Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

In 1968 Valerie Solanas shot and nearly killed Andy Warhol. Twenty years later she was found dead in her hotel room at just 52 years of age, surrounded by typed pages of her latest writings. This sad and sordid end followed a life of radical feminism and the composition of the ultra-feminist manifesto SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men). In this “literary fantasy” the author chronicles Solanas’ life but this is no conventional biography, but a fragmentary, disjointed and impressionistic fictional exploration, mixing documentary material, invented dialogue and stream of consciousness passages. The structure no doubt reflects Valerie Solanas’ own disjointed life, and I must admit the book is curiously mesmerizing and makes for some compulsive reading. Overall, however, I found it ultimately unsatisfactory. The trouble with mixing fact and fiction is that it leaves behind so many questions, and my more literal approach to literature made me long for a more conventional retelling of the life. However, I found it an evocative and atmospheric book, which I enjoyed more than I expected to, and felt that it did give an insight into this often troubled woman even if finally she still remains an enigma.

I'm asking myself what the reason for this book is. Did the author just want to make us readers gag throughout the book?

It was quite disturbing and crude. Every third sentence describes something including vomit, urin, blood or a sexual reference. The writing feels like someone rambling high on drugs. Is that really necessary?

Why would I like reading weird metaphors á la "the mirror is a foul-smelling stranger".

I also didn't like the dialogue written out. It felt very abrupt and I prefer a fluent writing style. I disliked everything about this book and cannot recommend it.

Four and a half stars.

I have to admit I didn't start off liking this book as much as I expected, but its power does grow, and both the author and publishers are to be trusted – this is a book worth reading. It's not an easy one, by any stretch, but it's certainly a clever construct and a survey of a very damaged mind. It's loosely about Valerie Solanas (well, it's very much about her, but as nobody is able to give us the full, rounded truth of her life it's much more about a fictional Valerie Solanas), who turned herself from a young abuse victim to young hooker to older hooker and junkie to wannabe writer, and ended up shooting Andy Warhol.

The art of the book is in how it manages to give us such an up close and personal look into the mind of a quite loathsome woman. In the style used here, where we get introductory, scene-setting paragraphs then a lot of playscript-styled dialogue with little interruption or description, we see this woman as almost incapable of conversing, as she's forever yacking on about her anti-sex, man-exterminating crusade. This non-stop misandry is quite relentless at times, and seldom if ever represented in novels, and makes you itch to skim a lot that spurts from her foul mouth. But, even if you're not entirely sympathetic to her at the end as she dies friendless (no spoiler, that's the opening lines), you do still pay attention to how intimate we get with such a horrid character.

The book clearly lays the beginning of her philosophy on being raped by her father, but the book also suggests the good ol' US of A is partly to blame, as it punctuates its narration with relevant nuclear arms facts, assassinations, and protests in the outside society. It's a fictional America, however, as the author rushes to assure us, although it feels really honest and true, even if the girl Solanas is stuck in a desert in Georgia that could never exist without a lot more global warming. Like this author's other book translated into English, there is a comment made too about institutionalisation. But this book really does show you how a person can go to an extreme of thought, and have a nightmarish life, and one climaxed by a quite pathetic action, without a nailed-down cause. It's very distinctive with its approach, and well worth a look. It makes two from two for Stridsberg.

This book, is a nightmare. But it's so beautiful.
Honestly- it's so difficult to read, as if it puts a cold, heavy stone on your chest.
The way it's written is so astonishing. This is a book like, say SlaughterHouse-5- you can tell it's a masterpiece. I know it's translated, but Stridsberg seems to have put words together to form a story that could not be told in any other way.
This is the story of real life feminist Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. It goes back and forth between the mind of a dying Valerie, and her childhood/teenage years. God, it's so mesmerising.
It's disturbing, it's dark, it's wild, but also intelligent and powerful, definitely worth a read and I am so surprised that this is not on shortlist of Man Booker international.

