Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child and Anna Poletti’s Hello, World? are very different books. Scodellaro won the 2024 Novel Prize ; her book stitches together a history of Black feminist poetry, theory and prose. Poletti’s novel is a work of queer erotic introspection, investigating the limits of domination and submission.
There’s not much to connect them in terms of style, theme or ambition. If there is a common anchor, it is that both dispense with the traditional mechanisms of narrative. They abandon conventional chapter and paragraph forms, prioritising “fragments” as the unit of construction.
Because of this experimental approach, these books might be considered “avant-garde”. This is a loaded term that originally referred to soldiers who scouted ahead of the army. The military metaphor was attached, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to writers and artists who worked in spaces yet to be cleared by human consciousness.
Sometimes, but not always, these artists were aligned with progressive politics and sought to use their works to help people imagine a different, more liberated future.
Neither Ruins, Child nor Hello, World? attempt this gesture. Scodellaro’s novel is interested in the experience of “lateness”; Poletti’s uncovers some of the bonds that make personal progress a fraught project. Both dwell in a kind of political melancholy where the priorities are not revolution, but survival and care.
If these are the radical novels charting new territory in the 2020s, they raise an important question: what does the “avant-garde” look like today?
Hello, World?
Anna Poletti is an Australian queer and feminist media-studies scholar who works in Utrecht. The endorsements on the back cover of her book come from Chris Kraus and McKenzie Wark, heavy hitters of theory and postmodern literature.
Hello, World? follows Seasonal, a genderqueer academic, who moves to the Netherlands for a job. After they break up with their long-term partner, they undergo a sort of katabasis: a journey into the underworld of their deeper sexual drives.
The book compares itself to Pauline Réage’s erotic novel The Story of O and the work of the notorious French libertine, Marquis de Sade. It spends most of its time exploring Seasonal’s dominant/submissive relationship with Laszlo, a self-exiled Hungarian.
The Kraus endorsement calls the book “radical”, and it’s true that it depicts a kind of relationship that is usually kept hidden. Poletti goes to the root of kink culture, trying to chart the ethics that sustain a relationship ultimately built on structured violence.
But the fragmentary approach, which moves between vignette-paragraphs and long text-message exchanges, allows the author to avoid some of the more intense moments between the characters. The book often stops just short of showing us the interior of the erotic relationship. It is elliptical about things that might be interesting for a reader of queer erotica.
That seems to be part of the point. The real subject of the book is the modulations of the relationship, as each character tries to avoid tipping the scales from domination to exploitation.
Seasonal often muses on their relationship to their own trauma. They are troubled when Laszlo uses the language of violence to describe them. It seems neither character can fly by the nets of their cultural and sexual conditioning.
In its exploration of the limits of trauma and violence, Hello, World? does chart somewhat virgin waters. Seasonal is an interesting creation. While they wax theoretical about relationships, they garble judgments about art and politics, declaring no interest in learning about either. They discard their long-term partner with relative ease when he says he won’t have sex with them.
They are straightforwardly dedicated to their own pleasure, in the best Sadean fashion, and largely indifferent to the suffering of those around them.
This complex portrait uncovers some interesting aspects of the doctrine of personal sexual liberation. Seasonal’s fairly uncritical embrace of identity politics and communitarianism leads to a sympathy with some of the arguments of Viktor Orban’s Hungarian nationalism. For all the rejection of the Enlightenment in the novel, the only thing that separates kink from abuse ends up being rational consent.
In the end, Seasonal’s pursuit of sexual freedom makes them into the sort of person they have spent their life rejecting.
As a diagnosis of the politics of self, Hello, World? works quite well. But its deconstruction of progressivism and internalised hetero-patriarchy is not “avant-garde”, nor particularly radical. I wonder what sort of circulation it will have outside the coterie of media-studies lecturers.
Ruins, Child
Like Hello, World?, Ruins, Child is a novel of fragments. But it arranges its fragments in a very different way. It is a tessellation of a huge number of texts drawn from the tradition of Black poetics and radicalism.
The notes identify the main texts as the writings…
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