Description

In a long, delirious monologue driven by bile and cocaine, a prostitute named Anúncia recounts the story of her life, remembering and sometimes inhabiting the men and women who left the deepest scars on her psyche—her absent father, her mentally disturbed mother, the son she never wanted, the parade of lovers like the poet and the philosopher—all the while drawing grand conclusions about the nature of sex, life, and death from her own experiences. In a world ravaged by pollution and unceasing war, the narrator’s acid tongue condemns anyone who believes that filth and depravity have more to do with copulation than the misery inflicted by exploitation and inequality.

“Art is a safe way of preserving life, making it less laughable, less miserable, even comical. Life would be unbearable if it couldn’t be narrated. Dribbled between one comma and another. A bonfire tells a story and continues. The fire goes out and continues. He who tells stories unravels in daydreams. Once upon a time. In the beginning, the Almighty created heaven and earth. The earth was void and empty. The worms had yet to corrupt God’s porous flesh. Now, post-apocalypse, the earth returns to the vacuum, to dullness. I look through the slot in the rotten wood window, mountains of salt getting lost slowly. I nurture myself on that loss, that natural erosion.”

In acidic, relentless, and sometimes dream-like prose, Barbieri conjures a figure at once singularly human and divine, an androgynous, eternal being made of viscera and utterance.