Hysteric

In front of your screen that week, I had a thought for those married couples who have lost all desire for each other and seek consolation by cycling through website after website in the comfort of their homes. At no time in front of your screen did I think of the two of us. I preferred my computer to yours, since with mine the images would appear, very slowly and by small increments from top to bottom, like a striptease, while your high-speed system threw everything in our faces all at once. The pictures overwhelmed us, we needed a few seconds to stare at the screen before we could assemble the pieces of female nudity and make a whole from the parts. Sometimes we’d see floating body parts that didn’t seem to belong to any of the girls and we tried to reconstruct the missing protagonist; that took some imagination.

Just a taste of the novel Hysteric by Nelly Arcan, forthcoming from Anvil press this spring, and wonderfully translated by David and Jacob Homel. For those of you who missed it this past Tuesday, an extended excerpt appears on the Biblioasis Translation Blog.