The link to the review is here, and yes, my friends, the review is as neoliberal as those books seem to be. You can catch a glimpse of how a brain that has been marinated in neoliberalism works. Although I do understand that “works” is too generous a word to apply to the linked piece of writing.
The author of the review doesn’t really review anything. She retells the plot in a scatty manner of somebody who interrupted her reading after every two pages to check the much more enticing goings on in her social media accounts. What the reviewer thinks of the books or what connection she sees between them other than that their heroines go on dates is never explained.
Only at the end of the article does she venture into something akin to reviewing. Here is the entirety of that part of the piece:
“YOLO” is the last phrase to appear on the last page of this book — and lo, you doth only live the very once. You might as well write like it. This book swings big. The ball arcs toward Gehenna, and Kemp’s hyper narrator Naruto-runs off the page, trying kawaiily to get under it. Here, at last, is someone doing something new.
Do you understand what this paragraph means? Neither do I. I have read the review and have no idea what the reviewer wants to say or why she even bothered. Neoliberalism always devolves into utter meaninglessness. Meaningless books, relationships, lives. It’s all as bleak and tawdry as these novels and the person writing about them.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Sophie Kemp’s Dada picaresque “Paradise Logic” dissolves form at the molecular level and builds an extraordinary story out of the residual goop.”
Should we be doing so much dissolving and deconstructing? Experimental fiction has pushed so far, what’s left to dissolve at this point? And color me skeptical that an extraordinary story was built from the goop; I suspect the author just made a bunch of goop.
I’m talking about literature here, but this obviously applies more broadly.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“What the reviewer thinks of the books …. is never explained”
Maybe I’m too far gone… but I think it was pretty clear. Not profound or meaningful but… pretty clear.
She dislikes the first book for being too conventional. She thinks it had promise but the plot is too…. solid. An unhappy woman is looking for love in a stupid way (quirky branding!) and then is pulled into another cultural world (good plus!) but it’s family connection so… sad face. But then she has a lesbian experience so we’re back to good plus! And she’s engaged in intercultural translation (which makes no sense*) so okay… but apparently she ends up paired up at the end of the book which is entirely too plot bound and too solid.
She likes the second book better because it is not solid at all (specifically comparing it to goop). The main character is clearly disassociated and (reading between the lines) undergoes some kind sexual assault and drugs herself up and hallucinates a bunch of shit about it. No form! No growth! No insight! Perpetual subjective reframing of unpleasant reality until it no longer exists and reification of delusion until it’s ‘real’… the neoliberal dreamtime.
*What kind of ‘translation’ of a the Koran makes any sense for a Persian-American? The Koran was not written in Persian and only the original has any spiritual value for muslims, the more traditional of which deny the very idea of translation and refer instead to ‘intepretations’ of the original…
LikeLiked by 1 person
I now desperately want to steal the phrase “perpetual subjective reframing of unpleasant reality and deification of delusion” for my own book because this is precisely what it is.
LikeLike
“deification”
Feel free to use (or modify) it. Technically I mean ‘reification’ and was referring to the weird infantile thing that neoliberal thinking folks do: trying to will things into reality by repetition or in the case of the book, the heroine (likely) coming to view her hallucinations as more real than the trauma she endured.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I also love the word reification which in the USSR we learned almost before getting potty trained. But the spell check is hostile to it. And yes, absolutely, a neoliberal subject sees herself as God the Word. It’s kind of scary in many ways.
LikeLike