Jenny Hval - At its simplest, this debut novel by the Oslo-based musician Jenny Hval is about a libidinal awakening. But the book, drawing elements from pulpy romance novels, the Book of Genesis, and magical realism, is also the origin story of a world born of queer desire

Jenny Hval, Paradise Rot, Trans. by Marjam Idriss, Verso Books, 2018.


excerpt

A lyrical debut novel from a musician and artist renowned for her sharp sexual and political imagery

Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo’s sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh.
This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.

“In Paradise Rot, Jenny Hval creates a parallel world that’s familiar but subtly skewed. As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder.”– Chris Kraus


Musician Hval weaves a strange and lyrical tale of a young woman trying to navigate a foreign world in her intriguing if uneven debut. Johanna is a Norwegian exchange student at Aybourne University in Britain in need of a flat. When she responds to an ad seeking a “QUIET” respondent, she finds herself embarking on a bizarre journey with her new flatmate Carral Johnston. Johanna’s new lodgings are strange indeed: in a renovated warehouse, with thin plaster walls that stretch only halfway to the high ceilings. Sounds echo oddly throughout, so that Carral speaking in the bathroom sounds as though she’s everywhere, smudging the boundaries between what is personal and what is shared. Johanna’s study of mycelium begins to take over her life in a literal fashion; mushrooms sprout from the walls of the flat and distinctions between life forms become blurred. Carral and Johanna, it turns out, might be two women, or one. Hval’s writing is surreal and rich with the grotesque banalities of human existence: urine, decay, mold. The prose is principally concerned with the varying feelings of grossness: from the mealy slime of a rotting apple to a man exposing himself on a train. Though the images can be striking, the reader begins to get the sense that there’s not much substance behind them, making for an visceral yet thin novel. - Publishers Weekly


It’s the textures of Paradise Rot, Jenny Hval’s debut novel, that stick with you. When Norwegian student Johanna arrives to study in a British seaside town, she’s struck by how foamy the food is compared to the wholegrain heft of Nordic cuisine—the only crunch is the sugar. She moves into a fetid converted warehouse with graduate Carral, where the damp partition walls and a glut of festering apples break down all physical and psychological boundaries. They consummate their strange attraction with Carral pissing on Johanna in bed and awaken with their “bodies dried up like a crystal fist.” Paradise Rot was originally published in 2009 and is newly translated into English, yet it feels ahead of its time. The themes of alienation, queerness, and the unsettling nature of desire align Hval with modern mainstays like Chris Kraus, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Maggie Nelson. Hopefully its critical acclaim will lead to the translation of Hval’s subsequent novels, Inn i ansiktet and this year’s Å hate Gud (I Hate God). –Laura Snapes

https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-best-music-books-of-2018/

“Hval is an artist of many questions—the ones she asks, and those she provokes in the listener. Apocalypse, Girl swerves from decipherable politics to recondite personal imagery. It’s not a paraphrasable album, but it is a listenable one, its avant-garde tendencies held in check by Hval’s beguiling voice.”– Anwen Crawford, New Yorker

“Contemporary pop culture teems with unfiltered first-person narratives and cathartic self-exposure, from search-engine-optimized ‘it happened to me’ essays to the highbrow family memoirs of authors like Maggie Nelson. At its worst, the form is trashy; at its best, it can convey ideas that extend far beyond the confessor, tapping into something both intensely intimate and universally political. The avant-garde Norwegian singer Jenny Hval pulls off this feat with a rare grace, layering prose poems, both spoken and sung, over synths, pulsing house rhythms, and noise-rock fuzz. Where Hval’s last studio album, Apocalypse, Girl, served as a withering feminist commentary on the sexual politics of American consumer culture (sample lines: “I beckon the cupcake/The huge capitalist clit”; “I grab my cunt with my hand that isn’t clean”), Blood Bitch, out September 30, deconstructs the menstrual cycle, the ageing body, and the symbiotic relationship between lovers, vampires, and prey.”

– Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Village Voice

Norwegian musician and artist Jenny Hval’s debut novel, Paradise Rot, published by Verso Books, is a trip. It’s acid(ic), unsettling and luminescent—teetering the fine line that separates psychedelia and paranoia, often slipping into the latter (for me anyway).

There, not there, there, not there

I read the book very quickly but it consumed me more than I it. Very often it left me breathless. The writing rips apart reality—what we think we see, feel, smell, know—and places it under a microscope. Words come alive, they mingle and spark off one another, bubbling bubbling bubbling in my brain:

slippery silk slides with slime gets clogged—soggyis sucked in, then sucked outback in, becoming something else:
something moist, skinless and quiet.

My eyes widen. So grotesque yet I want more. The textured writing plays on the abject in a Kristeva-ean way, but also not quite—it’s more psychosis than psychoanalysis. Reading aloud, words stick to the roof of my mouth. sweet sap, Mycology, bulged, mushroom. My skin crawls with goosebumps. drops, seeds, beads, spores, burst. The air is claggy, My heart beats faster. porous, holes, burrowing, filling, flesh… Am I sweating? There’s an involuntary shiver. (Trigger warning for trypo and mysophobes: Paradise Rot is both a sensory/synesthetic dream and nightmare.)

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Jenny Hval is a pro at knowing how to get to you. She’s a good witch practising dark magic: performative, visual, aural and literary bewitchment. Her music is a spooky and surreal soundscape diving deep into female impulses, women’s bodies, sex and queer desire, belonging, nature, myth and monsters. It is intellectual and haunting. It leaves what Hval’s calls sense impressions.
The rhythmic breathing of her song In the Red sends my heart reeling into a pumping frenzy. The soft screeches of Mephisto In The Water and woeful moans of The Plague tap into something buried and seething under the surface: a swirl of longing, trauma, hysteria and psychic pain. How Gentle is still; Holy Land is slow, scary; This Is a Thirst is serene—and my body trembles, my eyes welling with tears. But it’s the breathy whispers:
bananas, thin,skin,subculturally lonely,soft dick rock,capitalist clit,flaccid fingers
And the echoing bangs and clangs of Kingsize that remind me the most of Paradise Rot and its creepy power of getting under the skin and staying there.
As a piece of writing, Paradise Rot is, possibly, brilliant. But that’s not what I’m interested in. To read this book, one must embrace the vastness and messiness of their thoughts and perceptions—they must experience with their whole body. Hval takes simple moments, like looking at a decaying apple, taking a piss, sipping tea or holding another human form, and magnifies them, opens them up, making the reader pay attention to what is easily left at the wayside. A peripheral reject.

