The cadences of Despentes’ anger swim through the opening page, highs and lows pronounced for the reader. A sharp contrast to Despentes’ thoroughly organised anger, which pours over in these opening lines: ‘I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh.’ It is a great testament to the translator, in this case, that such initial anger is able to come across as mellifluous, almost sweet in its ugliness. However, I write this more than a month after, and my thoughts remain as much of a flurry as the index stickers I’ve filled the book with. Generally, this means I have been offered plenty to mull over during the course of reading a book. Thumbing the crisp pages of Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory, newly translated by Frank Wynne, I found myself marking the margins of pages with an array of index stickers: blue, red, orange, yellow and green coalesced in a chaotic mess. Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory is an angry and passionate manifesto against late capitalist patriarchy, a story about sexual assault and trauma that centres the survivor.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |