The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter

A succession of sounds: Doors opening and closing, the car engine starting, tires kicking up loose rock from the asphalt, then the silence again, always only silence for me. - Sarah Rose Etter, The Book of X

It is hard to encapsulate The Book of X in a few words. Eccentric? Strange? Beautifully gruesome? This book is undoubtedly an archetype of modern surrealism. The way Sarah Rose Etter creates a sharp contrast between the mundane daily life and the imaginary images (meat quarry, the sea of thighs, man store, jealousy removal centre, etc.) is breathtaking. Delving into this novel, I feel as if I were a curious outsider trying to have a peek into her world. This may come across as irrelevant but I was so enchanted by this novel that I have been in a so-called “book coma” for the last whole week.

Cassie was born with a knot in her stomach – a wicked deformity she was programmed to loathe, but at the end of the day, aren’t we all? As children, we were taught to embrace ourselves, to live in our wildest fantasy. On the blank canvas of childhood, we let our imagination roam free, beyond the confines of our earthly existence and the mundane humanity. However, as reality commences to snake into our rose-tinted vision, that sense of freedom gradually becomes eroded. As “adults”, we sluggishly waddle through life, our feet encumbered with experience, our heads full of wisdom. In the world of "grown-ups", there is no place for imagination. Adults do not dream of far-away lands. Adults do not drift off to another dimension. Adults…. live. We survive day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, slowly filling in our monotonous schedule with mundane tasks: do the dishes, go shopping, water our plants, etc. Stripped bare of our colourful minds, our flaws suddenly become more distinct than ever. Each day seems to be a constant battle between pain and bliss: We loathe ourselves for the flaws we bear, yet discretely relish in the thought that we are flawed, that we have something to blame for when the world collapses…