An apple is never just an apple,

it is a body or bodies: the core, skin (peel), (forbidden) flesh, leaking black (blood) juice. An apple is the beginning and end of this (fairy)tale. And through the senses and skin, nerves and organs of narrator Djåoanna/Johanna/little Jo—a 20 year old from Norway who has moved to the English coastal town, or maybe city, of Aybourne to study biology at university—this tale is told. It is a story of isolation, identity and navigating a sense of belonging within a new landscape. To make a home in a strange place and ask is this normal? Or better yet, is this real? Jo likes the real, that’s why she chose the study of the living.

The biologist creates the world; The world of biology

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W.HOUSE,
Paradise Rot is Jo’s living and decaying world. One she can’t escape. On lone walks around the winter stricken seaside town Jo follows an orbital circuit (Aybourne was beneath me, closed off in all directions, like a chest with no lid.) The hostel—her first “home”— the train, the university, the warehouse: all these new locations feel paradoxically full and empty, like, there’s a sense of solidarity and synchronicity yet total loneliness. It is a familiar heartbreak. A story I can search for, make fit in some places, but cannot fully feel the weight of:

I suddenly knew nothing about myself, nothing seemed right in English, nothing was true(I could not align with the landscape. It reminded me, my body, of being newborn.—Holy Land)

The warehouse—the story’s nucleus—is the vast and uncertain home Jo ends up in after numerous viewings, interviews, rejections. This is how it begins. She sees it advertised:

“ROOM AVAILABLE IN LARGE W.HOUSE.
SHARE WITH 1 F.
.QUIET.”

There is a curiosity to find out the warehouse’s history: why construct a plasterboard apartment here? It was an old brewery that becomes a sinking ship. It’s also haunted, filled with ghosts of inhabitants new and old. Invisible life grows, moves and speaks of its own accord. I know this uneasy sense of space well. Visiting friend’s warehouses or attending a random party: the milky synthetic walls, a make-shift bathroom, old rugs thrown over walls for warmth, tripping over unexpected steps, a new treasure around every corner—lots of corners. So much space yet everyone is on top of one another. A place where even isolation is intimate.
The book shifts between inside/outside the warehouse and its occupant “1 F.” Carral Johnston. The warehouse, or factory, as it is often called, is raw and porous; the outside gets in but the inside can’t get out. Unable to purge, the warehouse becomes sick and everything turns yellow: apples, moss, Carral’s hair, sweater and skin—the yellow Carral Johnston. The book, in general, is very yellow: urine, wallpaper, yolk, a pie, a rejection note, dying grass, alcohol, a lamp, a beam of light. Supernatural yellow, toxic waste yellow, pallid yellow; fading and fading and rotting. Bitten apples turn yellow, infected with Carral’s spit; apple slits, punctured by nails, go brown like a small dark nipple in the golden skin.

 I stared at her yellow sweater, trying to see a hint of nipple under the tight-knit wool fabric. There was nothing.

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1 F. 
Yellow surrounds Carral but not like an aura, more like a lingering disease. Everything she touches stinks of yellow. She’s a slippery goldilocks with no sense of boundaries. Sticking her fingers in everything. Reading about Jo and Carral makes me itchy. Uh, it is nearly a love story. But more carnal than considerate. More affect than affection. Their intimacy makes my stomach dance and my toes curl: Jo strokes Carral, Carral pees on Jo’s leg; their shared silences that say so much; two siamese twins entangled as one four breasted creature. It is toxic yet delicious. Their bodies melting into one another. It is intense and cruel.

(I feel sick)

Carral tries to devour young and innocent Jo. She plays with her like a yo-yo: back and forth. Breathe! … Anxiety brews in my chest because I know Jo and I know Carral. I know what it is like to live off the sickness of another person, to be fascinated and repulsed by them, all the while allowing the infection to spread. They promise to make you better. But in the end, please, you gotta purge. Jo and Carral’s relationship embodies the ethical dilemmas of consumption. Consume so much that you become it (another person? thing?) and it erupts out of you leaving scattered remnants—a trail of trash. A tangled history of trauma and triggers—slowly, slowly decomposing.
But! Love or not, it is a lust story that seeks to devour heteronormative convention.
Everything she sees she understands;Everything can be made from her hands.His body so tight, his arms so strong,His hair as red as fire…

…To grow together is their pursuit,And his red flesh their forbidden fruit,He stumbles and gasps and finally dies;From his ashes will a four-breasted creature arise.

These are extracts from a novel written (in verse) presumably about Jo and Carral in a yellow notebook. The beginning, on the left, was written by a man (the neighbour, Pym) and the ending, on the right, was written by a woman (Carral). It transforms from a man’s paradise fantasy into a tale about the destruction of Eden and the demise of Adam—a feast of flesh. It gives Genesis’ Garden of Eden the kiss of death, although in this version the snake—what a trickster—is suspiciously missing. Storytelling is important in Paradise Rot and there are others, like Moon Lips, the fantasy fiction porno book that rarely leaves Carral’s hands, which begins “this isn’t just any romance in your hands, dear reader…”. And there’s the story of Emma, a girl from a memory Jo tells Carral who, when Jo was seven, asked her to get into her bed naked.

Emma said that we could get pregnant On the sofa cushions, a fidgety Carral in my arms,I wondered why I’d been so scared in Emma’s bed back in year one

(a queer epiphany)
A four-breasted creature, Moon Lips, Emma, Paradise Rot. The stories leak into one another. By the end I feel as though they’ve climbed inside me—as one.

