My first thought after finishing Girls Against God: “finally!”. After reading Paradise Rot, I was so excited to read more from Jenny Hval. I’m not sure whether or not this was intentional, but this just felt like me trying to get out of writers block. If that’s what she was going for it’s genius and well done. The more I think about it, the more I start to think that this was actually her plan. I genuinely couldn’t stand the first 50-60% of the book still. Like yeah, tell me another dozen times how much you hate god. What the hell was the poop scene about? It all felt so chaotic and I couldn’t tell where the story was intended to go. What she was trying to tell. Like when I try to write and start out by just spilling out whatever is going through my mind. I got so bored and it took me like a month to finally pick the book up again. I didn’t want to give up on it though. Once I finally got past that 60% mark, it kind of started to grow on me. “Tell me, in your darkness, in your ocean, am I ever there? Have we ever reached each other?” -the yearning? Oof, I’m here for it. I’m all for weird novels, as I’ve loved Paradise Rot for example, but sometimes the weirdness in this one was a bit too much for me. And what is it about her obsession with vaginas? At first I wanted to give the book preferably 0 stars if that were possible, because the beginning was just too unbearable for me to go through, but when she started to describe the movie scene in the forest landscape I was sold and started to question my hatred for the book. It’s definitely not an easy read, you have to be completely open minded for it and you might end up liking it.

Das klang alles so wahnsinnig vielversprechend, ich meine, Metal, Horror, Norwegen, Surrealismus? Count me in! Leider wurde ich enttäuscht und musste auch kurz vor Ende abbrechen. Das liest sich alles wie eine wirre Ansammlung von Essays und inneren Monologen, die vorgeben, provokativ, progressiv und auf eine Weise radikal zu sein, in Realität aber eher den unvollendeten Gedanken aus missverstandenen Teenage-Zeiten ähneln. Mal abgesehen von dem Racial Slur innerhalb der ersten 20 Seiten – was sollte das?