Valerie: or, The Faculty of Dreams: Amendment to the Theory of Sexuality

by Sara Stridsberg, Deborah Bragan-Turner (Translator)

Overview

A fever dream of a novel—strangely funny, entirely unconventional—Valerie conjures the life, mind, and art of American firebrand Valerie Solanas

In April 1988, Valerie Solanas—the writer, radical feminist, author of the SCUM Manifesto and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol—was discovered dead at fifty-two in her hotel room, in a grimy corner of San Francisco, alone, penniless, and surrounded by the typed pages of her last writings.

In Valerie, a nameless narrator revisits the room where Solanas died, the courtroom where she was tried and convicted of attempting to murder Andy Warhol, the Georgia wastelands where she spent her childhood and was repeatedly raped by her father and beaten by her alcoholic grandfather, and the mental hospitals where she was shut away.

A leading feminist in Sweden and one of the most acclaimed writers in Scandinavia, Sara Stridsberg here blurs the boundaries between history and fiction, self-making and storytelling, madness and art, love and tragedy. Through imagined conversations and monologues, reminiscences and rantings, she reconstructs this most intriguing and enigmatic of women, reaching back in time to amplify her voice and bring her powerful, heartbreaking story into new light.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250619594
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	12/08/2020
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.13(w) x 7.95(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Sara Stridsberg is an internationally acclaimed writer and playwright. Her fiction and nonfiction books have been translated into more than twenty languages. A former member of the Swedish Academy, she is a leading feminist and artist in her native Sweden and around the world. Valerie is her first book to be published in the US.

Deborah Bragan-Turner has a degree in Scandinavian languages from the University College London. She translates Swedish literature, particularly literary fiction and biographies.

Editorial Reviews

*Longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize

*Winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize

*Voted the best Swedish novel of the decade by one hundred Swedish critics, authors, journalists and publishers, in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

"Valerie is one of the most genuinely insubordinate books I have read, and one of the most beautiful . . . Stridsberg infuses her protagonist with epic, tragic brilliance . . . her anarchism is humanized, without losing its teeth . . . One finishes this novel feeling taken by Valerie, but, even more, moved by the author’s love for her, the generosity that allows a potentially pathetic figure to become heroic, a guardian spirit."

—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

“Inventive and stimulating . . . As each new piece of Stridsberg’s portrait of Valerie is added, it alters the big picture, provocatively. The novel is as much about how little one can understand other people as it is about Valerie’s life. Stridsberg entertainingly casts new light on both Solanas and on how society views pop culture.”

—Publishers Weekly

“This is a brilliant re-imagining of the life and times of one of America’s great cultural icons. If Solanas was alive I’m sure she’d be amazed (and perhaps even gratified) to see what poetic feeling her remarkable destiny has aroused.”

—Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City

“Sara Stridsberg’s fantasy about the life of Valerie Solanas has attained the status of myth. We can finally read that novel—a cross between Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis—in this powerful, poetic translation. Stridsberg conjures up the loneliness and desire of Valerie, our Valerie—shit-stirrer, tormented genius, cast-off misfit—as well as the vertigo, passion, and complexity of a whole life beyond and through the sensationalized headlines, the caricature. Stridsberg’s intensity and love in writing Valerie’s life is something of its own manifesto.”

—Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines

“In Valerie, Sara Stridsberg has given us a wild ride through the haunted house of an infamous woman's memory, experience, and embodiment. A love-letter to the deep insanity of peak twentieth-century America, and testament to a life lived in its margins.”

—Elisa Albert, author of After Birth

“The thrilling spectacle, the muscles and bone, of a vibrant, living text . . . This novel of rare strength unleashes an irresistible seduction.” —Le Monde (France)

“Affectionate and incisive, compassionate and courageous.” —Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland)

“Brilliant, multi-layered, thrilling . . . a burning love letter with icy observation at its core.” —Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden)

“With [Valerie], Stridsberg proved that she is among the finest authors of contemporary Nordic literature.” —Aftenposten (Norway)

“Stridsberg's evocation of Valerie Solanas conjures images that are poetic and enchanting.” —Dagens Nyheter (Sweden)

“Stridsberg's language is brilliant; feverish yet clear. The depiction of the milieus of American workers, academics and artists from the 1940s to the 1980s is superb, but at the centre is the tender yet razor-sharp insight into the mind of a limitlessly fascinating individual.” —Deutschland Radio Kultur (Germany)

“Impressive and bewitching, [Valerie] is unquestionably one of the revelations of the publishing season.” —Le Nouveau Magazine Littéraire (France)

“At once a hagiography, an exercise in admiration, and a portrait of a marginal America, this passionate novel reveals the fate of the woman who wanted to shoot Andy Warhol.” —Lire (France)

“Urgent and poetic . . . fascinating literature.” —Bayerischer Rundfunk (Germany)

“Stridsberg excels in mixing documented facts with a liberated fiction in a feverish, vibrant prose.” —Nordic Council Award

From the Publisher

06/10/2019

The life of Valerie Solanas, who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and became famous when she shot Andy Warhol in 1968, is speculatively reconstructed in Stridsbergs’s inventive and stimulating novel, her American debut. Told in nearly a hundred short chapters that span almost 50 years, the book’s major focus is Valerie’s death in 1988 at the Bristol Hotel in San Francisco. Through an unnamed character called Narrator who allows Stridsberg to be in the room for historical events, the narrative returns to the Bristol Hotel again and again. Narrator questions deceased Valerie about her life; she also, in separate chapters, addresses the reader directly and addresses Valerie in the second person. Much of the story is told in dialogue—between Valerie and Warhol superstar Ultra Violet and between Valerie and her mother, Dorothy, who is also prominent in the novel. As each new piece of Stridsberg’s portrait of Valerie is added, it alters the big picture, provocatively. The novel is as much about how little one can understand other people as it is about Valerie’s life. Stridsberg entertainingly casts new light on both Solanas and on how society views pop culture. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-05-27
The English translation of a Swedish novel that has been longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

Valerie Solanas is most famous for trying to assassinate Andy Warhol in 1968. She is just slightly less famous for writing the SCUM Manifesto, a cri de coeur of outsider feminism. Solanas' life was not an especially happy one. She said she was sexually assaulted by her father and physically abused by her grandfather. When she first arrived in New York, she supported herself through panhandling and prostitution. While awaiting trial for attempted murder, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Among the vignettes of which this novel is composed are scenes in which the narrator visits Solanas in the Tenderloin hotel where she dies at the age of 52. Biographical fiction is not the same as biography—and Stridsberg is completely within her rights to turn Solanas into a figure of myth inhabiting a world of the author's own invention—but some of the choices Stridsberg makes are curious. For example, in real life, Solanas was born in Ventnor City, New Jersey. In this novel, Valerie grows up in Ventor, Georgia, a city surrounded by desert. It's as if Stridsberg wants to squeeze all of America into one imaginary place, and this makes Solanas seem generic in a way that she most definitely is not. It's true that this Valerie Solanas is often poetic and eloquent whereas the historical figure was not—a play she had written called Up Your Ass was at the center of her conflict with Warhol—but making beauty out of the hardship of Solanas' life seems inimical to her own work. Solanas was and is regarded as a serious radical theorist by a number of important feminists. She doesn't need rehabilitation as a figure of tragedy, nor does she need anyone to give her a voice.

For serious fans of European experimental fiction and Valerie Solanas completists.

Kirkus Reviews