THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 67
the narrator’s vexed friendship with an
aging movie star. During his visit to
her campy, creepy château—where eels
swim in the translucent guest-suite
bathtub—the actress shows him an en-
velope of nudes that she’s kept in a safe
for decades. He reacts with indiffer-
ence; she pinches him, hard.
A cocktail of eighties glitz and gothic
claustrophobia, the story reads like a
sendup of Henry James’s “The Aspern
Papers,” except that the narrator isn’t
conniving to extract the lady’s secrets
but attempting, half-heartedly, to es-
cape. The anxious, melancholy mood
is punctuated with flashes of deadpan
caricature: “The Mercedes braking in
the château’s courtyard set the chick-
ens fluttering in fright.” The playful
wit leaves an aftertaste of cruelty, es-
pecially after one learns that Guibert
modelled the actress after his friend
Gina Lollobrigida.
G
uibert’s often tasteless mean streak
makes “Written in Invisible Ink”
a decidedly mixed achievement. Old
women, freaks, fat girls, and “an Asi-
atic dwarf ” crop up in his fiction like
extras in a circus; though he admired
Diane Arbus, he is much crasser in his
fascination with the supposedly mon-
strous. There’s also his overwrought ex-
hibitionism, especially in the early work.
Lines of “Propaganda Death” read like
smutty Symbolist poetry, inadvertently
comic in their desire to provoke. “Se-
cret laboratory with frozen, white walls
that I tainted,” one narrator rhapso-
dizes on the toilet.
What’s obscene isn’t so much the
obscenity as its arbitrariness. Jean Genet
wrote as a missionary-messenger of a
criminal underground; Georges Bataille
insightfully linked sexual taboos and
religious tradition. But Guibert wrote
as a young man out to trigger the mid-
dle-class world he came from, espous-
ing extreme self-exposure for its own
sake. Wading through the scenes of
rape, murder, pedophilia, necrophilia,
and coprophilia in “Written in Invisi-
ble Ink,” I was reminded less of these
writers, whose lineage Guibert claimed,
than I was of Madonna’s “Like a Vir-
gin”—glamorous blasphemy from a
canny provocateur.
It’s difficult to say what kind of writer
Guibert would have become had he
BRIEFLY NOTED
Wandering in Strange Lands, by Morgan Jerkins (Harper).
The author’s ancestors were part of the Great Migration, the
exodus of six million African-Americans from the rural South
to Northern and Western cities. Growing up in New Jersey,
she felt frustratingly detached from her Southern roots. In a
book that is at once a family history, an ethnography, and a
detective story, she follows clues about her lineage across the
county. The people she meets—Gullah Geechee, Louisiana
Creoles, Black “freedmen” fighting for recognition in the Cher-
okee Nation—resist categorization and help her to embrace
the intricacies of her own identity. For Jerkins, this “journey
in reverse” has a dual purpose: “to excavate the connective tis-
sue that complicates but unites us as a people, and to piece to-
gether the story of how I came to be.”
The Pink Line, by Mark Gevisser (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
In 2010, after Tiwonge Chimbalanga was jailed for becom-
ing engaged to a man, she fled Malawi for South Africa.
Chimbalanga, who is transgender, was accepted in her village,
but her case was treated as a gay marriage by progressive ac-
tivists and reactionary prosecutors alike. This book argues that,
in seeking safety in another country, she crossed a “pink line”:
a physical, legal, rhetorical, or moral frontier between oppres-
sion and tolerance. Through a series of personal narratives—
lesbians seeking parental rights in Mexico, a third-gender
community in Kerala—Gevisser explores how globalization,
the Internet, and international development have brought
clashing ideals of gender and sexuality into new configurations.
The Discomfort of Evening, by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, trans-
lated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison (Graywolf ). The
narrator of this novel, the winner of the 2020 International
Booker Prize, is the daughter of religious farmers in Holland.
Surrounded by death—a drowned brother, the culling of dis-
eased cows that she loves, suicidal threats from her mother—
she makes a series of “sacrifices” to try to keep her family, and
her own body, from changing. Her parents have banned Goo-
gle and TV, believing them evil, but their authority collapses,
leaving a silence that she fills with her own fantastic specu-
lations: if she takes her coat off, she will sicken. In matter-
of-fact prose, the banalities and horrors blend as she longs
for a rescuer.
High as the Waters Rise, by Anja Kampmann, translated from
the German by Anne Posten (Catapult). This first novel by an
established poet examines the marginalized lives of European
laborers. An oil-rig worker, traumatized after a friend disap-
pears at sea, embarks on a journey of self-discovery—to old
haunts in Malta, Italy, and Germany, and to his friend’s home
town, in Hungary. Along the way, he encounters old and new
friends and lovers, who often share his sense of being left be-
hind in the wake of supposed progress. Although Kampmann
addresses current events, such as environmental degradation
and the precariousness of modern Europe, her focus is on
how ideas of masculinity affect one man’s ability to grieve.