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QUIET
Paradise Rot is loud. It continues to echo through me long after I’ve put it down. Jenny Hval’s sensory sensitivity is magnificent. She writes tunnels of sound, honing in on the subtle songs of everyday life. There are outside sounds: cars, trams, raindrops, a bee. And there are sounds that settle inside a person: skin against clothes or a toilet seat, apple juice between teeth, the distant swooshing inside someone’s ear, breath. The warehouse acts as an echo chamber, everything vibrates and everything has a rhythm.

I’m programing a new heartbeat for a new home.

Confession: I re-enact several sound scenes. By going deeper into Jo’s head—her body—I hope to fall into my own. In the shower I listen to water droplets bouncing off my body, noting their change or softer quality as I lather my skin with soap. Pausing, I push my ears to hear farther—what is there to be heard beyond the traffic, or wind, or tv? Vague sonic contours. I pay closer attention to the people around me and, after some time, learn the uniquely tuned rhythms of their breathing, chewing or fidgeting. But it always puts mine out of whack. One room of people becomes a fucked up symphony of fluids and skin. I wonder if that’s why I spend so much time alone.
I have to read some pages twice—slow down—as words seem to tumble and tumble and. Mania: I see and feel so much. This was on purpose, I think… Writing in rhythm, as rhythm, through rhythm. Sentence after sentence so well crafted that I sing them in my head as words bounce against one another.

warm white glob Pym…Pym…Pym…thick blood clotsdrips and dripsJo…Jo…Jo…Jo…

Jo sings too, but only in her head. And people sing to her: in dreams, at a party and at bars, through earphones. When Jo listens to music she wants to overpower and pause; volume high to push out unsettling thoughts, which, uh, doesn’t always work. Some music can only take you closer to the source of pain, like Bjork’s Vespertine album, so intimate. Music, sound and verse—poetry—form parts of this book’s soft skeleton. Paradise Rot is a re/mix of and for senses. Listen…

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The Snake
It’s Carral.

In the story the apple poisons the snake, and Eve packs her books and moves out of paradise.

Tears fall. It’s so simple: an apple.
A symbol of sin and desire to keep us in line, to keep the doctor away—(the in)sanity! Fruit of temptation, a lesson in shame and sex. Written as Golden in Greek mythology, the fruit of Discord, an embodiment of beauty, vanity, desire and dispute in the name of. The Norse Goddess Iðunn, the keeper of apples, a deity of youth and immortality with long golden hair and a promise of eternal beauty. And then there’s dear Snow White, an innocent soul and a foolish child. It’s a fairytale laced with envy and vanity, one bite of the poisoned apple and sleep beckons Snow into a glass casket: an eternal performance of Woman, Supine. Oh, of course, Alan Turing: gay, a genius. The myth of his poisonous apple is the saddest yet. Remember:

An apple is never just an apple

Paradise Rot has an abundance of abandoned apples, half-eaten and rotting. Yellow Honeygolds: Carral is the snake, the apple is the warehouse inside Carral. Pink Ladies: flesh. Bloody Ploughmans: forbidden. Each apple is a story of transformation and becoming, of desire and sex/uality. (A four-breasted creature, Moon Lips, Emma.) Hval weaves and re-forms stories, mutilating them with a deep commitment to the senses and subjectivity. Her stories grow around me and reach inside one tendril at a time, sometimes I feel her words behind my eyes or in my stomach: they wake something up; stirring something that has long laid stagnant. Paradise Rot is situated storytelling as a queer methodology for writing and rewriting (or breaking?) myth—the tales that seep throughout history—and for mapping lived experiences. It is writing against (hetero)sexed normative narrative and literary structures. Words run free, they feel from the inside. Paradise Rot is revolution through revulsion.
Jenny Hval has truly written something beautiful.

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Here, not here, here, not here
I still feel like I’m dreaming: expecting dirt between the tiles in my bathroom to start moving or waiting for an apple I’ve just bitten into to instantly rot, turn black and crumble. As I write I watch people move—in my house or at a cafe—and I see it: the sharing, touching and mingling of their bacteria and flesh and fluids. They take form in bright colours and grotesque textures, growing larger and larger and… stop! I have to look away. But it doesn’t leave me, I still feel it,

The apple has no end, just like this fairytale

growing under my skin, letters forming flesh bubbles. Spores, sex, stain, a snake, a mushroom, an apple. They want to be known.- Mollie Elizabeth Pyne
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-destruction-myth-jenny-hvals-paradise-rot/




