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PRINT Luke Warde Alice Wickenden Over the course
of writing these pieces, Preciado began the process of legally and physically transitioning towards the “political fiction” of being male rather than female. An Apartment on Uranus Paul B. Preciado [Fitzcarraldo] Written primarily as a column for the French newspaper, Libération, and translated here by Charlotte Mandell, Paul B. Preciado’s essays are obsessed with borders. If you were to glance at the content list and attempt to distil its main interests, you would likely come up with the following: gender, cities, the State, legality. You might also get a taste of the sharp-wittedness, the humour, the delight – and the corresponding fury – that runs through Preciado’s lucid exploration of often highly charged theoretical ideas. ‘Journey To The End Of The Bed’, ‘Valentine’s Day Is Crap’… but also ‘Your Wheelchair Turns Me On’ and ‘Declaring a Uterus Strike’. Don’t take his joy in language as a sign that this collection isn’t deadly serious. What you might not get from this preliminary glance is the way these ideas spark together in Preciado’s writing. The way the trans body becomes the state becomes sex becomes refugee… Over the course of writing these pieces, Preciado began the process of legally and physically transitioning towards the “political fiction” of being male rather than female, which means that – sometimes as the main focus of the writing, sometimes not – they present a record: of the way he begins injecting himself with testosterone, of his flirtation with the name Marcos (which was abandoned by the next column following accusations of colonialist appropriation), and of his eventual claim of the ‘strange, absurdly commonplace’ name Paul. ‘It was necessary to destroy the legal fiction ‘Beatriz Preciado Ruiz’ in order to invent the legal fiction ‘Paul Beatriz Preciado’. So I am born for the second time...’ he writes at one point. That ‘the border is a space where identity is destroyed and produced’ is not a particularly original sentiment in and of itself, but here this idea is taken to places you could never imagine. The body, the border, the city: all of these get reframed and repositioned. Reading the pieces cover-to-cover means seeing the past few years of the world skip past at an unnerving pace. This is especially true for those pieces, which span from March 2013 to January 2018, that touch on contemporary events (such as the Catalonian uprisings and the 2016 US Presidential election), and which hindsight can make seem inevitable. How the world has changed – and is changing. This sense of unease, even horror, is very much the point of An Apartment on Uranus. The title refers to Uranism, a concept coined in 1864 to ‘legitimise a form of love that, at the time could get you hanged.’ I didn’t always agree with Preciado’s arguments, but as a challenge to viewpoints I didn’t even know I’d imbibed, as well as a collection that does things with language, it left me feeling like what I thought was Earth had been another planet all along. My copy is full of exclamation marks in the margins. AW No Authority: Writings from the Laureateship Anne Enright [University College Dublin Press] No Authority: Writings from the Laureateship is a brief collection of miscellaneous writings by 2017 Man Booker-Prize winner Anne Enright, who was appointed the inaugural Laureate of Irish Fiction (2015-18) by former Taoiseach Enda Kenny. Its publication precedes that of Enright’s much-awaited new novel, Actress, to be published by Faber in March 2020. The collection, a mixture of illuminating and often deeply personal lectures-cum-essays and short stories, probes the theme of silence in Irish women’s lives. The first essay, ‘Antigone in Galway’, is a searing meditation on some of the Irish state’s most ignominious history, in particular the Magdalene Laundries and Senator Martin McAleese’s recent report into how they were run, and how the women unjustly committed to them were (mis)treated. Enright lays bare the shameful discrepancies in how we honour the dead, interleaving the essay with apposite invocations of Sophocles’ Antigone. While some, Enright shows, are heroically ventriloquised – the essay opens with a description of the solemn repatriation of Easter Rising veteran Thomas Kent’s remains – others’ silence is left to stand: Enright recounts, in particular, the egregious neglect of nameless women and children by institutions like the Magdalene Laundries, both in life and in death. No Authority contains two short pieces of fiction. The first, ‘The Hotel’, is a disorienting little story which hauntingly evokes the presence of refugees in central Europe. The second, ‘Solstice’, is a subtly powerful story on grief and we struggle to articulate its effects. It’s no wonder Actress is so eagerly anticipated. LW 74