A fascinating and atmospheric book that mixes historical characters and facts turning them into something that reminds me of a feverish dream.
It's a very challenging and complex novel, not an easy read, but at the same time one those book you keep on reading because you're fascinated by the prose and what you're reading.
I don't know if it's the translation or the style of the writer but I couldn't stop reading even if this totally out of my comfort zone.
I read about Valerie Solanas, the historical character, but the Valerie Solanas in the book is more complex and fascinating that the reality and she's a character you won't forget easily.
I'd be happy to read other books by this author.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to Quercus Books and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

The Faculty of Dreams takes a famous figure—Valerie Solanas, writer of the SCUM Manifesto and shooter of Andy Warhol—and imagines her through conversations and flashbacks. It starts with her dying in a hotel room in 1988, and traverses her childhood, her time in mental hospitals, and the events leading up to shooting Andy Warhol, fictionalising and inventing what she said and felt.

This is a stylised book that feels similar to Kathy Acker, depicting a specifically grim America from the 50s to the 80s. The insertion of a narrator figure at points was a nice touch, a reminder that this is a literary and knowing version of Solanas' life and also that it is both giving her a voice and an intrusion into her reality. Knowing basically nothing about Solanas other than the fact she shot Andy Warhol, it was impossible to know to what extent it was fictional and what was based in fact, and those with more knowledge would probably appreciate a lot more of what Stridsberg has done with the novel and with the depiction of Solanas.

I didn't expect to like this as much as I did. I would have steered clear of it if I hadn't pledged to read all of this year's International Booker longlist. At best, I thought I would have a grudging respect for the book in all its grimness.

Valerie Solanas had a very hard life, as her attorney explains in the novel:

<i>FLORYNCE KENNEDY: On June 10, 1968 I was appointed public defense counsel in the case New York State versus Valerie Solanas. I described Valerie as one of the most important campaigners for the modern women’s movement. Dr Ruth Cooper at Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital in New York described Valerie as brilliantly intelligent and . . . and Andy Warhol didn’t actually die, he was only injured, he survived and he kept on being wealthy and making bad art, even though he didn’t make a full recovery . . . There was her unhappy childhood . . . raped by her daddy when she was seven . . . raped six times before she turned eighteen, her mother abused and raped by an undisclosed number of men in the desert, homeless at the age of fifteen, working as a prostitute, drug addiction, mental disorders, repeated rapes in connection with prostitution…</i>

(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florynce_Kennedy">Kennedy</a> was a remarkable figure in her own right, a black radical feminist and pioneer of intersectionality who graduated from law school in the early 1950s.)

Never having read Solanas' <i>SCUM Manifesto</i>, my main impression of Valerie was via Mary Harron's 1996 film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116594/">I Shot Andy Warhol</a>, which I saw when it was on cinema release. Lili Taylor's portrayal of Solanas captures anger and vulnerability, but this book contains far more of both squalor and poetry.

It starts at the end, as Solanas dies in visceral detail, slowly and messily, in a San Francisco hotel for the homeless in 1988. Scenes then shift back and forth between several key periods in her life: childhood in the fictional desert town of Ventor, Georgia; holidays and adolescence in Florida; university in Maryland; writing and hanging out at the Factory in New York; talking with a female psychiatrist while remanded in a secure hospital; and death rattles in the Bristol Hotel, SF. Much of the story is related in a semi-delirious prose poetry which I found hypnotic and fluid - but it would be understandable if some readers find it repetitive, as the same lines and concepts recur again and again through the book. It often uses the second person but I never found this invasive as I have in some novels, e.g. Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller. (Though, of course, the combination of second person with the already harrowing subject matter could be triggery for some readers at the wrong time.) To me it always felt like the voice of the (omniscient) narrator was talking to Valerie - as she also does directly in several of the book's scenes that are set out as playscript. Some comment on the writing process and the book:

<i>VALERIE: …Giving up isn’t the answer, fucking up is.
NARRATOR: I only wish I knew how to fuck all this up.
VALERIE: Artificial historiography. The story of the whore and mental illness. Of the American underwater population.
NARRATOR: And the question of identity?
VALERIE: Non-identity is the answer…
There are no given identities, there are no women, there are no men, no boys, no girls. There’s only a little puppet show. An endless shitty play with a shitty script.
NARRATOR: So it mustn’t end like this?
VALERIE: You’ll have to write something new, baby-writer, you’ll have to find new endings.</i>