In Paradise Rot, a young university student named Jo has her first queer sexual experience in an apartment slowly filling up with creeping moss and fungi. At its simplest, this debut novel by the Oslo-based musician Jenny Hval is about a libidinal awakening. But the book, drawing elements from pulpy romance novels, the Book of Genesis, and magical realism, is also the origin story of a world born of queer desire. As Jo and her roommate Carral grow closer and closer, their damp apartment becomes ever more fertile, slowly transforming into an ecosystem unto itself. Their home is a warm bubble inside the cold fictional English town of Aybourne, and within that bubble, Jo slowly loses all sense of distance and separation from the object of her desire.
The novel very much mirrors the world that Hval has created in her work as a recording artist. Best known for the playfully cerebral avant-garde pop albums she’s released over the last decade, Hval explores intimacy and desire while embracing the repulsive along with the banal. “In the doctor’s office / Speculum pulls me open,” she sings on her 2016 song “Period Piece.” “Some people find it painful / But all I feel is connected.” It’s no wonder, then, that in Hval’s literary vision, love is driven by a focus on the eroticism found in the quieter details of domestic life: the sounds of fabric against skin, water dripping, tea mixing with milk, urine streaming into a toilet bowl. In these everyday acts, she finds something wondrously carnal to marvel at: “When she dipped her tongue in the surface of the warm milk and licked up the skin,” Jo observes of Carral, “I felt the tip of my own tongue get warmer, and when she closed her mouth I could almost feel the milk skin against the roof of my mouth, like slimy cigarette paper.” Although it was written early in Hval’s musical career, Paradise Rot is a compendium of the imagery and themes that have long run through her discography: queerness and feminism, a stark focus on the human body and its fluids, and the continuum between innocence and corruption. Originally published in Norway in 2009—when Hval was releasing music under the stage name Rockettothesky—the novel is evidence of just how long she has been turning these concepts over in her mind. It also marked the transition to releasing music under her own name. Her first album as Jenny Hval, 2011’s Viscera, can be seen as an extension of Paradise Rot’s love story: “Golden locks / Dripping, melting out of me / Golden showers,” she sings on the song “Golden Locks,” over soft guitar arpeggios. The language clearly mirrors the fixations that Jo develops as she falls in love: “I dreamt of Carral’s golden hair locks twisting around me like a warm golden exoskeleton,” she remarks at one point as the two become inseparable. “When I woke up, our bodies were clammy and damp. The mattress stank of urine.”
Moisture is the vehicle by which the main characters find connection, as well as the reason their small home starts to become a mini-biome. In the same way that wetness dominates Jo and Carral’s lives, fluids permeate every part of Hval’s music. She has sprinkled past albums with recordings of breathing and sound effects like liquid trickling and spilling in a quiet space, creating the feeling of an isolation chamber submerged in still, murky waters. The cover of her 2013 album Innocence Is Kinky features a wet face pressed against wet glass, and her fourth solo album, Blood Bitch, is entirely devoted to its titular fluid. Hval celebrates liquid for its drawing and binding power—another way to communicate sensuality and queer romance. On Blood Bitch’s final song, “Lorna,” Hval declares: “No one ever asked me, how do I desire? I don’t think anyone ever talked to me using the word ‘desire’ at all. No one ever told me or taught me how to contain it. It kept existing, but there was no language. Does anyone have any language for it? Can we find it?” Paradise Rot is an endeavor to create that language and articulate that desire, and it remains as relevant to Hval’s artistic practice today as it was almost a decade ago.
That Hval is examining the same issues that moved her from the beginning is a rare feat at a time when artistic reinvention commands the most attention and examination. And with each musical or literary examination of a substance like blood or a concept like desire, she reveals a new aspect. Her work in its entirety, then, offers a multidimensional perspective on those images, building up to an entire world—her beautiful, monstrous, queer Eden.
Hval’s latest musical release, The Long Sleep, revolves around this theme of constant revisiting, with each song calling into question aspects of the tracks that came before it. The lyrics of the opener, “Spells,” begin “You are your own disco ball,” with Hval singing the words in an upbeat, crystal-clear voice; the next song, “The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream,” starts out with her whispering dolefully, “Let’s say that you are your own disco ball / It sounds better, more promising / It doesn’t just sound like you’re broken.” The result is an album that winds around itself, never leaving any detail unexamined or taken for granted. In many ways, this kind of spiral structure is a fitting analogy for Hval’s career. Now, with the release of the newly translated Paradise Rot, we can experience her artistic evolution beyond the shape of a timeline, as a series of challenging examinations melting and bending in on themselves. Like Paradise Rot, Hval’s musical catalog begs constant revisiting and reexamination. Listening to—or now reading—her work feels like getting jettisoned into an underwater reality that fantastically mirrors our own. It would be entirely terrifying, if exploring it weren’t so much fun. - Ann-Derrick Gaillot
https://www.thenation.com/article/jenny-hval-paradise-rot-review/


