Nelly Arcan: Putain | Whore (2001)

There's something seriously wrong with the cover of this book: this is very deceptive marketing. The male hand down the young girl's underpants suggests titillation, a sexy read, although this is anything but that. It's disturbing, written as if in a frenzy, as if the narrator is at the end of her rope. Which is, I admit, an unfortunate way to phrase it because eight years after the publication of this novel Nelly Arcan, at the age of 36, hanged herself in her apartment in Montréal.

This is autofiction: much of the way of life described here was actually lived, and many of the feelings described were actually felt. Arcan went to the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM) to study Literature, and she had access to a reasonably comfortable lifestyle because of the prostitution which financed it.

This is not a novel with a plot as such, it's more of a howl of rage against the nature of the world, her parents, and men in general. It's not a comfortable read both because of its subject matter and the style in which it's written: there are no speech marks, the paragraphs are long, and the sentences are very, very long, rambling on and on at the speed of thought, repeating, digressing, hating.

The narrator had a hypocritical religious upbringing, her mother lying in a larval state most of the time, her very pious father having little communication with his wife. And the narrator doesn't mince her words: free from her parents, she sucks thousands of dicks, is fucked up the ass according to the whim of the client, has her face covered in sperm, and the unseen bag under the sink is emptied when it's full of wet tissues and spent condoms. Although some of the regular customers are remembered for their idiosyncrasies, most of them are viewed as if items on a conveyor belt, hungry for gratification, deceiving themselves that the prostitute is enjoying it, that she has an orgasm, that they make her wet. Many of the activities are as play-acting, with the narrator as the key actor, faking sighs, faking orgasm.

And she generalises, sees all women as types of prostitute, sees most human interactions on an economic basis, goes to a psychotherapist who doesn't seem interested in her, envisages the day when she'll meet her father as a client at the door. Her 'friends' are not the students she studies with, but the prostitutes she shares more life history with, with whom she can have a drink and maybe laugh about dick sizes. It seems unsurprising that she frequently mentions suicide in her ramblings.

I was a little surprised to find that not a single book of Nelly Arcan's appears in the Library of Congress catalog, and that the translation of this work – Whore – doesn't seem to be in the British Library catalogue: Putain may make for a rocky ride, but it is undoubtedly a major work of French Canadian literature.