Valerie: or, The Faculty of Dreams

June 10, 2019
The life of Valerie Solanas, who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and became famous when she shot Andy Warhol in 1968, is speculatively reconstructed in Stridsbergs’s inventive and stimulating novel, her American debut. Told in nearly a hundred short chapters that span almost 50 years, the book’s major focus is Valerie’s death in 1988 at the Bristol Hotel in San Francisco. Through an unnamed character called Narrator who allows Stridsberg to be in the room for historical events, the narrative returns to the Bristol Hotel again and again. Narrator questions deceased Valerie about her life; she also, in separate chapters, addresses the reader directly and addresses Valerie in the second person. Much of the story is told in dialogue—between Valerie and Warhol superstar Ultra Violet and between Valerie and her mother, Dorothy, who is also prominent in the novel. As each new piece of Stridsberg’s portrait of Valerie is added, it alters the big picture, provocatively. The novel is as much about how little one can understand other people as it is about Valerie’s life. Stridsberg entertainingly casts new light on both Solanas and on how society views pop culture.

June 15, 2019
The English translation of a Swedish novel that has been longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Valerie Solanas is most famous for trying to assassinate Andy Warhol in 1968. She is just slightly less famous for writing the SCUM Manifesto, a cri de coeur of outsider feminism. Solanas' life was not an especially happy one. She said she was sexually assaulted by her father and physically abused by her grandfather. When she first arrived in New York, she supported herself through panhandling and prostitution. While awaiting trial for attempted murder, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Among the vignettes of which this novel is composed are scenes in which the narrator visits Solanas in the Tenderloin hotel where she dies at the age of 52. Biographical fiction is not the same as biography--and Stridsberg is completely within her rights to turn Solanas into a figure of myth inhabiting a world of the author's own invention--but some of the choices Stridsberg makes are curious. For example, in real life, Solanas was born in Ventnor City, New Jersey. In this novel, Valerie grows up in Ventor, Georgia, a city surrounded by desert. It's as if Stridsberg wants to squeeze all of America into one imaginary place, and this makes Solanas seem generic in a way that she most definitely is not. It's true that this Valerie Solanas is often poetic and eloquent whereas the historical figure was not--a play she had written called Up Your Ass was at the center of her conflict with Warhol--but making beauty out of the hardship of Solanas' life seems inimical to her own work. Solanas was and is regarded as a serious radical theorist by a number of important feminists. She doesn't need rehabilitation as a figure of tragedy, nor does she need anyone to give her a voice. For serious fans of European experimental fiction and Valerie Solanas completists.

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August 1, 2019

A. You want a cohesive narrative. B. You believe character development is important. C. You're not sure who Silk Boy is. D. You are positive there is no desert in the state of Georgia. E: You think Dorothy was a bad mother. F: You want to learn more about CosmoGirl. Narrator: You seem to be fixated on story. Valerie: You seem more interested in form and structure than telling my story. Narrator: I like to take liberties. Valerie: I thought this novel was going to be about me. Narrator: It is. I'm watching you die and watching you grow up. Valerie: I can't tell which part came first, you're mixing it all up. Narrator: It's more fun this way. Valerie: My life was not fun. Narrator: No, that's why I focus on the bodily fluids so much. Valerie: Do you think I'm crazy? Narrator: That's for Dr. Ruth Cooper to decide. Why am I only allowed to make speeches and proclamations? Narrator: Because you wrote a manifesto, the SCUM Manifesto. VERDICT Editor: A fictionalized account of radical feminist Valerie Solanos from former Swedish Academy member Stridsberg. Valerie: I think the movie they made about me, I Shot Andy Warhol, was better. Maybe you should watch that instead. [See Prepub Alert, 2/4/19.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2019
First published in Swedish in 2006, then translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner as The Faculty of Dreams and longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker Prize, and now available in the United States as Valerie, Stridsberg's experimental novel explores the life and psyche of Valerie Solanas, author of the feminist SCUM Manifesto and famous for shooting Andy Warhol. Bouncing back and forth through time, Stridsberg enters a seedy San Francisco motel room during Valerie's final days, eavesdrops on young Valerie's conversations with Dorothy (her suicidal mother), and watches the trial where a belligerent Valerie condemns the conventions of normalcy. Stridsberg describes the book as literary fantasy, and indeed, nearly everything about it?from the arid desert near Valerie and Dorothy's Georgia home to the author's conversations with abject Valerie, dirty on her deathbed?is imagined. Its pages are full of references to blood, piss, and vomit, which set the stage for this punk-rock myth. Valerie paints its troubled protagonist as feminist hero, thumbing her nose at the law, celebrity, the medical establishment, and more.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)