On the question of fucking with identity: this is a fictionalised Solanas. Her parents are still called Dorothy and Louis, as they were in real life; she still studies psychology at the University of Maryland; she still shoots Andy Warhol and is incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals; and she really did die in the Bristol Hotel in 1988. But between these landmarks Stridsberg creates what she describes in introduction as "a literary fantasy derived from the life and work of Valerie Solanas … Few facts are known about Valerie Solanas and even to those this novel is not faithful… This also applies to the map of America, there being no deserts in Georgia". (Real-Valerie was from New Jersey, not Georgia.)

I needed to understand what was and wasn't fictional here: I didn't want to one day read a factual discussion about Solanas and unwittingly relate it to invented material from a novel. And a few weeks ago, I already embarrassed myself by posting a review of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2739030909">a Mathias Énard historical novel</a> without carefully checking how much of it was made up. So, thanks to Wikipedia and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18406247-valerie-solanas">Breanne Fahs' biography</a> of Valerie, I saw that she often lived with her grandparents during her teen years, and ended up having two babies before she turned 16 - not in a trailer park with a friend who was a rent boy, greedy for drugs and pretending to be brother and sister, as she does in the novel. (His main sugar daddy has a surname only one letter different from Dorothy's maiden name.) Some of the quoted interviews are real, some are not. As the name of an important university classmate, Ann Duncan, appeared, I searched. Was she going to be based on <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0241900/">a minor 1950s actress</a>, or possibly murderer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Ann_Duncan">Elizabeth Ann Duncan</a>, or was she nothing to do with either? It was fun watching the character's identity emerge from the haze, forming into a fictional daughter of Elizabeth Ann.

In the two fictional companions, brother-in-arms Silk Boy and her university girlfriend and fellow proto radical feminist Cosmogirl (Ann Duncan) - their nicknames perhaps oblique references to characters in Solanas' play <i>Up Your Ass</i>, which she alleged Warhol stole - Stridberg has granted Valerie close comradeship which she seems to have lacked in real life. This is a kindness. Although if considering the aetiology of her later life - and this is after all a novel about someone who was once a star student in her psychology class, who liked to analyse people herself - it fucks with the story in another way too. If real Valerie had had these important attachments for a few years each, as her fictional incarnation had, perhaps she wouldn't have shot Andy Warhol.

To what extent were Valerie's opinions the result of the life she grew up in? An impossible question to resolve fully. But one that means a reader not aligned with radical feminism could see this novel as showing how life experience combines with temperament to create opinions. Whereas a radical feminist may take Solanas' life story as a series of events that shows an urgent need for their philosophy. Fahs' biography states:

<i> As Jane Caputi, a radical feminist who met Valerie in the mid-1970s and currently chairs the women and gender studies program at Florida Atlantic University, claimed, “It’s not as simple as the abuse leads to the manifesto, that you’re filled with rage and that leads to things directly. But those experiences do take away the illusions. Those abuses don’t prescribe seeing through things, but they do affect things. That is one response to abuse, where you continue contact or are filled with rage. At the same time, you take it out on yourself.”</i>

At any rate, Valerie's rants and black-humoured quips sound like lines uttered by young feminists on social media now, half ironic, half serious. Stridsberg's novel was first published 12 years ago in Sweden, but this is a timely translation to English: over the last few years intersectional feminism has become a stronger part of popular culture, and once radical ideas more mainstream. Sara Strisdsberg's was one of those who resigned in protest from the blighted Swedish Nobel Literature Academy in 2018, part of the international #metoo movement. (As was pointed out recently in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/19742898-2019-mbi-discussion?comment=190628849&page=3#comment_190628849">a discussion thread</a>, #metoo, as well as a movement to stop sexual harassment and assualt, is a reaction to established male creatives controlling and squashing upcoming female artists' works - as Solanas felt Warhol was doing to her.) Aspects of 1970s-style radical feminism - in relation to gender and prostitution - are among the most contentious political battlegrounds of the present day, and Solanas' life as a radical feminist *and* sex worker is especially complex in the light of this. She talks of "pussy-souls" but says "My pussy is not my soul" - a partial contradiction of the biological essentialism associated with conservative radical feminism now. This novel finds itself in a longlist on which eight out of thirteen books are by female authors; the literary <a href="https://womenintranslation.com/about/">women in translation</a> movement, aiming to redress a major gender imbalance in which novels get translated, may be starting to pay off.

