every sentence of this novel was like a punch to the gut. it reminded me of the primal reasons for why we read literature: for someone else to uphold a mirror to us and allow us to in turn learn and understand ourselves.
in this novel, the self is destroyed and built up again and again. g.h's intense obsession with the roach and the spiralling psychological deconstruction that follows is remniscient of julai kristeva's powers of horror, particularly her theory of abjection. according to kristeva, disgusting things such as bodily fluids and vermin exist for us to form a sense of identity as opposed to them. Here, the narrator learns instead to flip this, and first search for them-self within the abjection of the roach and its fluids, before then learning to lose them-self in the face of the roach and its ancient abjection. freedom and ascension is achieved through delving into the black pool of vast nothingness encapsulated in the roach's beady eyes. it is only human ego that makes us cling onto the constricts of time and fears that colour one's identity, and only through wading through the dregs that we try so hard to reject that holiness is attained, which the narrator tries to achieve through a shocking act of ingestion and expulsion (a scene that made me shiver to the pits of my stomach, a rare feat for a book to do to me), recalling Kristeva: ' "I" am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit"