Hotel register 2014.008
Sex and power are usually a cold brew, no matter how many French herbs you stir in; writing with desire can lead anywhere at all, but writing about desire is a bad-faith invitation to get hot and bothered over a lab report. So what makes this book different—why is Luisa Valenzuela so obviously the real thing? The claustrophobia of state repression rendered as in an exacting horror movie, by what it leaves out, avenues closed. That desire still exists, a familiar beating heart, and has only these channels to pump through is as sickening as it should be. Something of Cortázar’s precise play, and a vocabulary that kept sending me to the dictionary to find out it was perfect.
