Unfurls with the smooth uncanniness of a dream. Everything feels lucid & coherent—perhaps a bit heightened, but also vaguely familiar—until the moment something is just off enough that the glassy facade shatters, unveiling an abyss of nightmarish unreality.

Think Nightwood, think Two Serious Ladies, even if Serre never quite reaches those heights (who does?). But what it most brought to mind was Wedekind's Mine-Haha: or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, a parable(?) similarly set in a boarding school that also queasily fuses sequestration in a lush eden with a subversive eroticism & uneasy sense of surveillance—& refuses easy interpretations at every turn.

The ostensible plain-spokeness & simplicity of the language (at least in Hutchinson's translation) places extra emphasis on individual words for meaning, & I became attuned to the slipperiness of signification in a way I don't encounter often outside poetry. The constant application of "devour" to the titular trio's behavior, for instance, had me convinced for a while this might be a vampire tale, perhaps a glimpse into the afterlives of Dracula's three brides. Is it? Most likely, no. But it also seems as possible as any other explanation...

But, little by little, they're overcome with lust. It's no longer enough that he turns up at night, they want him there in the daytime, too. They him all to themselves. They want him with no past and no other life than the love they feel for him.

Weird and dreamy and cool, like being gently drunk while watching a foreign art film written by a poet.

Those naughty governesses...

if this were published a hundred years ago, this view of women's sexuality would have been risqué and daring.

but it was the '90s, so it's just annoying.

this is a book about three, well, governesses, who are often f*cking and even more naked.

but in reality, it is a novella-length excuse to have the most insane style i have ever read. if you can handle prolific instances of the words "thatch" and "slit" and "member" and "his sex" (guh) you're a better reader than i.

because i was gagging like a sitcom reaction GIF.

i had no sense of these girls, of their lives, of the people around them. even worse, i know the latter two were thematically intended but that didn't make it a pleasure to read...do you know how hard it is to make anything i can say in a pretentious manner not a positive for me? all i have is my pretentiousness.

this book made me lose everything.

this is a world of sex-obsessed creeps doing amoral sh*t elegantly (so slightly better than real life for that last one.

the ending

Spoiler

(the governesses disappear when no longer watched by a specific person)

is cool but also kind of nonsensical in context - throughout the rest of the book, the governesses exist as perceptions, but by many people. they are always flat, always the net weight of others' assumptions, but each of these caricatures is brought about by the needs of the person doing the perceiving.

does that make sense? i'm kind of tipsy. i didn't want to write this review.

bottom line: turns out not every book that's trying very hard is good! who knew.

Nope, I have absolutely no idea what happened in this story. A little hedonistic, a little sexually explicit, a little fantasy. Perhaps some governesses and an other people living in a mansion somewhere, but why or how - I have no idea. None of it made sense.