Paradise Rot

— — 21st Century
— This edition printed in:

A tabby cat with a white face and brown nose looks up at the sunshine. By her paws is Paradise Rot, a novel with a black cover featuring rotting fruit.

It’s Here!

I cannot believe how quickly the months have whipped by, but here we are! It’s August once again and time for Halloween in August reviews! I guess the new word for it is ‘Summerween’, but I don’t know, it’s  going to take me at least a few Summerweens to get used to it.  But whatever you want to call it, I’m excited to start looking in my stacks for some spooky things to review and to dust off the spooky home décor!

An orange tabby with a white-ringed tail crowds a senior cat and rests her tail on a paperback copy of Paradise Rot.

A Slow Creeping

For August, I decided to go with a more subtle kind of spooky and some more contemporary literary titles starting with Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot. The story starts out typically enough — a young woman is moving away from home to attend university and moving in with a strange roommate inside of a space that is not quite normal. What follows is a fever dream of decay and the juxtaposition of awakening and discovering blurred boundaries between individuals, bodies, sexuality, and plant life.

An orange tabby and a brown tabby frame a paperback copy of Paradise Rot.

It’s a narrative that moves both quickly and slowly as Hval masterfully mimics the creep of organic rot and the devastation it causes on one side of a fruit while leaving the other side seemingly flawless.

Paradise Rot is a novel by Jenny Hval. The cover is black with an image of dark berries that are crushed and rotting and resting on a paper.

The Lushness of Rot

I think the true beauty of this book is in the descriptions of the flat as it rots and twists and turns into something decayed and monstrous around the two young women. In that decay, there is life in all of its putrid glory. Hval is asking the reader to examine the line between these two states. Between the death of the fruit and the flourishing of a mushroom. Much in the same way she is asking us to examine the boundary between two individuals as one type of relationship becomes another and lines blur into a sick kind of co-dependence. What is flourishing in the ruins of boundaries?

A tortoiseshell cat curls her tail around a paperback book, Paradise Rot. The book is leaning on her side. She is nearly sitting on a tabby cat, who looks away.

What Did I Read?

Framed by two cats is a copy of Jenny Hval's Paradise Rot. The book is a small, mostly black paperback, with a picture of crushed and rotting berries on the cover.

I think one of the most spooky aspects of this book is that, when it’s over, you’re left wondering what exactly you just read. What exactly happened to that roommate and what exactly happened in that house? There are no easy answers, just an unsettling feeling that it isn’t quite over and the rot that isn’t quite done spreading. Perhaps this book is not for a reader that loves straight-forward or more direct types of horror. This isn’t a ghost story or a monster tale. But there’s something very magical about the fact that it’s something even stranger.

A tortoiseshell cats sits nearly on top of the front paws of a displeased tabby cat. In front of them, beneath the tabby's displeased gaze, is a copy of Jenny Hval's Paradise Rot.

Waiting for the Harvest

As we speak, my lovely spouse’s tomatoes are still very green and awaiting a first harvest. But lately I’ve been seeing a lot of content about what to do with all of your tomatoes. So I’m wondering when the first harvest will be and if we will in fact get another. Or if we’ll be enjoying the fruits of her labour or whether it will go to our new friend the groundhog.

A thin orange tabby sits by a screen. A rounder brown tabby with a white face and brown nose sits right behind her, nearly touching the orange tabby's tail.
by S. Hargrave

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