

The Second Substance
Anne Lardeux, Coach House Books, 2022
Oie de Cravan, Nullica, 2021
Rural squatters seek a freer life on the ashes of petrocivilization
Lardeux considers how we atrophy and flourish, how we survive and decay, how we inhabit the substance of which we are made.
By turns sensual and poetic, The Second Substance is a book of images and ideas tied together by a thin plot… has a haunting and vulnerable quality…
Rendered with a wondrous, ambient dread by translator Pablo Strauss… a beguiling, bawdy chronicle of the lives orbiting an anarchist squat… The overall effect is one of absolute atmosphere, in which the bleak, necropastoral landscape — from junkyards to derelict nuclear power plants — is as integral to the novel’s emotional heart as its vivid characters… Claims a unique corner of its own within the wide field of contemporary dystopian lit.
Channels the same sensual ennui that powered the music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor in Mile End during the early 2000s, as it explores the intersections of sex, radicalism, purpose and resistance among a commune of squatters in an abandoned gas station on the city’s outskirts.
Anne Lardeux offers nourishment and bitterness … the energy of the prose stokes a flame, and the slowness of change tempers it … a novel for those who yearn, those who tire of digital cities, those returning to the body.
A paragraph
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