There was a time a few years ago when I regularly typed "I am not a radical feminist" in online debates, as a shorthand for where I stood. Looking at the history of 1960s-70s radical feminism while reading this book in 2019, I was struck by how many of its general principles, via their adoption by contemporary intersectional feminism, I had recently made my peace with and accepted as applicable to wider society. Whilst they still seem to say little about my own experiences or those of my emphatically matriarchal family, I had been induced to see how they are relevant structurally.


This is a remarkable translation by Deborah Bragan-Turner: it felt as if the English was the original work (though the impression must be enhanced by the American subject). US experimental novels get up to all sorts, so why might one not transpose a town in New Jersey to an imaginary desert in Georgia? Otherwise, the use of British 'postgraduate' where Americans say 'grad student' was the only hint that this novel was originally from any place other than the country where it was set. Allusions to lyrics by Nirvana ("I hate myself but I do not want to die"), early Manic Street Preachers lyrics ('Of Walking Abortion') and Hole ('Doll Parts') lurked within, reflecting Solanas' state of mind and her cultural influence, but also cementing a sense of the book's belonging in in English.

It reminded me most often of works which are not the best reference points for reviewing a Swedish book. Firstly, Canadian Elizabeth Smart's intense novel in prose poetry <i>By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept</i> (1945), which sweeps the reader along with its protagonist's emotional tumult during a straight love affair. I found both books similarly hypnagogic and dense: it felt like I had read and experienced a lot through the characters, yet I was reading far more slowly than I thought; it was repetitive yet I never wanted to question its repetitiveness. As if time was gathering in still puddles, and I didn't mind. Except when I noticed how many days I'd been reading this book (six, eventually), which I'd aimed to finish in two. (There is presumably also a Scandinavian tradition of prose-poetry; I've read recent examples by Dane <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4422522.Josefine_Klougart">Josefine Klougart</a>, but don't know about her predecessors.) <i>The Faculty of Dreams</i> shares with 1980s Northern English feminist play <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Mother_Said_I_Never_Should">My Mother Said I Never Should</a>, by Charlotte Keatley, a habit of bold, declarative, sometimes non-sequitur sentences about common female experiences - as well as scenes in playscript format, shifts back and forth in time, and minimalist order and tight structure imposed by the author on a potentially chaotic story. And I kept hearing the wonky, unglamorous, downright silly sound of Bowie's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4sANPkk3ys">Andy Warhol</a> - it's closer to the DIY feel of this book, and of Solanas' calmer ramblings, than it is to Warhol's smooth plastic pop-art and iconographic image. (Warhol also hated the song.)

Perhaps my favourite set of chapters in the book (also a break from Valerie's suffering) were the lists - several themed sections in which free-associated events or features of a subject were set out in 26 paragraphs 'numbered' with letters of the alphabet, such as these from 'The Presidents', a partial history of feminism:
<i>I. There were only superwomen. It was the second wave. They were all courageous, they all loved sucking cock. Passion. Obviously, I knew they were laughing at me.</i>
(Billed as "Daddy's Favourite Girl Gloria", Steinem appears in the text: the conventionally attractive mainstream liberal feminist, trying - unsuccessfully of course - to persuade Valerie of other viewpoints. Valerie derides liberal feminists who include men. Feminist controversies go in cycles, and I was reminded me of the anger towards Emma Watson's HeForShe project.)
<i>J. Suffragettes. One by one they joined the underworld. Lung cancer, heart attacks, shark attacks. The inquests never ended. Formalities were set aside. It was overrun with weeds around the house…
M… Fuck you Miss Pankhurst. The white blouse. That was 1913. I had seen her on Fifth Avenue. The next summer she died from her injuries at the racecourse. </i>
As second-wavers are the older generation nowadays, so we see the Suffragettes stand in the same relation to the feminists of Valerie's age, at a time when many music stars of the 60s are dying off. Imagery of Emily Wilding Davidson recurs - the Suffragette who famously threw herself in front of the king's racehorse: an implicit analogy to Valerie in sacrificing herself to her cause - but with a clear coherent decision that is now widely respected.

