VALERIE

The English translation of a Swedish novel that has been longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

Valerie Solanas is most famous for trying to assassinate Andy Warhol in 1968. She is just slightly less famous for writing the SCUM Manifesto, a cri de coeur of outsider feminism. Solanas’ life was not an especially happy one. She said she was sexually assaulted by her father and physically abused by her grandfather. When she first arrived in New York, she supported herself through panhandling and prostitution. While awaiting trial for attempted murder, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Among the vignettes of which this novel is composed are scenes in which the narrator visits Solanas in the Tenderloin hotel where she dies at the age of 52. Biographical fiction is not the same as biography—and Stridsberg is completely within her rights to turn Solanas into a figure of myth inhabiting a world of the author’s own invention—but some of the choices Stridsberg makes are curious. For example, in real life, Solanas was born in Ventnor City, New Jersey. In this novel, Valerie grows up in Ventor, Georgia, a city surrounded by desert. It’s as if Stridsberg wants to squeeze all of America into one imaginary place, and this makes Solanas seem generic in a way that she most definitely is not. It's true that this Valerie Solanas is often poetic and eloquent whereas the historical figure was not—a play she had written called Up Your Ass was at the center of her conflict with Warhol—but making beauty out of the hardship of Solanas' life seems inimical to her own work. Solanas was and is regarded as a serious radical theorist by a number of important feminists. She doesn’t need rehabilitation as a figure of tragedy, nor does she need anyone to give her a voice.

For serious fans of European experimental fiction and Valerie Solanas completists.