two bodies, girls’ bodies, our bodies: our upper bodies had melted together and our necks twisted around each other, thin, and long like swans’ necks” (135). 

The book makes some pretty clear connections to the Garden of Eden, but in a bizarre and surrealist way. If I try to map the apple, Adam, Eve, and the snake, I’m not sure it’s an easy overlay. In some ways it also feels inverted: is Jo entering the garden? Or expelled from it? Is Pym the snake or the apple? Or is his manuscript the apple (it is found in the compost along with the apples, after all)? The conflict of the book is fundamentally ambiguous, too. Pym writes a manuscript for a novel in verse that describes a biologist (Johanna) creating a world and then having vigorous sex with Pym and Carral. Then, Carral writes an addendum where the two girls consume him. In reality, as I mentioned, when they kiss, it is like they are sucking Pym through them back and forth. Jo is frustrated with Carral for not telling her that she slept with Pym and Carral says she only did it because she was afraid Johanna would leave. It’s a painful psychological triangle where the intentions of its vertices are ambiguous.

The ending of the book, which I won’t spoil, is ambiguous, too. I hereby request someone read it and explain to me why things play out the way they do. It’s as if it’s transitions into a haunted house narrative or a ghost story, but it’s unclear to me why Johanna has to act the way she does. I’ll leave it at that for now.

All things considered, I really liked this book. It was oddly visceral, erotically charged, poetic and grotesque, beautiful and painful. It’s the kind of book people will write essays about; it connects to so many discourses and offers an endless well of discussion. If it isn’t a hit in the academy yet, it will be. I guarantee it.

Happy reading!