A review by saint_eleanor
Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense fast-paced
  • Loveable characters? Yes

5.0

God isn't the one writing anymore; its all the girls sitting inside paintings, hating. I'm looking for us.
I write a satanic pact between you and me. THE END. 

I could talk about this book for literally hours, would not be able to fit all my thoughts into a review. If you want to talk abt it message me on discord honestly lol (pickledfishxoxo). I would love to know your thoughts on the closing quote, and
what the thick mass is, and who she is writing to. I think that it's an extension of the earlier quote "Tell me, in your darkness, in your ocean, am I ever there? Have we ever reached eachother?" and she is still "looking" for the 'hating' girls, saving them from the darkness/void of their paintings. She's reaching across time and space to rescue them.


In place of an actual review and bc im extra i made a list of every explicit and implied reference in the book and some I just thought would be good further reading because I loved this book sm and i think part of why is bc she referenced so many of my favorite medias 🤓: 

Books: 
  • Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
  • Malleus Maleficarium - Hammer of witches 
  • Gender Trouble - Judith Butler 
  • Powers of Horror: Abjection - Julia Kristeva 
Movies:
  • Wild Strawberries 
  • Daisies, + Vêra Chytilovà movies
  • American Beauty 
  • Penda's Fen
  • Jubilee
  • Sweet Movie 
  • Citizen Kane
  • Insignificance 
  • Love Exposure / Noriko's Dinner Table ("an episode", p.32, girls jump onto the subway tracks) 
  • Wicker Man (p.120, the ram appearing in the circle of naked women) 
  • Agnes Varda movies , Cleo from 5 to 7 
  • Hausu (p.187 reminded me of it, when they are tossing something 'neither cabbage nor soccer ball', like a head maybe)
  • Men (p. 199, when nocturno culto is giving birth)
Art/Music:
  • Pubertad - Edvard Munch 🎨 and The Scientists
  • Nocturno Culto/ Darkthrone 🎶
  • Hellhammer 🎶
  • Rodin 🎨
  • Dan Graham 🎨
  • Jenny Holzer 🎨
  • Ann Sofi's Fideicommunism  🎨
  • Otto Meuhl 🎨
  • Meredith Monk 🎶
  • Varg Vikernes - Burzum 🎶 (nsbm, so watch out)
  • A-positive by Eduardo Kac (image of man and machine nursing eachother, p. 146)
  • The Collapse of PAL - Rosa Menkmen (No christians see trees fall in this digital forest. p.180) 
Other: 
 Anders Breivik (?)- norweigan terrorist, Friedrichshof Commune, DWeb vs. ARPANET, Jacques Derrida- Algerian-French philosopher, Luce Irigaray- French philosopher and linguist. 

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