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.