Just over 40, Belgian novelist and critic Verhelst edits a literary magazine and won two top prizes in the Netherlands for this phantasmagoric novel, his first to be translated into English and published in the U.S. Like Carla Harryman's post-apocalyptic, sexually supercharged Gardner of Stars, Ben Marcus's much gentler Notable American Women: A Novel
or Alice Notley's recent excoriations of the present, this book turns on explorations of gender as refracted through social hierarchies that have collapsed into haphazard, "warmth"-seeking violence, fueled by rumor, desperation and inarticulate despair. Each of its eight chapters is narrated by, and named for, a different character (excluding a short poetic epilogue). The book opens with "Strawberry Mouth" during the year Zero, when, instead of a global warming–based inferno, the country freezes, the king orders the word "winter" to be banned and the young male narrator's family members die one by one, leaving him to survive on the street: "us, eat, survive." Religion fails. The king evaporates in orgiastic communion with the "Girl-with-Red-Hair." That's just the first 20 pages, but Verhelst goes on to confront possible pasts and futures from multiple perspectives. "Wallwoman" is confronted by the dead, who leave just as quickly "to gorge on my stories." "Fleshcrown" begins his narrative: "I'm the king, I'm not the king," and may or may not be a murderous, deluded soldier. "Firehair" wryly describes court life during one of her eight other lives. Verhelst produces a disorienting allegorical charge out of the dissonance between the fairy tale–like evocations of the court and what king and subjects actually practice: war, sexual mayhem and random death. But readers will have to be predisposed to recognize the actual present—where war, sexual brutality and random death figure prominently for many—in the subterranean nightmare described here. (Aug. 1)
