The narrator navigates the contemporary queer scene of Parisian bars and nightlife, where they meet their friends. They live on the eighteenth floor of a building, in an apartment where every room is overtaken by plants and trees in perpetual growth. By day, they work as a receptionist, leveraging their apparent femininity. One evening in a café, they meet an English-speaking man who regularly visits Paris for his work as a composer. This encounter sparks a complex relationship, marked by tensions between two feminist cultures (French feminism and that of a "Northern" European city) and between two languages, bringing in issues of linguistic dominance that intersect with gender dynamics. In this ever-shifting, transformative narrative, the author explores new ways of inhabiting language and transcending binaries—whether of gender or the divide between human and non-human. The novel interrogates linguistic norms and how they are inscribed in bodies and sexualities.
Camille Cornu’s writing is both abundant and controlled, serving a narrative that continually surprises, where plants infiltrate daily life and blur the boundaries between dream and reality. A fascinating and deeply contemporary book that follows a character breaking away from norms and categories, inventing a new language, and forging novel alliances with plants.