As per the title's promise, Paradise Rot seeps with goo. There are "spit bubbles," "pearls of fat," "a pee soaked mattress," "warm white globs" and "sticky black crotches" frothing freely around; apple flesh "bubbles in between teeth," sweat forms "cold sweet sap," and velvety "honey funguses" sprout from space.
Such freaky finery fills only a petri dish's worth of secretions from the sticky bildungsroman of Djåoanna, or Jo – a mousy, twenty-year-old Norwegian on semester abroad in the fictional seaside town of Aybourne, Australia – poised on the cusp of a fantastic sexual awakening. Lonely, curt and unmoored, little Jo tumbles into an oozy erotic fantasia in the same way that one falls asleep and enters a dream: slowly, then suddenly. "Sometimes I'm not sure what's going on," she whispers partway through her psychedelic trip through Aybourne. "I don't know how to explain it."
Equally psychedelic (and Norwegian) is the author of Jo's life, Jenny Hval, a multi-disciplinary artist who has always loved investigating viscera in search of dampness and truth. Over the past 12 years, Hval has presented clammy wonderland after clammy wonderland, in albums and art installations that suggest her intense fascination with the lurid world of flesh, disentangling beauty from gore and vice versa.
Her music – rich, filmic, spectral and sinewy, as if Cronenberg's more operatic movies were for some reason re-scored by Björk — inveterately worships the body, in modes that can sound like prayer. In her songs, women appear in primal, exposed, surreal shapes: sometimes in moments of climax, sometimes pried open and into pieces, and very often in states of extraordinary rapture. ("I arrived in town... with an electric toothbrush... pressed... against... my... clitoris..." goes the first line of the first song off Hval's very first record under her own name.) As such, mucus, rot and pus; blood, spores, urine — all of it takes center stage in the ornate grotesquerie of her gluey debut novella.
"When I went to America I found myself to be not myself," Hval recalls on "Holy Land," the sprawling closing track of her fifth album, Apocalypse, Girl. "I could not align with the landscape. It reminded me, my body, of being newborn." Rot opens on a similarly natal scene: Jo lands not in America but Australia, loaded with too much luggage, staring out of her hostel window as fog smothers the grey coastal hamlet. "There. Not there. There, not there," she hums upon her arrival in a coolly lyric voice, imagining herself "a new heartbeat" for her new life.
After a fruitless, weeks-long apartment hunt, Jo makes a funny friend in the older, lissome, chronically sleepy Carral Johnston, moving in with Carral after a brisk interview in the converted beer brewery she's made her home. (The place is "raw and porous," nightmarish and noisily alive.) Their shared living space spans a rancid, massive cube, all plasterboard and mezzanines with a thin fur of moss lining the floors, but nothing is half as monstrous and weed-like as Jo's lilting narration, running wild as her home becomes a slimy wonderland of psychosexual discoveries. It is, as Jo puts it, a "rotten, reeking garden of Eden" — not hell and not heaven, but an honest limbo where Jo's reality lives in jelly-like suspension.
Like the first-person mode so often used throughout Hval's art, Jo's voice feels partly like autobiography and partly like a proxy for women fighting the drifty feelings of dissociation in response to a world of vague, unnavigable sensations, like sexual preference or anxiety. Braising in the juices of her home — the runoff slimes, the milky emissions, the putrefaction of decaying food — Jo spends much of her time trying to compartmentalize away the mounting bizarreness of the world around her as half-hallucinatory visions threaten what's real and what's not. Like funguses, strangeness springs forth sui generis. Things decay and fall apart; certainty curdles. Bodies change with the suddenness of jump scares, mimicking the sometimes-monstrous shifts that occur during puberty.
"There's something in me that makes me ... lose control sometimes," Carral reveals at one point where her body seemingly disintegrates, softens into mush, and joins the squalor of their little universe. Like a riff on Helen Chadwick's "Loop My Loop," it begins when her hair falls clean from her scalp in large fistfuls, mixing into their flat's fleshy sludge "like peelings from a golden apple."
Unlike the work of magical realists like Bulgakov or Borges, the thrill in Paradise Rot is not in the characters' lack of acknowledgement of the vile and surreal, but in feeling Jo's eyes, like our own, widen in response to the unstable world both within and around her. Sex amplifies the feeling tenfold. The novel's liquid language – decomposed and viscous, as if pooled from the home's floorboards – gleams during the dreams and motions of desire. "Transformation is for me a much more interesting way to look at narrative than a 'story,' " Hval told NPR in a 2015 interview. "The reward is desire, a desire that is not about inequality and dichotomy, but about liberation. It's a fairy tale, perhaps."
"I wanted to wear him like a coat, suck him out," says Jo, of a former partner. In fantasies, Jo has "paws and claws growing out of fists," and necks elongate "thin and long like swans." An unwanted kiss is a "Spanish slug, antennas tickling the roof of [her] mouth," while a wanted kiss is a "rush," where "stalks and fingers and veins spread through the body like a new soft skeleton."
Compared to Hval's "continuous echo of splitting hymens;" her appellation of "soft d*** rock" to her fourth album, her orgiastic "black vegetable soups of hair and teeth," Rot often feels like a parade of impressions mixed from her lyrics writ large. Hval has always seemed to admire the cursed image for the shorthand way it suggests the violence of emotional turmoil. But she is at her best and most successful in the novel, as in her music, when she allows herself to follow the twisty thread of a wild vision and spiral backward into more mystic places. Paradise Rot only does this at key moments, and not often enough to pull the novel out of its sometimes too-distant stupor, but the passages that do pursue this movement feel extraordinary, like translations from an ancient, kinky parable.
Here is Jo, for instance, midway through recounting a good dream:

"I'll tell you the fairy tale of the apple. Eve ate the apple, and then Adam came and did so too. Afterward, this apple was forgotten, and it was assumed that it rolled away in the grass while Adam and Eve were chased out of the garden. But that's not true, because secretly the apple rolled in between Eve's legs, scratched open her flesh, and burrowed into her crotch. It stayed there with the bite marks facing out, and after a while, the fruit-flesh started to shrivel, and mold threads grew from the edges of the peel."

Julia Kristeva, in her essay "Powers of Horror," might term the whole of Paradise Rot a work of pure abjection: "that which does not respect borders, positions, rules ... that which disturbs identity, system, order." In art, and in practice, the abject refers to the monstrous, horrific, literally repulsive stuff — corpses and blood and slurry — that one "thrusts aside in order to live." But abjection — to Carral, by proxy Jo and more broadly, to Jenny Hval — is life itself.
Cindy Sherman — a woman who has also spun together an artistic existence by inspecting the bonds among our bodies, our fluids, our flesh, and one another — may be Hval's closest analog in her study of the similarities between revulsion and desire. Sherman's photographic Sex Pictures series, one of her many projects that induce lightheadedness on sight, features sharp images of violated and hybrid mannequins posed like odalisques on damp forest floors.
Like the figures in Sex Pictures, Hval is calmly consumed by the grotesque and the relationship it has with women's bodies. Flesh is never immaculate in Hval's universes, but meant to be probed, biopsied, examined intently with a hand mirror in low light. Hval's curiosity is more than simple pleasure in perversity: It's meant to defile the idea of women's bodies as pristine and plush (recall Eve's primary role in Milton's Paradise Lost: "For softness she, and sweet attractive grace") and reshape it into something more dreadfully real. Maybe more revolutionary than that transfiguration is her disemboweling of desire itself, unraveling it to its fearsome, primal state, and exploring the strangeness of how sexuality can alienate one from oneself; how feelings of mistrust come about when desire is new, queer and unreliable. Or, too, the nasty, menacing, small instabilities of attraction — how brutally infiltrative it can feel when realizing, midway, the sensations of a crush — the freakishness of the way it grips.
The cover of Hval's sixth album, Blood B***, features two faces (one of them Hval's) unpeeling from one another from what looks to be a single sheet of skin. It's a photo of two Eves, shot in low-fidelity, and reminds me of one of Sherman's Sex Pictures — "Untitled (#305)" — in which a pair of almond-toned mannequins exhale in soft ecstasy.
"My breath was her breath," Jo intones, barely at a whisper, at the end of the novel.
Aren't all romances conceptual? Though what Carral and Jo had was as doomed as a dream, Hval's treatment of sexuality as grisly eros perhaps shouldn't be all that shocking. Desire, like viscera, is quotidian, part of us, as reliable and as fitful as sleep. When fantasies become reality, however, there's a calculus to be made. What can we live with? What fictions do we have to reject? What happens when we realize loneliness is the gory thing that unsettles?
Hval already wrote a song about this, two years ago, titled "Secret Touch." "It was both ravishing," she sings, her voice curling toward paradise, "destructive, and most of all, (and most of all), absolutely necessary." - Mina Tavakoli
www.npr.org/2018/10/25/660242476/in-paradise-rot-jenny-hval-traces-a-surrealistic-sexual-awakening


