F/32
Robert Coover:
"This is a highly original narrative, a parable of sorts, disturbing and funny at the same time."
Kathy Acker:
"It is wonderful to see a woman not interiorising male fear of her, especially her body, but rather confronting that fear, fighting it, and celebrating her body and her sexuality by creating a fabulous and funny tale."
Frederic Tuten:
"f/32 is one of the most daring American novels I have read in years. It is comical, ribald, passionate, visceral, maniac, and wise. Almost any page of f/32 redeems us from the anemic writing and banalities we have endured in the past decade of bloodless fiction. Let's hope f/32 sets the creative tone for the nineties."
Patricia Coleman:
"In true Bildungsroman fashion, Ela's experience of herself develops in the novel from one of unconscious fragmentation to completeness in fragmentation. The literary parodies of the Bildungsroman and of notions of essence and absence are necessary components of this novel. For the reaffiliation of the self with the self (as in Virginia Woolf's Orlando), it is necessary to go over and through history, and to appropriate the self through history's remarks in literature."
Description, Virago Press:
More outrageous than Erica Jong, more sensational than Nicholson Baker's Vox, more explosive than the later Vagina Tales, f/32 is Eurydice's astonishing debut. If Gogol had an irrepressible nose, then Ela (a name meaning orgasm) has a less metaphorical organ which is relentless and defining. It whines, it shrieks, it drives Ela mad. Thanks to "it," Ela is an urban siren. Whoever meets her, desires her at their own risk. Then, one day, she loses the instrument of her "pleasure," and sets out after it on a mock-quest for self understanding and unification. f/32 is a wild Rabelaisian romp through most forms of amorous excess, but it is also a brilliant and apocalyptic tale orbiting around a macabre assault on the streets of Manhattan. Fasten your safety belts, for one of the most dazzling rides in recent fiction.
Book Description, FC2:
"Beauty invited the Beast for a stroll on a srystal path strewn with hollow silver hearts that were being stirred up by stiff gusts of wind like clouds of dust: and so everything began." And so begins F/32, Eurudice's award winning first novel about Ela (a pseudonym meaning orgasm). The sight of Ela stops all hearts. Ela is an expert on love. No matter how many people love her, she daily inspires more. She spends half her life avoiding the people who love her, and the other half making them love her. She is mind-blowing. A mock-quest for self-understanding and unification, F/32 lures the reader into a landscape of sexual alienation, continually interrupted by gags, dreams, mirror reflections, flashbacks, and scenes from Manhattan. Between the poles of desire and butchery the novel and Ela sail, the awed reader going along for one of the most dazzling rides in recent American fiction.
Book Description, RKasak/Masquerade Books:
Ela and her "other"--an unmentionable with a voracious appetite--roam the city streets, consuming anyone un/lucky enough to hear their siren song. The day they are separated plunges Ela into a chaotic search through the urban sprawl in an absurd, passionate search for unity.
'f/32' examines the JudaeoChristian dichotomy of flesh and spirit, as it is lived by a modern Everywoman, Ela, in New York City. The narrative, conceived as a neo-fable, follows Ela's urban mock-quest for self-understanding and unification, as she struggles with her alienation from her sexuality and (when seen from the other side of the mirror) her alienation from self-conscious cognition and civilization. Ela's unleashed female signifier (literalized as her estranged vagina) is naturally out of sync with the signified world around her; and the integrity of her quest is undermined by her socially-enforced image of herself. In the final redemption, Ela reunites with her dismembered body and, according to one reviewer, by that act she "redefines the modern world." "f/32" refers to the aperture of the camera lens that presents the central impossible transformation (vagina into lens) in the novel.
f/32 exorcises the language of everyday sex, the fear of using sexual terms, the secret of the female body. It reclaims the sexual signifier for women and subverts the Lacanian mirror. It has been called "the definitive novel on female sexuality." It received positive reviews in every country where it has been published, and more translations are under negotiation.
f/32: The Second Coming
A Novel by Eurudice, 1993, Virago Press
A cunt on her own. Seperated from her excessive owner she [the cunt] launches into adventures beyond imagination.
