Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot, originally published in Norwegian in 2009 and translated into English by Marjam Idriss in 2018, is a stunning work of fiction teeming with vivid, visceral imagery that manages to burrow into your skin. Clocking in at only 148 pages, Paradise Rot is an easily devoured read. The plot is relatively simple—international student Johanna, or Jo, ventures to the fictional city of Aybourne for university and finds herself sharing an abandoned brewery as an apartment with a magnetic, slightly older woman named Carral. As the two grow closer and the homoerotic tension grows, the apartment around them begins to transform into a wet, fermented version of Eden. Male next door neighbor Pym, an aspiring, sleazy author, complicates things as Jo wrestles with desire, bodily fluids, and her own identity.
The real magic of Paradise Rot happens not through extravagant plot, but through the rich tapestry of similes and metaphors that Hval weaves in every line. Hval has a background as a music artist, and the flashes of images she conjures in her writing are lyrical in their rhythm and fantasy. Like the converted brewery itself, the text becomes a hollow space for a world of life and rot to grow. Hval writes passages so gorgeous in language that they beg to be read aloud, akin to poetry. If you do choose to read the lines out loud, truly holding the words in your mouth, you become another example of the embodiment that this text is concerned with.
Paradise Rot has a preoccupation with both embodiment and disembodiment. Jo often feels separate from her own self, whether it is through the unnatural use of a foreign language, her unheard footsteps, or the way others perceive (or don’t perceive) her. And yet she is incredibly aware of her body, of other people’s bodies; aware of the sweat that coats her palms, of the spit that collects on others’ lips when they speak. The lines between embodiment and disembodiment are constantly blurred in the way everything in the novel is always melting, dissolving, wet, ghostly—tangible but not quite solid, mutable and temporary. Characters consume each other, become each other, mold to each other’s bodies until they are so entangled that Jo is forced to take action to retain ownership of herself. Jo frequently muses on facelessness, on being rubbed out of existence, and on the importance of names. “There, and not there” is the opening line of the book, and the liminality it represents is at the core of Paradise Rot.
The lines between embodiment and disembodiment are constantly blurred in the way everything in the novel is always melting, dissolving, wet, ghostly—tangible but not quite solid, mutable and temporary.
Queer desire is another seed found at the core of Paradise Rot. It is not represented as something inherently beautiful or sacred— it is animalistic and hungry, like any other type of desire. Muffins that are reminiscent of labias are eaten, there is both a real and imagined mixing of bodily fluids, and detailed but restrained touches conjure a breathless, festering attraction. Mentions of apples, Eve, and Eden abound, and Paradise Rot’s title itself evokes John Milton’s Paradise Lost. What is striking is not just the mixing of queer and Biblical imagery, but the way the text handles the concept of womanhood and The Fall. While Milton’s Eve is characterized, in large part, by her beauty, Jo and Carral are decidedly described in unflattering terms. Jo talks of her pubic hair as looking like a “half-finished sketch” (3), and is often described by others as pale and ghostly. Carral is constantly described as “yellow,” at one point evoking a “sexless, matted nakedness” (49). Hval deconstructs the Miltonic figure of womanhood into one that highlights the animal body over the beautiful one. Additionally, Paradise Rot is not the traditional story of The Fall. Jo and Carral are already fallen, already mutable, already wandering at the beginning of the story, a fact that is unravelled with time. Paradise Lost ends with lines about Adam and Eve “hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow/ Through Eden took thir solitarie way” (Book 12), and Paradise Rot seems to ask what that wandering would really mean. Carral and Jo exist perpetually without real roots; Jo is a foreigner, and is constantly walking and getting lost; Carral is between jobs and is frightened of being alone. Their wandering is essential to the story, connecting them to each other, and to the final figure of the fallen Eve that Milton gives us.
Queer desire, however, is often mitigated and expressed through the surrogate male figure (Pym). While this is effective in exploring compulsory heterosexuality and the predatory nature of certain heterosexual encounters, it does begin to feel trite when Pym is still being used as a device in the very climax of the story. It renders a powerful moment less satisfying than it could have been. I suppose that is the point, though— anything put on a pedestal, even desire, will never live up to expectations; and desire is often filtered through what we know.
Additionally, Paradise Rot is not the traditional story of The Fall. Jo and Carral are already fallen, already mutable, already wandering at the beginning of the story, a fact that is unravelled with time.
There are also times when Paradise Rot, in its commitment to near-constant viscerality, may feel self-indulgent. This is not a book everyone will necessarily enjoy, either by virtue of being a slow-burn or incredibly, squeamishly, corporeal. Everything is always rotting, or wet, or a urine yellow, and there is little reprieve from the sensual onslaught. The sexual, the desirable, and the disgusting have no true distinguishing markers—they are one and the same within the text, as are all the senses. At times chapters are downright erotic, almost pulpy, and then suddenly becomes so bloated with this sexual want that it transcends into the metaphysical. A line in the text reads, “An apple is never just an apple”(38), and that is the approach Hval takes to crafting her story. Hval’s constant imagery and extended metaphors offer ample ground for the imagination, and I found it mostly effective. However, it sometimes comes off as heavy-handed. (“Was there really a need for another scene involving pee?” I found myself asking, before annotating said pee scene for its literary merit.) If everything is always dissolving, if every apple is not just an apple, it can be hard to find your footing within the actual grounds of the story.
However, I would argue that that is exactly what Paradise Rot does best, making you feel consumed by the text’s fungi-filled world just as Jo is. Pym says he is attempting to write “a novel, but in verse” (79), and at times that feels to be exactly what Paradise Rot is, a story written in the compressed, lively images of poetry. But really, Paradise Rot often feels like the opposite, like a poem stretched into prose so that you can see every pulsing, poetic vein. This serves to create an extremely evocative atmosphere. Paradise Rot is more about the feeling of coming of age and of newfound eroticism than anything else. That feeling builds and builds throughout the story, and it caused me to turn each page faster and faster as the climax came to a head. When the story finally erupts, it leaves little room for after-care, and in a gorgeous but uneasy ending, asks readers to consider what it really means to forge an identity.
Paradise Rot is more about the feeling of coming of age and of newfound eroticism than anything else.
Overall, Paradise Rot is an invigorating read for anyone interested in queer or subversive literature, poetic sensibilities in prose, and extremely corporeal imagery. As a shorter story, it is not overly demanding and is worth giving a shot if you are at all intrigued by its subject matter or style. This is a book that begs to be relished and consumed in the same dizzying way the characters relish each other—“Together we filled each other to the brim and lay there slumped in an all-consuming doze, like gorged snakes digesting their prey” (75.)
JENNY HVAL, Norwegian musician and writer, has honed an intellectual and uncompromising view of politics and sexuality in her prose as well as in records that include Blood Bitch; Apocalypse, Girl; and Innocence Is Kinky. Paradise Rot is the first of her books to appear in English.
Paradise Rot can be purchased here.
Berkeley Fiction Review 
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