Girls Against God - Jenny Hval

[troisoiseaux]

Finished Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, which is more like a collection of increasingly bizarre vignettes than a novel— I didn't know, going into this, that Hval is a musician apparently best known for trippy feminist concept albums, but this was in fact basically a trippy feminist concept album as a book. To be honest, it got a bit too weird for my tastes by the end - at least once in a burst-out-laughing "WTF??" way - and I kind of wish she'd done more with time-traveling Edvard Munch and the vengeful teenage model of his painting "Puberty" since this was one of the things in the blurb that had piqued my interest, but there were some stand-out scenes and, overall, I liked how reading this felt like being pulled along a current, from idea to weird tableau to resonant idea.

Comments

[sovay]

time-traveling Edvard Munch

You didn't mention that!

[troisoiseaux]

It gets pride of place in the back-cover blurb (below), but time-traveling Edvard Munch only shows up briefly as a story idea within the frame story, such as it is; Munch's painting "Puberty" and its model are a recurring theme, though.

"Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice and her hatred, things start stirring themselves up around her. In a corner of Oslo, a coven of witches begins cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a black metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. Awful things happen in aspic." [x]

(Interestingly, this description also makes it sound like the Artist - aka the narrator - and the coven of witches are separate, when to my understanding, the coven of witches was the Artist and her friends...?)

[sovay]

A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a black metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind.

That does in fact sound like a plot thread in the blurb! I am sorry it raised your hopes.

[troisoiseaux]

To be fair, it's a hard book to try to summarize!

[chestnut_pod]

Okay, I'd be really interested in perhaps a different book about time=traveling Edvard Munch, though. Great tagline.

[troisoiseaux]

Right????

[marginaliana]

I really can't tell if I want to read this or not. It sounds fascinating but maybe insufferable.

[troisoiseaux]

Yeah, I suspect that it's a very... "either you vibe with it or you're like WTF is this??" book, without much middle ground. (Although I think by the end I was somewhere between the two, so idk, maybe it is.) If you can read a sample of the first few pages you will probably get a good sense of whether you'd like the writing style or not??