The Book of X
The novel follows Cassie, a woman born with her stomach twisted into a knot, through a life rendered by alternating everyday scenes and surreal imagery. Through a meat farm, city work, love, and illness, it asks how women’s bodies are seen and wounded by society.
Work Information
The knot in the body becomes the pain the world ties to womanhood itself.
Cassie’s physical difference is not merely a strange premise; it expresses the way gazes, desire, work, and family expectations are inscribed on the body. A feminist fable where realistic coming-of-age narrative mingles with nightmare landscape.
Review Summaries
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Readers value the bold metaphor and unsettling beauty. Some are strongly drawn to the grotesque imagination, while the intensity of bodily imagery may divide tastes.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Two Dollar Radio
- Published
- 2019-07-16
- Pages
- 284 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 1.78 x 19.05 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781937512811
- ISBN-10
- 1937512819
- Price
- 3696 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Coming of Age
*Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards for Novel * The Believer Book Awards, 2019: Editors' Longlists in Fiction *The Northern California ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Awards 2019, Fiction longlist *2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Longlist *A Best Book of 2019 — Vulture, Entropy, Buzzfeed, Thrillist "Etter brilliantly, viciously lays bare what it means to be a woman in the world, what it means to hurt, to need, to want, so much it consumes everything.” ―Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist "I loved every page of this gorgeous, grotesque, heartbreaking novel." ―Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties A surreal exploration of one woman's life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men. The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday ― school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents ― with the surreal ― rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats ― Cassie’s realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.
Sarah Rose Etter is the author of The Book of X (Two Dollar Radio, 2019) and Tongue Party (Caketrain Press, 2011). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cut , Electric Literature , VICE , Guernica , Philadelphia Weekly , and more. She is the recipient of writing residencies at the Disquiet International Program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan Creative Program in Iceland. She earned her MFA from Rosemont College. She lives in San Francisco.
Reviews
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A surreal stunner of a debut!
This is the first book that I have read in a long while that I can truly say is addictive. Sarah Rose Etter has written a piece of work that I literally struggled to put down. Cassie has a knot for a stomach. Not 'in' her stomach but born, body-tied at the centre where her belly should be. Just like her mother and grandmother. Sounds surreal? It is. But that's nothing. She helps her father and brother mining in the family meat quarry. She walks down corridors of wet walls, glistening red and marbled with fat. Cassie plunges her arms, elbow-deep to pull out bloodied meat the size of boulders for her father to sell. She has visions: fields of throats and rivers of thighs. Heads are removed to watch their own bodies. Her jealousy is taken away in a removal shop, cut out like a cancerous tumour. She buys half a man because she doesn't have enough money for a full one. The men she meets in her real life are not good to her when they discover her knot. She's treated like a freak, abused and left mentally dead. She's does eventually fall in love, but things are far from perfect. Everything in this book is disturbing and off-kilter, as if Cassie has been dropped into a Salvador Dali painting. It's a wonderfully layered and brutally surreal book. It takes on the agonies and trials of a young woman growing up; it could also be seen as the struggle of chronic illness. Split into 4 parts, and rather than chapters, it's written in very readable chunks of narrative, dreams, visions and fact lists. This format only adds to its addictive and waking-nightmare quality. Highly recommended if you like your fiction surreal, dark and experimental. If you're easily disturbed then this may not be for you. But Sarah Rose Etter nails it all perfectly in her wonderful debut novel.
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A necessary and important read soaked in the sorrows of women for generations.
A necessary and important read-Etter's book is soaked in the sorrows of women for generations. Heavy in raw imagery and the routines of life, this books runs parallel to the pulse of women and lives and heartbreaks all ending in a climax that will leave the reader haunted but fulfilled.
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Knot for me
I’m not really sure I got it, it was perhaps a bit surreal for my taste but some of the imagery didn’t really hit with me. I think a similar story set in a more familiar setting would have probably struck deeper for me but factors like the money, the quarry and difficulty picturing ‘the knot’ took me away from being immersed in the story. I probably wouldn’t revisit this style of book but having read other work by the same author, would definitely be interested in future books!
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fascinating style - how did i miss this one?
i was born with a knot in my intestines (unlike the characters in the novel mine was thankfully inside my body) so i had to read it. but i was pretty impressed with the style and magical realism tone. i will read her again with or without knots. a bit dark but life often is.
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Weird.
I didn’t like this book! I read a few good reviews and hoped to find it just as revealing and rich. Instead, it’s just really, really, odd.