Yes, this book is very strange and very gross but I think I kinda loved every minute of it. ( )

Paradise Rot follows Jo, a Norwegian foreign exchange student in Great Britain, as she finds a place to live and makes friends at her new school. The apartment she ends up living in has very thin walls, and her new roommate quickly becomes very close to her.

It is definitely a book that is not for everyone. Jenny Hval uses the culture shock of being a foreign exchange student and combines it with living in a strange apartment, where senses are heightened and foods rot, to create a feeling of disillusionment. This disillusionment is used to show the disconnect that can come during a queer or sexual awakening. Throughout the novella, she feels more connected with her surroundings and herself, hence the reader becoming more comfortable reading the story. The way description is used throughout curates this feeling perfectly and brings the reader on the same self-discovery journey as Jo.

Because of the seemingly adverse way she uses descriptions, I was able to connect with the story in a way I didn't think I would. I ended up quite enjoying it, and think Hval achieved perfectly what she set out to accomplish. ( )

Can confirm: a decent amount of piss. ( )

A creepy and psychedelic novel that is slender and powerful. It's as if the process of decomposition was distilled into book form. The rhythm of the text was hypnotic, enough so that I was drawn deeper and deeper into the world, even as it became increasingly disturbing. After I reached the half-way point, I was pretty much powerless to stop reading until the book was over. This is how a surreal novel should be written, without a wasted phrase. ( )

Norwegian college girl Jo arrives in Australia to spend a year studying. Looking for a place to live, she comes across Carral’s ad for shared space in a “converted” brewery. I have quotes around ‘converted’ because it’s not really made fit for human dwelling. There are few walls put in. The bathroom is on the ground floor, and it has no ceiling- awkward when you consider that the place is two or three stories tall. Everything is just a jumble of coming apart steel. It smells of its former life, as well as of urine. Urine is a theme in this story; it comes up with discomforting frequency. But Jo settles in. Carral brings home a huge number of apples, which they can’t eat fast enough, and so start to rot all over the brewery. Slowly, a relationship develops between Jo and Carral. Mushrooms appear on the bathroom wall. The apples mark the fall of this smelly Garden of Eden.

This story has the feel of a horror novel without ever quite going there. I kept expecting the mushrooms to start growing on Jo or something. I found it extremely creepy, especially how Carral descends into a sort of human rot. I wasn’t sure if some of the descriptions were actually happening, or hallucinations brought on by how gross the brewery was. It’s totally surreal, rather like Lovecraft brought into the modern age. Three stars. ( )