“Our relationship existed in a space outside the boundaries of gender. It was fluid, without the weight of definitions.”
Anne Garréta, Sphinx
I read Sphinx for one of the reads for our book club. I loved the style of writing and the story, but oh my god, was it depressing. Also, this was our next read after One Hundred Years of Solitude. *Facepalm. 🤦♀️ We must love the torture. Never doing that again.
SPOILER ALERT
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you will realize that pretty much any of my book posts will be spoilers, because, I kind of have to to talk about the characters, plot, and setting in any coherent manner. Anywho, back to Sphinx.
Sphinx follows a young person who is kinda all over the place, but if we assume they are 20 somethings, that makes sense. We meet our theology student, who then turns into a DJ after the resident DJ at a place they frequent is found dead in the bathroom. And of course, when the resident DJ is found dead, we have to hide the body…in the pipes…in the nightclub.
Initially, when I started reading this book, I was like, ok. Sure. Let’s see where this goes, but theeennnn, the DJ in the pipes and I was like, ah, let’s see how this all plays out.
The whirlwind romance between the narrator and A*** reminded me of any fleeting infatuation that occurs at that age. You love fast and you love hard, well I did. But at that age, it’s hard to really understand what love is. I appreciate how A*** was always like, no, don’t pursue this, like, really don’t and then the narrator was like, bet….annnddd then we get the rest of the book.
There was such a build up of this romance and then the, inevitable decline of the relationship as things got real and then the narrator and A*** were attempting to work things out. Suddenly, A*** dies in a tragic manner. This was pretty abrupt. I felt bad for the narrator as there was no warning or anything, but c’est la vie. After this, we get to see just how intwined their lives were and the narrator gets so fixated on the loss of the love of their life.
After all of this loss and turmoil, we get a final gut punch with the narrator being stabbed at the end of this novel. Essentially, this book was quite a whirlwind with unexpected twists and turns, but I think this highlights the pace of life in a big city and all of the unknowns that lurk behind the corner.
I appreciated the lack of gender throughout the book and after reading about how hard that is to do in French, am thoroughly impressed. I do not read French, so I read the English version, but loved this novel approach to writing. It takes the reader out of the prescribed gender norms and into a place of fluidity. Overall, I enjoyed the book, though it was quite sad and came at the heels of another sad book. What’s going on in Europe?
Did you read Sphinx? What were your thoughts?
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