Blue Hunger
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
From one of Italy's most electrifying voices, a fearless story of queer love and obsession set against the glassy surfaces of Shanghai.
"Blue Hunger is irresistible, evocative, dripping with desire, and brilliantly written-Viola Di Grado is a genius."-Jami Attenberg
After her twin's death, a solitary young woman leaves Rome for Shanghai, the city where her brother Ruben had long dreamed of opening a restaurant. Teaching Italian to Chinese students, she meets a mysterious girl named Xu, who is also running from a turbulent past: a violent father, an absent mother, and an extended family who wishes she'd been a boy. Xu's house is dingy and full of rotting food, like a museum of decomposing organic matter. In the gloom of abandoned textile factories and dilapidated slaughterhouses, the two discover an extreme dimension where biting, swallowing, and taking each other in are part of the erotic ritual.
Rooted in an experience of cultural limbo, Blue Hunger takes the reader on a visually stunning, taboo-demolishing journey into the depths of the psyche, from mourning to falling in lust-all in a city of potent dreams, stories, and stimulations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Di Grado (Hollow Heart) delivers a sensuous and biting account of a young woman from Rome who, in the throes of grief, leaves home to teach Italian in Shanghai, where she falls in lust with a student at the language school. The unnamed narrator's recently deceased twin brother had long dreamed to open an Italian restaurant in China; there, she thinks more of him than of herself. She dwells in a part of the city called the French Concession, land that had been apportioned in 1849 as a port of call for Westerners. It's an apt setting for the liminal, vaguely transactional relationship between the habitually acquiescent narrator and Xu, a beautiful former model and a bit of a sadist ("Her touch," Di Grado writes, "was stiff and imperious, like the pat you reward a dog with for staying put"). The book offers many of the pleasures of a Mary Gaitskill sex romp, though the author's wearying reliance on vulgarity for the sake of edginess and pervading sense of dire emptiness don't help distinguish it from current erotic obsession novels. Still, it's worth indulging in this visceral story about a woman's difficulty with finding satisfaction, sexual and otherwise.
