On Tuesday 28 April, Melissa Giardina, Seppe Decubber and Jan Dertaelen will join presenter Ruth Joos. Together, they will discuss three books, carefully selected by our editorial team.
Dominique De Groen – 'Corpus Britney'
For her debut as a novelist, Dominique De Groen pulls out all the stops, because 'Corpus Britney' – she deserves a literary award for that title alone – is a book that pays no heed to genres and how they are usually defined. The main character is called Bella Goth and works as a B-horror film actress. She looks exactly like Britney Spears and disappears after a day’s filming.
For Malayney Melkzuur, a so-called paranormal detective, this marks the beginning of a hallucinatory quest through time and space: through countless layers of meaning comprising pop culture, cyberspace horror and digital ruins. Between the lines lies a idiosyncratic history of raw capitalism, including the recent regime of the algorithm.
Catherine Lacey - ‘Biography of X’
In 'Biography of X', a novel by the American writer Catherine Lacey that has been acclaimed by the international press, there is a sense of a kind of persecution complex – a posthumous one, that is. When X, a pioneering artist, collapses and dies in her office, her widow throws herself into writing a biography: the ultimate portrait of the woman she idolised, but about whom she knows almost nothing.
According to cult author Chris Kraus, known for ‘I Love Dick’, with this novel Lacey has written a “fascinating vortex in which the political and cultural history of twentieth-century America converge”. Deception serves as a recurring theme in a sophisticated literary labyrinth.
“Lacey masterfully weaves historical anecdotes into her fictional universe, drawing uncomfortable parallels between X’s fragile world and our own.” – The New Yorker
Georges Perec - 'Things'
In his first novel, entitled 'Things' and published in 1965, the French-Jewish writer Georges Perec sketches the daily life of a young couple, Sylvie and Jérôme. We find ourselves in the trendy Paris of the early 1960s, and Perec presents his characters as if studying them as specimens under a microscope: detached, inquisitive, at times cynical. But what is being critically examined is nothing less than a – political and social – system that remains omnipresent to this day.
Perec described his debut as ‘the very first book to describe the phenomenon of the nascent consumer society’. With characters who cannot buy what they want and do not wish to work any harder than they do, until they lose their way in a self-created labyrinth. Six decades later, this incisive analysis – winner of the Prix Renaudot – still resonates, and that says everything about the times we live in today.
As a musical interlude and as Vooruit readers, we welcome three young artists: Hanna Mensink, Robbe Embrechts and Winter De Cock. They call themselves the Joooties, and this has everything to do with the life and work of Jotie T’Hooft, the poet who – after a life as brief as it was intense – exchanged the temporal for the eternal at the age of 21. T’Hooft would have turned seventy on Saturday 9 May. This is the occasion for a podcast and a tribute.
