Rêvoir

Novelist and playwright Cixous (The Laugh of the Medusa) serves up a surreal, unclassifiable meditation on isolation and resilience centered around the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing parallels between herself and her Jewish ancestors, Cixous likens the “sensation of moving in place, within the turbulence, as if we were on a ship midocean” that she felt while stuck inside her home to Exodus, when “the Jews felt the same mummification of time, an ongoing incarceration.” Interwoven throughout is dreamlike dialogue between Cixous and her mother, whose voice is always “perched on my left shoulder” and who reminisces about the difficulties of surviving two wars. Elsewhere, Cixous turns to literary forebears for answers about how to produce art in times of tragedy, finding inspiration in Franz Kafka’s ability to write even as Europe descended into WWI and concluding that writing is an act of self-preservation. The highly experimental style introduces paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences, resists the strictures of linear narrative, and utilizes fragmentary prose as mesmerizing as it is mysterious (“how long is it going to last this dying, the unkind irony of wished-for death, silent siren, follow me darling, no matter how often you try to drop the soul’s leash, it doesn’t want liberty”). Evocative and enigmatic, this intoxicates. (Oct.)