Back in the mid-90s before the <i>I Shot Andy Warhol</i> film was released, the impression of Valerie Solanas I'd got from pop culture was that she was kind of embarrassing. There was punk and there was punk. This could be seen as the view of a male-dominated entertainment press, but I for one didn't have a problem with them. (And it's not just that - there are radical feminists who disavow her too.) Mary Harron's film humanised her, but I'd hardly thought about her since, except when I watched Warhol's <i>Chelsea Girls</i> and read a little about the Chelsea Hotel and the Factory. I'm not sure I'd ever known how brilliant she had been when she was young, enough to be awarded scholarships despite the sort of teenage years that would derail most people. But the legacy of that time, and perhaps the lack of the right support (whether socially, or therapies and understandings of trauma that barely existed yet) meant she did derail eventually, and with spectacular destructive effects on herself and the New York art world and culture. I never thought I would be so moved by Valerie Solanas and that she was that sort of string of might-have-beens; if only things had been a little less bad in her circumstances or epigenetics or something, and she'd been an outrageous radical feminist psychology professor, or a writer and activist shouting things up even today online.

Stridberg is a bit late in the story with the if-onlys. Perhaps, by the time Solanas was on her way with the gun to find Warhol, she was too far gone mentally to have ever become more than a bit less of a mess than she ended up by shooting him. But it was wonderful that the book articulated all this:

<i> This is the beginning of the end, Valerie. The moment you shoot Andy Warhol, you throw away all possibility of being someone other people listen to, the only thing you dream about, writer, artist, revolutionary, psychoanalyst, rebel. There are so many options, there is a world that can be yours out there, if only you drop the weapon and leave. Remember, Valerie, this is New York, it is 1968 and you have your university degree, your wild heart, your rich talent of raw poetry and a fantastic sense of humor. You can do whatever you want. In a few years’ time the women’s movement will move into the universities and everywhere women’s cafés will appear, reading circles, feminist groups, and in San Francisco half a million women will demonstrate, dressed in white, in protest against sexual politics based on fear and systematic rape. A radical women’s movement will grow up and radical sexual politics. There will be a place for you there, Valerie. The new age will be your age.</i>

If this sounds like a 5-star review, it is in a way. But I have to love a book to give 5 stars these days, and this had a bit too much horror. it is all brilliantly done for what it is. If you like this sort of writing - which not everyone does.

----
In the context of the 2019 MBI longlist, it's interesting to look at <i>Faculty of Dreams</i> alongside <i>The Years</i> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2523296968">Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead</a>. In these, three of the five most substantial books on the list, there's an apparent resurgence of literature about people (women) who were young in the 1960s - the late Silent Generation or early Boomers. From 2013, when Eleanor Catton won the English language Booker, prize lists had more and more young authors, and the stories of people from the 1960s and 70s (people now in their 70s) which readers had been hearing for decades took a back seat. This crop of three excellent books, all published in their original languages in the second half of the 00s, has appeared coincidentally together a decade later in English, a sort of time-capsule but a very worthy one. In their activism, anger and imagined utopias, the protagonists seem similar to those who are young now. There are closer parallels again between <i>Plow</i> and <i>The Faculty of Dreams</i>: each presents a character who'd be commonly regarded as a dangerous crank, in a sympathetic, yet unvarnished portrait. It's shown that her causes and views have a good point, even if she takes things too far. Tokarczuk's book shows the tension and contradiction in this project and struggles to make it cohere - although it manages to have both readability and intellectual depth. But, regardless of its poetic style, Stridberg's book pulls it off, and in doing so makes something difficult look easy. It may not be the most comfortable reading, but I could see why <i>Faculty of Dreams</i> won the Nordic Council Literature Prize - which includes work from all Nordic countries, and "was voted as the best Swedish novel from the 2000s (decade) in a poll held by the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which involved one hundred Swedish critics, authors, journalists and publishers" (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drömfakulteten">Wiki</a>).

