Blue Hunger by Viola Di Grado
Blue Hunger (2022) is award-winning Italian writer and translator Viola di Grado’s fifth novel. In Jamie Richards’ English translation, this short but electrifying book captures the life of a young Italian woman in Shanghai as she finds herself captivated by a beautiful, enigmatic woman named Xu.
After the death of her twin brother Ruben, the narrator arrives in Shanghai to live out his dream of becoming someone in China, all the while grappling with her own feelings of grief. In a city that “unfolds like a dream, an accumulation of images,” our narrator embarks on a feverish love affair with the mean and capricious Xu, who she meets in a club. Xu soon overpowers her every thought and desire.
When describing the object of her infatuation, the narrator shows both complete vulnerability and awareness of the unrequited, one-sided tilt of their relationship.
“She could play the harp and walk the most applauded runways. She could be a supportive girlfriend, the kind mentioned with teary eyes during family gatherings. She could be a lot of things. She is none of them. She's the person I love. She's the person who can't love me.”
The two begin an on-again, off-again relationship that sees the narrator pushed to the very brink, as pain and pleasure mingle with an overpowering sense of grief: grief that creates an all-encompassing need to be distracted, touched, eaten.
Reminiscent of the unbound nihilism of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2019), the exploration and boundary-pushing of female sexuality in Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020), and ripe with interconnected appetites like that of Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed (2021), Blue Hunger goes on to explore identity in a writhing blend of lust and pain.
Language and communication play an integral role both in the delivery of the novel, and in the evolving relationship between the narrator and Xu. As a translation from Italian to English, Blue Hunger is already one degree removed from its origins, just like the narrator in an unfamiliar setting. Having arrived from Italy to teach Italian to Chinese students, the narrator often remarks on language’s inability to find a point of connection and its capacity to multiply meaning, while Xu uses it to dominate the terms of their relationship by deciding not only what they talk about, but what language they text in.
“In bed I checked my phone and found messages from Xu. They were in Chinese. It was her way of dominating me. Making herself indecipherable, forcing me to make the effort of comprehension. I opened the dictionary app, then changed my mind and closed it. I cursed her under my breath: sadist, narcissist. Cursing to myself was the only time I still used Italian.”
Her position as a language teacher also gives the narrator the ability (and the authority) to remark on more nuanced details of Chinese and the ways in which its translation to Italian (or in our case, English) can place us out of context, out of time and place.
“I walked down the crowded halls, my head down, immersed in my confusion. It was a confusion without words, in no language. And Chinese is an invertebrate language, like a snake. It lacks the backbone of conjugations. The grammatical difference between doing something and already having done it, between past, present, and future, is located outside the verb. It's a pros-thesis, a particle to append at will. Time is a detail to relate only when absolutely necessary. The syntax doesn't require it. In short, in Chinese, there's no difference between ‘Ruben is my brother’ and ‘Ruben was my brother.’ Between ‘Xu loves me’ and ‘Xu used to love me,’ for a while, at certain moments, in her room or out in the city, on the asphalt, on a hard bed in a high-rise hotel.”
However, in the same way that the narrator understands language’s enduring role in defining the self, so too does she acknowledge that the opposite is also true: that words can be stripped down to their essence as nothing but tools, when desperate use undermines their very meaning.
“I knew very well that past a certain pain threshold, words regress, lose communicative value, serve only to release tension, like the crying of newborns.”
In Blue Hunger, language therefore is not only a mode of communication – it is a way of understanding one’s self, one’s relation to others and their lives, and ultimately one’s sense of belonging. Language also becomes borderless, anything that’s used for communication – in this case, the feverish, obsessive sex life of the two young women attempting to exorcise their own demons. As the two meet in public, in abandoned slaughter houses and dilapidated factories, to let themselves be consumed by desire – and each other – the corporeal mechanics of sex transform into language itself.
Di Grado writes these scenes of extremes superimposed on poignant evocations of loss. Her strength as a writer lies in the layers of metaphors that weave into a narrative fabric thick with intertwined meaning. These metaphors are sometimes more subtle – like in 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”), and sometimes less subtle – like in the narrator asking Xu to literally eat her, then wondering to herself whether this surprising request has deeper connotations:
“Was it just a metaphor, what I said to her? The ultimate metaphor for our relationship? I'm still trying to figure it out. But understanding is a cold exercise. Understanding is the opposite of hunger. The opposite of desire. Xu bit me again. A rivulet of dark blood, warm like chocolate sauce, trickled down to my navel.”
The result is a novel that is pushed on by the self-imposed suffering of the narrator as well as her substitution of grief with reckless desire, towards a boiling point that promises the final narrative climax: will she allow herself to remain for the consumption of others? Or will she imagine another life for herself, unrestrained by the demands of loss and longing? Blue Hunger explores these questions and many more in the form of a dizzying, intricate study of grief, displacement, obsession and desire under the glittering veneer of Shanghai.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer and book reviewer from Hungary, currently residing in Naarm/Melbourne. She has been a reader all her life, and she finds unexplainable joy in forcing literary revelations into the hands of friends, family, and strangers. When she's not reading or writing, she likes to even out her nerdy side by doing martial arts or going for hikes. You can find her online at fruzsinagal.com.