When the brown paper package containing Alvina Chamberland’s Love The World or Get Killed Trying arrived at my address in Dublin, it was a rainy day in late spring, and I had just finished Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Parade. Though both are marketed as autofiction, Cusk and Chamberland’s novels have very little in common. Despite Cusk’s clear intelligence and stylistic mastery, Parade made little impression on me. In trying to work out why such an objectively impressive book had, like much contemporary literary fiction, left me feeling apathetic, I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s question in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, which she uses as a litmus test for books she reads: ‘Is life like this?’ It’s an astute question because it points to the mysterious subjectivity at the heart of all criticism. There is no single objective way of saying what life is like or what it looks like when mirrored in art. There are surely people for whom life is like an endless procession of insightful conversations with artists and curators in well-furnished rooms, and maybe these are the people Cusk’s relentless good taste and icy intellectualism speaks to. Unfortunately, I am not one of them.
It was in this context that I unwrapped Chamberland’s Love The World Or Get Killed Trying and looked with tentative hope at the cover, on which the author poses nude on a lacquered, pearlescent surface that looks like an AI-generated dream of the inside of an oyster. It’s like a futuristic reimagining of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, or ‘Pamela Anderson meets Björk’, as Chamberland accurately describes it in the afterword. It’s a good advert—avant-garde, sexy, and strange, much like the book itself.
Love the World or Get Killed Trying flouts the rules. It makes up words, like ‘marvelocity’ and ‘thoughtfeelings’. It’s overwrought, repetitive, rash; it rises to heights of operatic intensity and delivers long, meandering anecdotes. All of this only adds to the charisma of the book and the rare urgency it is charged with. The autofictional novel follows the heroine, Alvina Chamberland, a trans woman in crisis at the imminent prospect of turning thirty, as she travels around Iceland, Paris, and Berlin. It documents the dangers of moving through the world in the body of a trans woman, the brutality of being caught in the cracks of other people’s set ideas of who you should be. Alvina’s world is filled with disappointing club nights, lame DJs, and awful men who try to humiliate and harm her. It’s a dark, violent, at times harrowing book that begins with a rape scene; to say that reading it is fun seems wrong, and yet it is, because it’s shot through with a keen and exuberant sense of humour: ‘I have been known to allow men to swiftly pull me back on a slingshot and then let go, as I catapult into the air, hitting the ground, THUD. That’s how I’ve defined A Fling.’
Chamberland is an attentive observer. She has an eye for spotting the resonant detail and not overexplaining it: ‘He tells me only 1 in 1000 people in Iceland are homophobic. He himself has many gay friends and relatives.’ Sometimes rage breaks through her restraint. ‘LISTEN UP, STRAIGHT SOFTBOYS, NEUROTIC NICE GUYS WHO DO NOTHING…’ Her extremism is hard to resist. Rob Doyle’s blurb rightly situates Chamberland as an heir to Valerie Solanas, whose brand of uncompromising and problematic brilliance seems to have gone out of fashion. It’s an apt comparison, particularly given that the novel’s frame of reference is rooted in the East Village scene of the 1960s. ‘Gone are the days of Candy Darling and Lou Reed,’ Chamberland laments. ‘Indeed, the avant-garde has never been as rigid, gentrified, boring and bourgeois as it is today.’ It’s a throwaway comment, part of a complaint that ‘If I go to the theatre, the reading, the vernissage, zero men will flirt with the only trans girl in the room. However, on my way home four men will wolf-whistle or holler.’ But it gets at something that runs deep in this novel: a sense of nostalgia, a yearning for real counter-cultural romance.
I had the impression, as I read on, of a narrator watching from deep within the culture as a tide of mediocrity sweeps over everything. Nothing is safe. Even the queer community, a historical refuge for eccentrics and geniuses, has become mainstream and sanitised. Descriptions of dull Pride parties stand in stark contrast to a vanished Warholian Wonderland. This can’t be stopped, Chamberland seems to say; patriarchy and capitalism have colluded to flatten our desires, to limit our minds and ruin our landscapes. ‘Reykjavik, are you another city where another old building is being torn down to make room for a monstrous generic abomination? I am not an architect, but I can already place my bets on the construction of a sterile, beige and metallic Scandinavian Design temple, dedicated to the fear of inflicting stains and the feeling of being dead inside!’ Chamberland’s demonisation of banality in all its forms is refreshing because banality, by its nature, usually goes by unnoticed. It’s characterised not by any malign presence but by the absence of anything new or interesting.
This brings me back to what I mentioned at the start: my vague feeling of apathy towards a lot of contemporary literary fiction. I’m not trying to offer any grand sweeping theory about the sorry state of art in today’s society, only to diagnose something personal, to get to the bottom of why so many books, despite their obvious merits, fail to leave any trace on my mind. It’s hard to spot an absence until you look away and find the very thing that you were missing elsewhere. Reading Alvina Chamberland’s novel revealed to me the endemic lack of fun I had been finding in the world of literary fiction. The kind of fun I’m talking about is the reason her novel is distinctive and alive, with all its flaws, rather than existing as a formally perfect mausoleum. It’s a fun that’s born of the courage to take risks. Taking risks means including random sexual reveries about Cristiano Ronaldo in your novel; it means switching between the tone of a punk manifesto and a strange lyricism reminiscent of Clarice Lispector; it means composing your novel as a love letter to the reader, ending with ‘a scream of love!’
‘Dear reader, I am going to be completely honest with you,’ Chamberland writes. ‘In the creation of this body of work, I have not always been disciplined enough to write the proper sentences in real time. Sometimes life happens and all I am able to jot down is the half-gibberish of fragmentary morning thoughts.’ This confession is worth questioning, because Chamberland’s writing is always purposeful. Her aesthetic of rawness is the product of a series of artistic decisions that are every bit as deliberate as the polish favoured by a more conventional narrative. She is participating in a sacred tradition of slapdash autofiction: Valerie Solanas, Eve Babitz, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker. They all seek to remind us of a fact too many novelists obscure: that behind every piece of writing there is a person whose experience of being alive is as baffling and bitty as our own.
Chamberland is aware of the commercial processes that dictate what kind of novels are available to us: ‘It is the gatekeeping publishers who hinder our freedom. They do not wish to put you through the chaos that lives within without a sense of solidness.’ Of course, sometimes we want to read a book with a sense of solidness, so it’s good that there are so many to choose from. But a book like Love The World or Get Killed Trying, an unexpurgated examination of a chaotic life, feels as rare as it is necessary.