Paradise Rot, the newly translated debut novel from experimental Norwegian musician Jenny Hval, centers around a stranger come to stay. After biology student Jo arrives in an English university town, the only housing she can find is in a former brewery. There are no permanent walls, and every sound carries and amplifies itself. Before Jo even agrees to move in, she hears her future roommate, office temp Carral, urinating: “I thought it sounded a little thick, as if warm milk was trickling out of her.” But Jo is not bothered by this intimacy. She moves in with little hesitation, marking her first shift from the person she used to know and into this unknown new world. The narrative setup (newcomer, foreign town), combined with the tenuousness of the living situation, gives the novel a sense of shifting reality and temporariness from the start.
Hval is an expert at creating and sustaining atmospherics across genres, and Paradise Rot is no exception. Her descriptions of the odd, fervent life inside the place creep in slowly and then take over. Normal apartment things take place at first, with bugs, mildew, and some near-rotten apples that wind up in strange places. Eventually, though, every surface in the apartment is covered in moss and grass and condensation, with mushrooms growing on the ledge of the bath. Jo and Carral adjust themselves to the changing atmosphere, growing separately inside their habitat and closer together like a network of fungus. The novel becomes like a terrarium, the loft some kind of magical realist Eden. There may be severe hazards involved with the living situation, but nobody seems to mind (even though, in a panic, I found myself thinking “Buy a dehumidifier!”).
The strength of Paradise Rot is its peculiar narrator, whose headspace provides Hval with a showcase for her descriptive style. Jo is a watcher—reticent and imbued with the patience of a scientist. She accepts the oddities of her living situation as observable fact, but it’s clear that her inner monologue has an unusual quality to it. Every time Jo observes Carral, the latter takes on slightly alien aspects: “She was wearing that thin pale-yellow wool sweater again. The yellow was so close to her skin tone and hair that she seemed naked, a sexless, matted nakedness.” As Jo’s relationship to Carral grows closer and more idiosyncratic, their interactions become stranger and less human too: “Carral stared back at me and followed the juice sinking down my clear jellyfish throat.” By the time that Carral creeps unsettlingly into Jo’s bed, the two seem on the way to becoming mycological, a part of the mushroom network of the apartment itself.
In this novel, as in much of Hval’s work, identity and belonging are capable of morphing based on the narrator’s surroundings. In “Holy Land,” the closing track from 2015’s Apocalypse, girl, Hval says, “When I went to America, I found myself to be not myself/I could not align with the landscape.” This also rings true for Jo, whose identity is upended the second she lands in Ayborne, down to her name. “When I said, Hello, my name is, I couldn’t help but think of other names, from pop songs and films: My name is Luka, I sang to myself, My name is Jonas.” When she does manage to introduce herself, the sound is all wrong: in Norway, she is Johanna, with a soft, y-like J; in Aybourne, she is Jo, or as Carral calls her, “Little Jo.” All through the novel, her selfhood is context-dependent. She repeatedly visualizes herself disintegrating or absorbing outside elements. At one point, when talking with a male character, she remarks how she doesn’t enjoy the conversation or the way it “focused only on burrowing deeper inside of me. I felt translucent. Could you tell just by looking if someone is a virgin?” She repeatedly finds herself unable to explain the circumstances of her relationship with Carral to other students in her program. The borderlessness she feels by being dislocated from her context offers her no bolster against outside forces. It also renders her nearly incapable of decision-making until the novel’s end, when she has to choose a self and salvage it.
Other motifs running through Hval’s lyrics are also on display, including sex and gender, the curious grotesqueries of the body, its fructification and softening. When Jo gets her period, thoughts about fecundity come with it, and she sits in the toilet “as if [...] leaking into the room and dissolving, flowing from my own bloody crotch like black juice from a rotten apple core.” The detached yet unbearably intimate manner of this organic observation is common throughout the book, and reminds me of the track “Kingsize” (Apocalypse, girl), in which the singer holds four large bananas in her lap to rock them to sleep as they “rot slowly in my lap, silently, wildly, girly.” There is, obviously, a connection to Blood Bitch, Hval’s 2016 thematic investigation of menstrual blood, but the album takes cues from horror in a way Paradise Rot simply does not. Given that Paradise Rot was printed in Norway nearly a decade ago, it’s also possible the novel is an incubator of sorts for what seems to be a significant thematic interest for Hval.
Paradise Rot is an odd microcosm inside an ordinary world, something so enclosed that it might go unobserved if you didn’t know where to look. It is, in many ways, a novel about finding and then choosing a self; it also shows the pull of unexpected queer desire and the dismantling of boundaries that draw requires. But most of all, in the way that a microscope reveals an unsettling truth about the familiar (that it’s teeming with life you never expected), Paradise Rot is hard to forget. - Niina Pollari
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/jenny-hvals-debut-novel-paradise-rot-review-stunning-slice-of-fermented-life/


