No discussion of jobs, education or real estate. Wolff includes few signifiers of class or taste.

We learn almost nothing about their childhoods. In a sly manner, they are strangers to the reader as well. By scorning this routine digital probing, they attenuate their safety and intensify their exhilaration in roughly equal measure. It won’t ruin the plot to say that Bennedith and Mercuro become entwined as deeply as two people can: sexually, spiritually, criminally, and all without performing the initial cyberstalking that is now a condition of human interaction. In “Carnality,” Nietzsche is rampant.īut this novel is mostly concerned with the social category of the stranger. In her debut novel, a dog at a brothel is named Bret Easton Ellis. A character in “The Polyglot Lovers” finds a stash of Michel Houellebecq novels hidden at the back of a man’s bookcase. Her fiction is filled with references to other texts. Wolff has long been interested in male aggression and female sexuality, and in the diminishment of power that occurs when a man loses his ability to exert violence or a woman ages out of her capacity to seduce. He begs Bennedith to hide him “for a few days.” When she tries to leave, twice, he grabs her arm and begs. He buttonholes Bennedith and tells her a story about the time he was wronged by an evil nun with a maimed hand. He is sweaty and shaky, with a darting glance. Mercuro displays a parade’s worth of flags, all of them red. Unfair.) When an author succeeds, as Wolff does, it replicates the optimal sensation of intoxication: Suddenly anything can happen! And you want it that way!Īfter landing in Madrid, the woman - who is given the unusual name of Bennedith - heads to a bar and meets a man called Mercuro Cano. When an author tries and fails to pull off this level of formal sorcery, it feels like being pantsed on the playground. The third-person narration turns into a monologue from a secondary character, which morphs into a memoir in the form of letters from a third character. Premise established, we are safely buckled in for the ride, which rumbles along a scenic track for roughly five minutes before a crazed carnival operator assumes the controls and we take off at warp speed through loops, inversions and spins. What is she doing? Traveling on a writer’s grant. Who is the main character? A 45-year-old Swedish writer. “Ah, a nice old-fashioned novel,” the reader thinks, gliding through the opening pages of “Carnality.” The author, Lina Wolff, begins in a conventional close third-person perspective and quickly dispatches with the W questions. CARNALITY By Lina Wolff Translated by Frank Perry 357 pages.

Rash decisions