Phototaxis
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Translated from the French, Phototaxis is a fragmentary, darkly-humorous, and apocalyptic novel from a leading young voice from Montreal from Montreal centered around questions of friendship, the commodification of globalized tragedy, ecological crisis, the griefs of migration, and the possibility of political coherence in today’s world.
In a city mysteriously overflowing with meat, a museum is bombed, a classical piano player hooked on snuff films throws himself off a building, a charismatic but misled political organizer has disappeared, and a young immigrant navigates a crumbling continent. In the fallout of their friendship, Olivia Tapiero’s Phototaxis deploys a fugal language at turns surreal, scathingly comic, poetic, and revolutionary to dismantle our world and construct one even closer to its breaking point, or further along in its breaking. Here, voice and event surge up like reflux from the exhausted throats of nature and urban spaces, sounding out an architecture of failure within a suspiciously steady rise of fascism and its persistent counterpoints. A dystopic work of hope that carries its own disintegration, Phototaxis (translated by Kit Schluter) is Tapiero’s first novel to appear English.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Canadian writer Tapiero's narratively opaque but politically acute English-language debut features a dystopian city where the streets and parks are piled with animal flesh. Zev, a proponent of Max Stirner's anarchism, speaks to a group of followers about their withering world during meetings on the roof of a hotel. Then, he disappears, leaving two of his disciples directionless: Théo, a dejected pianist who can't escape his fear of mediocrity, and Narr, the observant "strategist" who, as a woman and an immigrant, deals with social alienation. After Théo jumps to his death in despair, Narr reflects on one of Zev's lessons about paying respect to the animals he hunts ("a form of recognition for life turned into meat"). Tapiero builds a tableau of catastrophe with references to historical deaths such as the "falling man" of the 9/11 attacks; Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, who was fatally tased at Customs in Vancouver; and Omayra Sánchez, who died after a volcano eruption in Colombia, and fuses it all with a provocative interpretation of the myth of Icarus that portrays his descent as being of his own volition and a way to leave a crumbled world behind. It's a confrontational but eminently quotable text ("Desire is one form of suicide," Théo thinks of his audience). This cyclone of art, destruction, and nonconformity impresses.
