Boeke | ’n Heilige is los in die haashok

SY WAS DIE TEENOORGESTELDE VAN NIKS

Boeke | ’n Heilige is los in die haashok

DEBORAH STEINMAIR het haar eindeloos verkneukel in Tess Gunty se subversiewe debuutroman.

THE RABBIT HUTCH is Tess Gunty se debuutroman en dit het my mateloos beïndruk. Sy is boonop bloedjonk en beeldskoon.

Die boek begin met ’n ongekende intensiteit. Die eerste bladsy het my oorrompel en ek het gewonder of sy dit sou kon volhou. ’n Jong meisie word in haar woonstel aangeval. Sy word herhaaldelik met ’n mes in die maag en bors gesteek. Hoor hier:

Knife, cotton, hoof, bleach, pain, fur bliss – as Blandine exits herself, she is all of it. She is every tenant of her apartment building. She is trash and cherub, a rubber shoe on the seafloor, her father’s orange jumpsuit, a brush raking through her mother’s hair. The first and last Zorn Automobile factory in Vacca Vale, Indiana. A nucleus inside the man who robbed her body when she was fourteen, a pair of red glasses on the face of her favorite librarian, a radish tugged from a bed of dirt. She is no one … An algorithm for amplified content and a blue slushee from the gas station … She is the smartphone that films her as she bleeds on the floorboard of her apartment, and she is the chipped nail polish on the teenager who assembled the ninetieth step of that phone on a green factory floor in Shenzhen, China. An American satellite, a bad word, the ring on the finger of the high school theatre director …Ten minutes of pleasure igniting between the people who made her, the final tablet of oxycodone on her mother’s tongue, the gavel that will sentence the boys to prison for what they’re doing to Blandine now. There is no such thing as right now. She is not another young woman wounded on the floor, body slashed by men for its resources – no. She is paying attention. She is the last laugh. On that hot night in Apartment C4, when Blandine Watkins exits her body, she is not everything. Not exactly. She’s just the opposite of nothing...

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