In 'Paradise Rot,' Jenny Hval Traces A Surrealistic Sexual Awakening
As per the title's promise, Paradise Rot seeps with goo. There are "spit bubbles," "pearls of fat," "a pee soaked mattress," "warm white globs" and "sticky black crotches" frothing freely around; apple flesh "bubbles in between teeth," sweat forms "cold sweet sap," and velvety "honey funguses" sprout from space.
Such freaky finery fills only a petri dish's worth of secretions from the sticky bildungsroman of Djåoanna, or Jo – a mousy, twenty-year-old Norwegian on semester abroad in the fictional seaside town of Aybourne, Australia – poised on the cusp of a fantastic sexual awakening. Lonely, curt and unmoored, little Jo tumbles into an oozy erotic fantasia in the same way that one falls asleep and enters a dream: slowly, then suddenly. "Sometimes I'm not sure what's going on," she whispers partway through her psychedelic trip through Aybourne. "I don't know how to explain it."
Equally psychedelic (and Norwegian) is the author of Jo's life, Jenny Hval, a multi-disciplinary artist who has always loved investigating viscera in search
