Blue Hunger

Blue Hunger by Viola Di Grado captures perfectly the isolating and strange feelings the narrator experiences through the combined affects of bereavement and living in a foreign place, culture and language.

Blue Hunger is a novel about an Italian woman who goes to Shanghai after her twin brother's death and finds herself in an obsessive love affair. The narrator, who doesn't share her name but often goes by her brother's, Ruben, moves to Shanghai to fulfil the dream of her brother, who recently died. She teaches Italian and meets Xu, a Chinese woman also trying to avoid the past. They meet in abandoned factories and slaughterhouses and in Xu's apartment, filled with rotting food, where they take yellow pills and hunger for pleasure and pain, but the narrator always wants more.

This is a dreamlike novel that combines the imagery of consumption with ideas of grief and need. It also explores language, particularly the gaps in between Chinese and Italian (the novel is translated from Italian), and how language impacts self and identity, and the narrator's views of different cultures. The relationship between the protagonist and Xu is filtered through this, and through the fact that you can only see the relationship from one side. The relationship itself is a fairly classic kind of all-consuming love in a foreign city, focused on hunger and need, and whether what we want is good for us, though blurbs describing the book as abolishing all taboos are definitely over-exaggerating.

The book presents an interesting, uncanny view of a grieving person in a foreign country, seeing both place and language through their own lens, and someone looking for an all-consuming kind of pleasure to erase the past. As you'd expect from the premise, it isn't really a book with much of a plot, but more moves through scenes in an artistic way, more surreal than engaging with the realities of their lives.

'Eat me: make me yours, make me disappear'

'We like love because it's an edible feeling': Di Grado does a marvellous job of building this text on metaphors that she intertwines so that they feel organically and thickly connected - the cultural weight of food consumption with the concept of being consumed by desire; the reading of bodies and embodied feelings with the lexicology of ideograms and language ('the ideogram for love contains the one for claws and night'); the way grief and death may lead to a desire to wipe out the self as an act of complicity.

Placing an Italian woman in China adds to the sense of displacement, isolation and alienation as the protagonist mourns the death of her twin brother whose name she takes, and pursues a relationship with the elusive Xu whose own propensity for sexualised biting and ritualistic unclothing that follows the direction of reading ideograms play into the structure of the text.

'Time becomes physical, muscular. Blood is quicker than the brain. Abrasions on the arms and chest, on the fingers, form scabs. The skin defends itself, regenerates, and in regenerating forgets it was ever wounded' : gorgeously written, dense and rich, here the conceit of embodiment merges perfectly the unspoken with the textual.