The narrator moves within the contemporary queer scene of Parisian bars and nights, where they meet their friends. They live on the eighteenth floor of a building, in an apartment where each room is invaded by plants and trees in perpetual growth. They work during the day as a receptionist, capitalizing on their apparent femininity. One evening in a café, they meet an English-speaking person who identifies as male and regularly comes to Paris for their work as a composer. Thus begins a complex relationship, a place of conflict between two feminist cultures (French feminism and that of a "Northern" European city), between two languages (considering issues of linguistic dominance that intersect with gender issues). Through this narrative where nothing is ever quite stabilized, always evolving and transforming, the author explores new possibilities of inhabiting language and transcending binaries, both of gender and between human and non-human. The novel questions linguistic norms as well as their inscription in bodies and sexualities.
Camille Cornu’s simultaneously abundant and controlled writing serves a continually surprising narrative, where plants infiltrate daily life and blur the boundaries between dream and reality. A fascinating, deeply contemporary book that shows the evolution of a character breaking away from norms and categories, inventing a language, and creating new alliances with plants.
