“I’ll offer you my spleen…” says 35-year-old unemployed Emma to San. That’s how a series of weird transactions takes place between Emma and San, the neighborhood’s strange junk dealer, who is interested in buying Emma’s spleen, wisdom teeth, her love letters and, in the end, her mouth… As San is gradually deconstructing Emma, buying her piece by piece, another story, Emma’s love affair with L.R., a man who intended to reconstruct her wanting body, emerges.
Walking the line of dehumanizing sexual exploitation and unconditional love, Rokou dives into the cunning, obscure depths of desire. What is the prize of one’s heart? How do you deconstruct someone in order to reach his core? Do flying plants exist? Can you give birth to a book? Sharp, surreal and with lyrical moments, her vibrant first novel provokes the unsettling, and at times disturbing, feeling one has when reading Yoko Ogawa’s stories or Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut novel The Discomfort of Evening…
“When reading The End of Hunger one has the impression of entering a merry-go-round, where unforeseen emotions, mythos and cunning lyricism endlessly swirl; they won’t stop spinning until the very end of the novel” ―A. Stergiopoulos, The Magazine
Ikaros, 2018, 192 p.