The sound of urine hitting a porcelain bowl rings in your ear, bouncing off high ceilings to reverberate throughout the air. As you read Jenny Hval's Paradise Rot, it becomes clear that Hval is writing for the senses, conjuring with almost nauseating accuracy sensations both mundane and extraordinary. The motifs swirl across the pages: the uncannily soft texture of a slowly spreading fungus, the saturated stench and taste of overripe apples, the endlessly echoing plinks of streams of urine, the pale yellow-white of elderly skin and hair—a world that is completely saturated, about to burst. By the time you close the book, you practically expect the pages to be damp and stained from the juice of apples.
Paradise Rot is not necessarily a pleasurable read, blurring the lines of the coming-of-age genre with psychological horror and rendered in such lucid, impressionistically descriptive prose that merely reading it makes you feel fairly woozy. The skeleton of Paradise Rot—the ostensible plot—tells the story of Jo, a young Norwegian woman who moves to a small town in the United Kingdom to study biology, and moves in with Carral, a mysterious older girl, who lives in a renovated old brewery.
And that's where the sensations begin to pile up, both for Jo and for the reader, because their apartment in the brewery barely has any walls, and the walls that have been constructed are thin, shoddy affairs that don't reach the ceiling. Every sound carries, whether it's the rustle of hair swinging in a ponytail or, as we experience along with Jo multiple times, Carral using the toilet; every smell carries, like the nearly-rotten apples Carral brings home. There's simply no privacy; Jo and Carral therefore grow closer in ways both intentional and unintentional, until it's no longer clear to the reader whether Carral is another character or merely a manifestation of how Jo sees herself in her new life in a foreign country.
If Paradise Rot were to catch on and become popular (or if it took the form of a television miniseries), the inevitable water-cooler discussions would certainly center on whether Carral actually "exists". There are clever little hints dropped by Hval throughout the short novel (it's barely 150 pages) that indicate a growing convergence between the eccentric Carral and the rather passive Jo. It's seen as Jo becomes accustomed to taking tea with milk in the British way (rather than the Norwegian way) soon after moving in with Carral. One of Jo's classmates notices that she changes around Carral, speaking with a similar accent and acting oddly around her in public. Towards the end of the novel, it's seen when Carral discusses Jo's childhood memories as if they were Carral's own.
Indeed, Just as Jo's biology lecture about mycology seems to spill over into her life in the brewery as mushrooms appear in the bathtub, parts of Jo's own life become intertwined with Carral's. (There's also what could be a red herring alluded to later in the story, where one of Jo's classmates mentions that the brewery is supposedly haunted by a dead girl. But I prefer to think of Carral as less of a specter haunting their apartment, more a facet of Jo's personality.)
If we read the relationship between Jo and Carral as Carral being alter egos, of sorts, then Jo's later actions begin to make sense; it's as if Carral is giving her permission to explore her sexuality. Jo only picks up the trashy romantic novel Moon Lips after Carral has left it lying around the apartment. Clearly, Carral enjoyed its purple prose. Jo only hooks up with their neighbor Pym after Carral suggests they find someone for Jo to lose her virginity to.
As Jo bleeds into Carral, Carral bleeds back into Jo: Carral, in turn, has sex with Pym after Jo does, and Carral hijacks Pym's preposterous prose novel to add a short piece about two women feasting on a man, destroying him, then combining into one being. At this point the lack of privacy in the apartment begins to make sense, in a way: after all, there's no privacy from yourself, as much as you might try to hide parts of yourself from the other parts.
Of course, there's the opposite way to interpret this strange relationship: Carral and Jo are both real, and their merging is merely symbolic as they become closer and closer, a sort of quasi-literal rendering of how people's identities change when they form intimate bonds with one another. The heightened reality of Paradise Rot, then, could be read as highlighting Jo's unfamiliarity with being in a relationship, and her own fears of losing herself to this mysterious other girl.
As Jo grows more used to life in the former brewery, she and Carral become more intimate, going from what seems to begin with Carral crawling into Jo's bed to Carral's eventual… disintegration, as if she has been absorbed into Jo when Jo packs up and leaves the brewery for good. The disintegration of any narrative propulsion in Paradise Rot, as the story goes on, seems to mirror how unreal Carral feels to the reader. Where Paradise Rot starts off with the structure of Jo going to her university classes, it slowly begins to become less linear, as half-remembered dreams and surreal lines of thought blur into one another. Like Jo and Carral in bed together, the two becoming one in multiple ways. - Deborah Krieger
https://www.popmatters.com/paradise-rot-jenny-hval-2615210862.html

On her 2013 album Innocence is Kinky Norwegian artist Jenny Hval asks, “Is there anything on me that doesn’t speak?” The eponymous track, written while Hval toured the world with her 2011 release Viscera, features drum machines and soft guitar, forming a scant, panicky terrain where Hval details the lines and limits of her body in unfamiliar lands—Australia, Brisbane, even home base Oslo. The musician gained broad notoriety from arbiters of taste like Pitchfork’s Jenn Pelly, who contextualized Hval’s 2016 release Blood Bitch within a canon of leading female intellectuals including Judy Chicago, Julia Kristeva, and Chris Kraus. Indeed, Hval’s heady craftsmanship pulls from a vast array of capital-T theory—her master’s thesis was on Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, an album inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses—but it ultimately centers a deeply visceral feminine experience. Under Hval’s steady guidance, the body becomes “a thousand little mouths” and “a thousand baby birds,” both lines from the 2013 track. The words could have just as easily emerged from Jo, the main character in Hval’s English language debut novel Paradise Rot, out this month from Verso.

In Paradise Rot, the musician-novelist proves once again the breadth and depth of her intellectual and artistic range, articulating a young girl’s queer emergence into adult desire. Jo’s story is firmly situated in a reality just south of our own—fruit rots and expands, walls talk, and bodies taste as sound overlaps with smell and touch. We are led deep within the consciousness of Jo: a somewhat uncomfortable, awkward occupation that beckons the reader into a sensory exploration of the character’s emerging sexuality. Sensations permeate Hval’s writing as they do her music, where slippages from genre to genre and voice to voice create a polyphonic world for listener (and reader) to occupy for a minute, an hour, a day—if you have it in you. Hval’s writing, like her music, does not make for seamless reading. On her 2013 album’s title track, Hval says, “I watched people fucking on my computer… My skin starts breaking like LCD.” Hval (and Jo) lift the reader into a fantastical reality that is as contemporary—as millennial—as it is piercingly bizarre. The novel offers a unique window into girlhood from an experimental voice, marking new territory for both musician and reader.

