reviews | literature | novels | play of form
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Lisa Samuelsโ complex coming-of-age story dances the surrealist dialogue
.ยท:*ยจเผบ __________________
Les Chants de Maldoror with an illustration by Renรฉ Magritte, 1948.
Sink your teeth into the soil and hold onto it. Figuratively speaking, this is exactly what Lisa Samuelsโ unnamed main character does at the beginning of Tender Girl (2015). Like evolution, the novelโs story begins in the water and ends on land. And an evolution it certainly is โ the evolution of a girl who is new to the sweet achings of the human world. Samuelโs thirteenth work is a coming-of-age story of the unusual kind: with a strange protagonist and stranger prose.
Tender Girl opens by washing up its leading figure on the shore of humankind. Girl, as she is simply called throughout the story, is a peculiar hybrid being โ half human and half shark. For the first time, she steps out of the ocean and carefully makes her way into a strange new world. Drinking up the unfamiliar encounters with a wondrous soul, she learns to navigate the complexity of human existence and what it means to be a woman. As she grows up, Girl experiences love, and violence, and art, and grief, and motherhood, and loneliness โ and the language of herself. Lisa Samuels approaches this exploration in a complex linguistic way. One which often eludes the rules of syntax and grammar, instead radically striving for a stormy stream of consciousness.
"That untranslatability being the half-slipped land-slide kind of 'person-hood' she's noticing in the other body eyes and talk she hears conveyed. How do they keep from fundamental loneliness?"
Although not expressively labeled as surrealist, Tender Girl certainly is evocative of the style: the work embodies the idea of a metamorphosis ofย being. Through its themes and its form โ both of subversive nature โ Samuelsโ novel conducts a conversation with the past movement.ย
(Tender) Girl is the child of a well-known father: the work takes direct inspiration from Les Chants de Maldoror, a poetic novel written by the French author Comte de Lautrรฉamont in 1869. Lautrรฉamontโs piece approaches transgressive topics such as violence, evil, and absurdity through the actions of its misanthropic main character Maldoror. In one scene, a bizarre sequence of events climaxes when he violently mates with a shark. In the diegesis Samuel has created, her protagonist is the offspring of this brutish encounter, and Tender Girl an informal follow-up of the 19th-century tale.ย
Decades after its initial publication, Les Chants de Maldoror was embraced by the Surrealist movement, being hailed as a โproto-surrealistโ masterpiece for its subversive themes and absurd contents. Lisa Samuels expands on Lautrรฉamont, plucking Girl from the tree of his fictional sphere and giving her a unique voice. Through this continuation, the author places her protagonist in direct relation to the avant-garde movement: both Les Chants de Maldoror and Tender Girl are explorations of transformations. Just as the source material which Girl is given birth from utilizes surrealist concepts, so, too, does Samuelโs work absorb and reform them.ย
"She licks her tears away from her lower face, her pink tongue on the blue of her skin. The strawberries and the tentacles are softer than anemones."
The novelโs linguistic style is an ungraspable creature, an ever-changing chimera of words. The author thrusts away any coherency of sentence structure or syntax or grammar, freeing language from the shackles of coherence. Seldomly can the reader guess how a sentence will end. Samuelsโ prose is an immediate representation of the protagonistโs fluctuating feelings. While Girl shifts and changes and grows in the world she explores, the narration responds. Through this, Tender Girl holds the theme of metamorphosis in its very form.
Lisa Samuelโs novel has glistering sharp teeth, and they have sunken deeply into the soil of Surrealism. Tender Girl is an anamorphic absurdity in contemporary shape, its complex form speaking the same language as the concepts that have conceived it.
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