A strident book which refuses to play nicely, awash with bodily fluids, maggots, sexual abuse and all manner of foullness. Riffing on Valerie Solanas, playing with form, moving from extreme man-hating to something much sadder, more tragic. A collage of narrative styles keeps us disoriented as readers. This made me think of Kathy Ackerman and some of her experimentation in 'Blood and Guts in High School', though Stridsberg is less extreme.

Fierce and foul, one of the most confronting books I’ve read in quite some time, The Faculty of Dreams is a novel about Valerie Solanas , the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol.

Except it isn’t, not really. It’s much more complex than that. This is not a biography, neither is it a straightforward fictionalised account of Solanas’ life. The author describes it as a ‘literary fantasy’. It warps and distorts the biographical details, it is disorienting and metafictional. For example, Solanas’ hometown of Ventnor City, New Jersey is misnamed and misplaced and becomes Ventor. In the desert. In Georgia.

The form alternates between second person narration (‘you’ being Valerie), dialogues and excerpts from court reports and psychiatric evaluation transcripts. It jumps around in time. The text is outré, not shying away from filth, bodily functions, ugliness of all kinds. Blood, stench, prostitution, child sexual abuse. ”The sky above Ventor is the same pink a a sleeping tablet or old vomit.” “The hotel sheets are dirty, gray with age, and foul-smelling, urine and vomit and vaginal blood and tears.”

There is poetry here too and flashes of dark beauty: “My heart beats read, beats blue, beats rage”, “Her eyes are black mirrors. Her heart is a bruise”. The imagery and repeated motifs are striking: roses (being dug up), white dresses (no longer white), Warhol dissolving into white backgrounds, magnesium flaring.

The narrative is chaotic, it whirls and hopscotches, the timelines blur. Some sections are bulleted lists, sometimes Stridsberg just free associates. She quotes the lyrics of ‘Doll Parts’ by Hole. Valerie talks in riddles and word salads. It is a depiction of mental illness and unbridled rage. The characters are all chimeras. The whole thing might be Valerie’s deathbed hallucination.

The novel’s audacity is, at first, a thrill. These words have power, they sting, they will shake you up. Then the adrenalin wears off as you acclimatise to this book’s style, and the effect becomes… sadness. This is a sad story.

Solanas’ radical feminism is hard to take. She is relentlessly angry. She calls men ‘a biological mistake’ and ‘walking abortions’. The book does not glamourise Valerie or excuse her actions in shooting Andy Warhol. Nothing could be less glamourous than what is depicted here. Besides, this Valerie is fictional. And her story is one of tragedy, rather than rebellion.

What is Stridsberg’s aim here? Merely to provoke? Acting the provocateur as a tribute to Solanas? Maybe it’s to make a point about the way, through literature, we consume other people’s lives. The end result is quite brilliant, if you can stomach it. That’s a big if.

"I’m sorry I missed. It was immoral to miss. I should have done more target practice."
Valerie

"I think you are the saddest girl I have ever met. There are no paths in the dark. There is nothing to tell. I cannot tell you how sad I am. I cannot talk about it. It is not possible to think outside your thoughts."
The narrator

Book 11/13 from the Man Booker International and my favourite so far.

'The Faculty of Dreams: Amendment to the Theory of Sexuality OR Valerie' has been translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner from Sara Stridsberg's Swedish-language original Drömfakulteten: - tillägg till sexualteorin. It is a fictional retelling of the story of Valerie Solanas (1936-1988), author of the SCUM Manifesto, self-published in 1967, and who, 0n June 3rd, 1968 shot and almost killed Andy Warhol. The SCUM manifesto memorably opens:

"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples."

Stridsberg's novel was originally published in 2006 winning the highly prestigious 2007 Nordic Counsel's Literature Prize (other winners in the 2000s include novels from Per Petterson, Lars Saabye Christensen, Sjón, Sofi Oksanen, Naja Marie Aidt and Jan Kjærstad.)

