Hidden Life

For all its eccentricity and absurdism, the French poet Laura Vazquez’s debut novel, The Endless Week, grounds itself in the familiar. The quotidian is its object and its adversary. From this Vazquez gleans her speculative material, which could be classified as the hidden life of things and people, a series of micro-inquiries into objects, rooms, body parts, names, terrors and thoughts. Rarely have I read a novel in which so much of what I take for granted – bathrooms, whales, shadows, DMs – is shown to ferry messages from eternity. This is a novel that fabricates its own struts and connectors, a deep (and deeply anxious) inventory of modern subjectivity that feels more contemporary – and less self-satisfied – than any so-called ‘internet novel’ I’ve yet read.