3.5/5

Unfailingly find the fault line, the tiny place where meaning calls for some daring moves. Such was the price of beauty, like a longed-for light.

There was a time in my life when I would have aped loving this, but that time has passed, and these days I value the holistic of instinct coupled to contemplation over the too often abused benefit of the doubt. Still, there are some glorious passages contained within this, and all those Joycean/PoMoean/etc sycophants would find some form of home here if they got off their cishet tower long enough to look around and breathe. I also must mention an aesthetic appeal in the form of the desert, as well as the shier relief of a queer landscape, so the fact that I didn't love this may have something to do with a burgeoning resistance to white narratives sprawled on settler states, such resulting in a persistent whispering of Whom did this land come from? and What lies beneath the vapid dreams of Americana in this far flung moon landing known as Arizona, Al Shon, Aleh-zon, Ali-Shonak, scholars debating over the exact origins (perhaps Pima, perhaps indigenous unknown), but it certain came from no white boy. A personal pet peeve that I doubt factors into the evaluations of most others, so if you're looking into a less postcolonial delving into the experimental formula petite mort of a novel, you're likely to find a bevy of it elsewhere.

Reality is what we recapture by an incalculable return of imaged things, like a familiar sense very distinctly set out in our lives. But to all of this there must be, we think, another sense, another version since we dream of it as we do of a musical accompaniment, a centered voice capable of securing for us a passage, a little opening. A voice which could, at equal distance from origins and death, activate the hypotheses, adapt the adornment, adjust the folds, the ornament, the anecdote ensuing from it like a work, regulate the alternating movement of fiction and truth.

Despite my overall reception averaging out to the lackluster, this was a blessed finding amongst other fortuitous finds during my usual library sale sojourns. I can't imagine who was privileged enough to acquire a pristine copy of translated experimental queer women's lit and then of all things donate it, but I have that unknown to thank for being able to acquire this reasonable quickly (five years is a reasonable divide in my experience between initial interest and actual copy). In any case, the luck of the find doesn't bedazzle my reader's gaze as much as it used to, so now I have to sit and think about why this novel within a novel sandwiched between two translations of the same text of a midnight sun didn't call my name as much as others very similar to it have. True, there are some passages to die for here and there, but it was more miss than hit most of the time, even with the benefit of being pretty much forced to reread the initial text and thus extract myself a tad out of the patina of vagueness still hanging onto my irises. I get what's going on and I appreciate the queer, but honestly, most of the digressive revelations were a tad too tame (writing! books! existence stripped of all sociopolitical contextualization!) for me to find it necessary. Very pretty, then, even stirring in places, but too flighty in certain respects and too blinkered in others to fit my tastes. It certainly hasn't killed my appetite for queer translated lit by women: that whole string of words is just too unbearably sexy to not seek out and indulge in further.

But I could exist without comparison.

I'm rather disappointed in my reception of this, but it's nice to have grown out of the peer pressured cultivation of praise I usually resorted to in the case of texts such as this. As it commonly is these days, I'm hoping that whoever acquires this appreciates the luck of the find as much as I did, if not more. Experimental lit has grown and changed over the years, and works such as [b:A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing|18218630|A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing|Eimear McBride|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1374386236l/18218630._SX50_.jpg|25647879] reassures me that it's not dead yet. This work wasn't for me, but I hope to find others that fall into this ultra specific crossing of categories, as I am specific human being in my existence and my pleasures, aesthetic or otherwise, and it's about time that I saw more of the stuff with which I am made in the modern market. Ideally, at any rate, it won't take another five years to find the next contender.

The time had come for taking on the book body to body. A time that would give way to astonishment regarding things only very seldom seen, sited in the background of our thoughts. From one tongue to the other there would be meaning, fair distribution, contour and self-encounter, that moving substance which, it is said, enters into the composition of languages and makes them tasteful or hateful. Maude Laures knew that now was the time to slip anonymous and whole between the pages.
Full desert, full horizon.

Mauve Desert is divided into three parts—a short story (which, for the purposes of the book, poses as a novel), the translation of that story into, presumably, another language (in reality, English to English, as the original was presumably French to French), and a longer middle section between the two in which the themes and motifs are individually examined in the light of the translator's obsession with the novel. The entire thing reads like a puzzle box carved from a dazzling jewel, shown first intact, then taken apart and shown piece by piece, then put back together in a slightly different way and shown intact again.

This is so close to a five-star book. The only thing that moves me to withhold a star is the slight tedium of the middle section. This tedium very well might be a necessary aspect of the whole. It's impossible to say exactly how it altered my reading of the third section, the "translation" of the first. The two versions of the translated text have some notable differences, not only in terms of prose but in subtle shades of meaning. The whole comprises a complex knot of the influence, translation, impression, and memory.

You know something-- There are very good reviews of this book on this site and elsewhere that will tell you more about it than I ever could. So I leave you with what Aritha van Herk said, taken from the copy on the back of the book:

"Here is the night landscape of writing and its translation: their un/read erotics. Brossard words desire as a wasteland/paradise motel of language and courage, textualization and difference. This traduction/translation/transportation refuses the familiar erosions of the mind/body question and arouses an aesthetic of expression/perception."