Its publication now, in 2019, in English is particularly apposite given, as a fellow Goodreader J pointed out, the revival of interest in radical and queer female writers such as Berg, author of Berg, and Kathy Acker, subject of Olivia Laing's Crudo as well as the #metoo scandal. On the latter, Sara Stridsberg was elected to the Nobel Prize Committee in 2016, serving on the jury that awarded the prize to Kazuo Ishiguro, but resigned at the end of 2017 over the Jean-Claude Arnault scandal, in solidarity with Sara Danius.

The Faculty of Dreams itself is a innovative reinterpretation of Solanas's life and manifesto and indeed the art of fictional biography itself. It begins:

"The Faculty of Dreams is not a biography, it is a literary fantasy derived from the life and work of Valerie Solanas, American, now deceased. Few facts are known about Valerie Solanas and even to those this novel is not faithful. All characters in the novel should therefore be regarded as fictional, including Valerie Solanas herself. This also applies to the map of America, there being no deserts in Georgia."

and indeed in this treatment the fictional Valerie is born not in Ventnor, New Jersey but 'Ventor', in the non-existent desert of Georgia; the real-life Solanas had a sister, Judith, and had a child when she was c.16, fathered by a married man, which was taken away for adoption, but neither feature in the novel.

The narrator of the novel imagines herself with Valerie in her dying days in a seedy hotel in San Fransisco:

"A hotel room in the Tenderloin, San Francisco’s red-light district. It is April 1988 and Valerie Solanas is lying on a filthy mattress and urine-soaked sheets, dying of pneumonia. Outside the window, pink neon lights flash and porn music plays day and night.

On April 30 her body is found by hotel staff. The police report states that she is found kneeling by the side of the bed. (Has she tried to get up? Has she been crying?) It states that the room is in perfect order, papers neatly piled on the desk, clothes folded on a wooden chair by the window. The police report also states that her body is covered with maggots and her death probably occurred around April 25. Some weeks earlier, the report goes on to say, someone on the hotel staff had seen her sitting by the window, writing.

I imagine piles of paper on the desk, her silver coat on a hanger by the window, and the smell of salt from the Pacific. I imagine Valerie in bed with a fever, attempting to smoke and make notes. I picture drafts and manuscripts all over the room . . . sun, perhaps . . . white clouds . . . the desert’s solitude . . . I imagine myself there with Valerie."

Stridsberg narrator circles back through Solanas's (at times imagined) life, but always returning to the hotel room where she at times she addresses Solanas in the second person. and others has a dialogue with her, presented in the form of an interview or playscript (and indeed Stridsberg went on to write a play, Valerie Jean Solanas ska bli president i Amerika (Valerie Solanas for President of the United States) based on the story:

"VALERIE: I don’t want to have a religious funeral. I want to be buried as I am. I don’t want them to burn my body when I’m dead. I don’t want any man to touch me when I’m dead. I want to be buried in my silver coat. I want someone to go through my notes after my death.

NARRATOR: My faculty of dreams—

VALERIE:—and no sentimental young women or sham authors playing at writing a novel about me dying. You don’t have my permission to go through my material.

(Silence.)

(The narrator picks at the flowers.)"

A second, interspersed, narrative strand, takes us through the aftermath of the shooting of Warhol, starting with Valerie's arraignment at the Manhattan Criminal Court that day, to her eventual commitment to Elmhurst Psychiatric hospital in 1969, and her three years in prison from 1969-1971, again largely told through playscript style transcripts of court proceedings, discussions with her lawyer and psychological evaluations. These sections also draw heavily on the SCUM Manifesto, as well as, as a secondary source, Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

A third strand has scenes returning to Valerie's life up the shooting, with lyrical narration told in the second person, and split into five chronological sections:

“BAMBILAND” (1945-8) - her childhood with her mother Dorothy in the desert

“THE OCEANS” (1951-5) - her youth, and her love for 'Silk Boy' in Alligator Beach, Florida

“LABORATORY PARK”(1956-63) - her student days at the University of Maryland, where she has a strong relationship with a fellow research student 'Cosmogirl'

“THE FACTORY” (1967-8) - her time in New York in the late 1960s and first involvement with Warhol, including the publication of the manifesto and her role in his movie I, A Man

