Baise-Moi (Rape Me)

Virginie Despentes is an anti-stylist. In her prose, she tries to capture the rhythm of the popular, nonliterary mind. She's against aestheticism and the literary aesthetic, much like the avant-garde writer Cathy Acker was. What she hopes to do in this book is to enter directly into the minds of alienated, abject characters, without poeticizing them. This is a very difficult task, and she succeeds beautifully. The translator tried to match this naked, gritty voice as exactly as possible. Those readers who didn't like the book or its style obviously didn't get it, or had to shut their minds off to this harrowing experience of alienation. But this is a very human, deeply touching book. It's brave and uncompromising. The French understood this, but the book has been sadly neglected in this country.