A fiction whose mission is to stage the journey of a woman fighting her way out of male-directed gazes and discourses cannot even feel like a “novel” and the established definitions that the term evokes. Maybe the novel as a form, as a genre of literary being, is a fantasy too. Perhaps the personage who creates must also come undone. Employing essayistic and filmic techniques, Zambreno implies an author as narrator-character first before Ruth’s entrance into frame. “I try to sketch her face, over and over and all I come up with is a furious pencil cloud. … She forms. Yet she is an indistinct blur. … My wonder child, wandering child. I am trying to push her out into the world.” An attempt to write the green girl eschews linear plot in favor of the anxious thrill of the present tense of writing (I think of Robert Walser’s The Walk); Zambreno places an implied author as the lens through which we perceive Ruth at the center of the narrative. The epigraphs that begin each scene also frame the shot we will witness — this is someone’s projection of an ego, a kind of literary cinema where the roles of audience and reader are collapsed by a hybrid prosaic-filmic lens: a sentence.
Frequent Biblioklept contributor Ryan Chang reviews Kate Zambreno’s novel Green Girl at Berfrois.
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