“LOVE VALERIE” (May -June 1968) - the deterioration of both her mental condition and her relationship with Warhol and his acolytes, leading up to the shooting

The narration features a number of recurrent motifs and symbols: for example the Florida section features male seahorses (perhaps a code for the 'Men's Auxiliary' of males who serve at least some purpose and so will be exempt from the SCUM's initial killing of all men) and sharks (other men). Two colours predominate: silver, including Warhol's famous wig, and rose-pink, which first features on the garden seat on which her father, Louis, repeatedly rapes the child Valerie:

"He was a jumbled agony of tears and lust and the seat cover fabric was a mesh of wild pink roses that Dorothy had embroidered at nights and I counted the roses..."

A sample passage from “THE OCEANS”:

"The ocean thunders around you, words drown in the waves and the blinding white light shifts into something softer. The sky and the sand turn to muted pink and the beach will soon be empty of bathers again.
...
You keep on reading your seawater-warped books and Dorothy keeps on vanishing behind her sunglasses, keeps on forgetting. Her cigarettes always burn out on the sand as she falls asleep, her dreams invaded by black underwater trees and black luminescence, constantly descending. When she falls asleep on the beaches of Alligator Reef she dreams about someone no longer wanting to be a mother, and she wakes every time with suffocating heart and salty wet globs in her mouth. Her hand moves on the sand and in her dream and the underwater world there is no shriveled foal, knowing it is going to die, but persisting, still a sticky mucilage around its mother, constantly letting itself be kicked away, for the warm taste of her milk like a watermark on its fur, its mouth filled with black ants. She picks up her book and tries to read, but she is robbed of concentration by the ocean, and still more by her pocket mirror, nail file and cigarette, and most of all by her way of looking furtively over your shoulder at your book."

As an example of how Stridsberg fictonalises, Valerie's female lover and soulmate at university,
"Cosmogirl" - is called Ann Duncan, her mother Elizabeth on death row, facing execution just before (as the narrator knows) the Supreme Court will temporarily halt executions in the US in 1972.

"Elizabeth Duncan loved getting married. She and Cosmo crisscrossed America in search of handsome, dark-haired men to whom she pledged large sums of money in return for marrying her. And later, when they wanted the marriage annulled, she carried on to a new state and wed again. And when the money ran out, as it always did, she sent pregnant girls to the doctor and claimed it was her, and then sued her ex-husbands for child support.

VALERIE: What’s she sentenced for?

COSMO GIRL: Murdering two of her new husbands with arsenic.

VALERIE: Is she guilty?

COSMO GIRL: Very guilty, I suspect."

Elizabeth's story in based on the real-life Elizabeth Ann Duncan, the last woman to be executed in California before the 1972 halt. But the real-life character had a son, not a daughter, and was executed for murdering her pregnant daughter-in-law, not her husbands.

And the narrator keeps returning to the central questions she has:

"NARRATOR: I keep thinking of your wild-animal language, of your time at the university. Then I think about New York and the Factory. Questions central to this novel. Why did you stop writing? Why did you leave Maryland? Why did you shoot Andy Warhol?"

but this is never answered definitely, since this is, as Javier Cercas refers to in his The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel, a novel not a biography:

"The novel is not the genre of answers, but that of questions: writing a novel consists of posing a complex question in order to formulate it in the most complex way possible, not to answer it, or not to answer it in a clear and unequivocal way; it consists of immersing oneself in an enigma to render it insoluble, not to decipher it (unless rendering it insoluble is, precisely, the only way to decipher it). That enigma is the blind spot, and the best things these novels have to say they say by way of it: by way of that silence bursting with meaning, that visionary blindness, that radiant darkness, that ambiguity without solution."

Thanks to Machelose Press for the ARC.

4.5 stars - rounded to 5 as the outstanding book from this year's MBI and one that would repay both re-reading and further investigation into the real-life Solanas.

This was super fascinating and this was factual, up to a certain point. I never knew Andy Warhol had been shot at but this was an interesting character study on the woman who did it. This was a quick read as well as I managed this in a few hours as the way it was formatted was quite gripping. There was not anything inherently wrong but this book did not blow me away. It was good but nothing special.