Love the World or Get Killed Trying

A trans performance artist wrestles with the hypersexualization she faces from straight men in Swedish American author Chamberland’s ardent and autofictional English-language debut. On the precipice of turning 30, Berlin-based Alvina sets out on a “dead-serious and gallows-silly mission” to enter into the male-dominated travelogue genre by writing about her trip to Iceland. She takes the reader on hikes to glaciers, where she’s awed by the beauty of ash-covered ice columns (“Reality pops up like something out of a big-budget, action-adventure feature film”) and moved to tears by their melting. While in Reykjavik during the Pride Parade, she is disappointed to mainly encounter wholesome cisgender heterosexual families. Later sections cover her return to Berlin, where “the majority are horny” and she “provides many with the hope that today is their lucky day. They whistle. They praise my legs. I try my best to get rid of them,” and a trip to Paris for her birthday. Chamberland’s spiky storytelling manages to find dark humor in her accounts of routine harassment from cis men who grope her and demand casual sex (at a bar, a man appeals her rejection by saying, “But I am the greatest!”). This thrums with life. (Mar.)