Blue Hunger

November 28, 2022
Di Grado (Hollow Heart) delivers a sensuous and biting account of a young woman from Rome who, in the throes of grief, leaves home to teach Italian in Shanghai, where she falls in lust with a student at the language school. The unnamed narrator’s recently deceased twin brother had long dreamed to open an Italian restaurant in China; there, she thinks more of him than of herself. She dwells in a part of the city called the French Concession, land that had been apportioned in 1849 as a port of call for Westerners. It’s an apt setting for the liminal, vaguely transactional relationship between the habitually acquiescent narrator and Xu, a beautiful former model and a bit of a sadist (“Her touch,” Di Grado writes, “was stiff and imperious, like the pat you reward a dog with for staying put”). The book offers many of the pleasures of a Mary Gaitskill sex romp, though the author’s wearying reliance on vulgarity for the sake of edginess and pervading sense of dire emptiness don’t help distinguish it from current erotic obsession novels. Still, it’s worth indulging in this visceral story about a woman’s difficulty with finding satisfaction, sexual and otherwise. Agent: Sandra Pareja, Casanovas & Lynch.

February 1, 2023
A young woman flees from Rome to Shanghai after the death of her twin brother in this haunting tale by Italian author Di Grado. Six months after her brother Ruben's death from a heart defect, the unnamed narrator leaves her boyfriend--as she says, "He was nice, but nice things were of no use to me anymore"--and moves to Shanghai, where her brother had longed to become a chef. She supports herself by teaching Italian to Chinese students whose grades aren't high enough for them to learn English, and at a club for Westerners, she meets a brittle, opaque woman named Xu. They begin an affair, and Xu's treatment of the narrator becomes increasingly brutal over the long autumn and winter through which their relationship unfolds. "She's the person I love. She's the person who can't love me," the narrator writes. They meet in Xu's garbage-filled apartment and in an abandoned slaughterhouse, where, during their rendezvous, Xu savagely bites her. The narrator experiences China as "the country of philosophy and sex dolls" and Shanghai as a feverish dreamscape, a place of "water the color of arsenic." In spite of all this, she thinks to herself, "I was in China, halfway across the world, but alas, I was still me." While some readers may find the novel repetitious and repellent, it accurately depicts the state of mind of its bereaved heroine, as the city and her relationship with Xu mirror her descent into a deep depression and her gradual climb back into a version of her former life. An erotic and disturbing depiction of the effects of grief.

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February 15, 2023
In this novel's opening sentence, the narrator explains that when her lover Xu, ""naked and bad,"" bites her, ""everything is good."" Naked, bad, good, and biting are apt adjectives to describe the world captured in DiGrado's (Hollow Heart, 2019) fourth novel translated from the Italian. Mourning the death of her twin brother by taking the trip he dreamed of from Rome to Shanghai, the narrator is bounced around equally by the city's spectacular imagery and by Xu's off-again-on-again love. The narrator cocoons in her hard-to-find hotel, waiting for a typhoon to pass or for a WhatsApp chat from Xu with meeting instructions, both events having the same emotional effect. As their relationship deepens, Xu brings the narrator to empty, repurposed buildings, gives her yellow pills, and erotically bites her with the strength to draw blood. Readers will be fascinated by the novel's scenery, psychological acuity, and even of Xu's room, filled with rotting food that she needs around. Queerness, grief, isolation, dependence, and love merge in this novel of geographically-based healing and descent.

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