Hval deftly avoids overwrought political arenas by focusing on Jo’s persistent, almost confessional narration. Sexuality is never explicitly discussed, and when it is referenced, the elliptical question roots itself deep within Jo’s body. One insistent fact swims through the sensorial topography of her prose: This is not a coming-out story; it is a coming-of-age story. The arc of Jo’s maturation, though, does not find itself lingering in Holden Caulfield’s duck pond. Jo March’s proposal rejection at the climax of Little Women may be more analogous—but Hval’s Jo resides in a different domain, deep within the gutters of girlhood. Jo does not “come of age” in one fell bat mitzvah swoop; instead, she journeys to and from disgust and pleasure, eventually finding, more or less, the love, passion, and understanding that hides in other people. In this way, Jo’s story does not follow a typical romantic queer plotline, which would move linearly from coming out, to marriage, and then maybe adoption. Instead, Jo’s vault into adulthood is composed of experiences, sexual and not, that center on the learning of an individual body to like what it likes—nothing more and nothing less.

Jo’s growth rests in her relationship to sex that, unsurprisingly for Hval, is also the narrator’s relationship to her own senses. In an interview with The Arts Desk in 2009, Hval said, “I want to see the body differently—as a space, a pioneer territory, something surprising and eye-opening.” For no one is this statement truer than for the teenage girl. With keen focus, Hval transmutes the facts and figures of late adolescence into a beautifully alien vista. The effect is both intimate and estranging. In an early episode, Jo gets cat-called on the street by a man who makes a lewd gesture, mistaking her for a prostitute. Jo’s description of the scene levitates away from the streets of Aybourne. As she says, “[Nothing] helps: Inside me the boy continues to put his index finger through his hand… as if he is poking it inside my body.” Trauma is not earth-shattering; in fact, it is worse—trauma is quotidian. The banality of Jo’s experience is dwarfed by her emotions about the event, manifesting in her imagination long after the “cat-call.” It is isolating—mostly. In one instance, a man exposing himself on a bus to every passenger allows Jo to feel a rare appreciation of acceptance and fellowship, a communal repulsion from sex that, for a moment, makes her less alone. Moments like these demonstrate Hval’s unique ability to gaze upon late adolescence with an unusual complexity, evoking the discomfort of growing up while allowing an intricate sense of belonging to begin to form.

Like Hval’s music, the novel defies genre, negotiating a space in between fantasy and reality, driven principally by the highly specific internal life of a young female narrator. As Jo settles into her life, her home in Aybourne quickly develops supernatural qualities. Jo’s roommate-crush, Carral, lets apples rot and insects invade the apartment, inciting unique permutations of objects and emotions. As Jo bites into a fried egg, she says, “The yolk burst under my tongue, and I imagined it was her skin I was tasting.” This rich description of highly specific sensorial overlap persists throughout the novel. Soon, the environment gives way to Jo’s blooming awareness of her own body, as she starts to grow more attuned to her own desire. The outside world originally invaded Jo’s thoughts, prodding her perceptions and dominating her daily life. However, in an apartment with a female love interest, emergent desire seems to create different, unfamiliar sensations. After discovering a newfound intimacy with Carral, Jo describes, “There’s a rush through me, her stalks and fingers and veins spread through my entire body like a new soft skeleton.” Her voice gives way to description of sweet fruit and long trees, things she can touch and smell. This may be the greatest gift from Hval in Paradise Rot: the idea that sex and love restructure the way our senses work. In a short 140-odd pages, Hval manages to suggest that queer, honest, desire births strange and wonderful relationships not only to other people, but also to all the tastes and textures of our landscape.  

Over sparse drumming, Hval’s voice echoes through her 2016 track, “Period Piece”: “I must find some kind of art form that calls my tongue from underground.” In her novel, Hval articulates on paper the aural and bodily entanglement she sets forth in her music. What Hval loses in books—the silent medium—she makes up for in a wildly imaginative portrait of a young woman colliding with the world for the first time. Intimacy and alienation create the very substance of Jo’s experience, where, under her eye, ordinary objects like apples (or urine) take on beautiful, dreamlike, and even horrific attributes. Sexuality is refreshingly subservient to Jo’s individual preferences and relationships, untethered from now-tired articulations of social pressure to be cis-het-whatever.

Is writing fiction Hval’s way of calling her tongue from the underground? Maybe, but somehow it seems that Hval’s answer is more complicated than any single medium. In her world—and, for a novel or two, ours as well—bodies sing and shudder before a universe of desire, of the possibilities of desire. Hval’s search for the art form is one we should be more than happy to accompany, waiting patiently while she leads us through the magnificent caverns between sight, smell, and sound.

- Claudia Ross
https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/home/paradiserot


Every page of Paradise Rot, the debut novel by Norwegian musician Jenny Hval, contains something in it that burrows deep inside you. Much like Hval’s musical output, the book is almost uncomfortably intimate, the kind of penetrating encounter that will make you uncontrollably shudder as your body is plunged into the sensory world that Hval has created. It’s an uncanny and yet deeply moving reading experience, one that Hval uses to explore the complexities of queer desire and human enmeshment in our physical surroundings.
The book, first published in Norwegian as Perlebryggeriet (Pearl Brewery) in 2009, follows the story of Jo, a young Norwegian woman, who has moved to the small fictional town of Aybourne to pursue a degree in biology. Jo quickly discovers a world in which all boundaries have collapsed, as she moves into a former factory building with few walls, every sound pulsating through her conscious awareness.
Her roommate Carral similarly erases all clear barriers between them, creating an unfamiliar form of intimacy that challenges Jo’s ability to make sense of the distinctions between her and the space around her. As mushrooms sprout from mold in their bathroom, bringing the outside world into their home, Jo and Carral find themselves uncertainly linked, with Hval writing: “Mostly I would stay still and feel the rhythm of her soft breath on my neck. Sometimes I was sure I could feel little sprouts appear under the skin where she’d breathed.”
Chatting with NYLON, Hval describes what it was like to see her work in translation, how her
music and writing relate to one another, and the challenges of creating political work that isn’t readily captured by platforms like Facebook. - Tanner Howard
 read the interview