A heart full of black flies. The loneliness of a desert. Landscape of stones. Cowboys. Wild mustangs. An alphabet of bad experiences.

Everything reaches it’s end, certainly Valerie Solanas reached her’s in a sad hotel room “last stop for dying whores and junkies”, and with this creative novel Sara Stridsberg brings her back to life, in the only way writers can, through exploring her past and freely using creative imagination. Valerie Jean Solanas, feminist and author of The SCUM Manifesto shot Andy Warhol. Yes, that Valerie! Her story isn’t focused on Warhol, nor should it be. Instead, we are taking a trip into the underbelly of her existence. The early sexual molestation by her father, her years as a student of science working in a lab with animals, her keen intelligence battling her declining mental states, the prostitution, the institutions, arrest, her lonely death from pneumonia… One can imagine why she had a deep hatred for men, a defiled child grown into a woman with no reason to have faith in man. What was sex to her but survival, just like conversation, she could escape her body, go to a place where no one could touch her, she learned that at her father’s hands. A member of one in her club of hate, just like when she was little.

She didn’t succeed in her assassination attempt on Andy Warhol, but she hit her mark on that June day in 1968, his lungs, esophagus, spleen, liver and stomach were damaged and he never fully recovered despite living until his death from a heart attack in 1987 due to complications following gallbladder surgery. She wanted Warhol to produce a play, he passed it up- too outlandishly vulgar for him… he would pay for that brutal rejection! These are facts, but it would do good to research Valerie if you want more than fiction, her life wasn’t a pretty existence, and I couldn’t help but wonder who I would be in her shoes. I remember reading about her giving birth to a child but I digress… this novel is all over the place and I don’t think it’s due to the translator, I feel it is meant to make the reader feel they are on shaky ground. There seemed to be very little stability in her life, nor did she ever appear to get the chance to be a little girl. If her prostitution is distasteful, if she was too much, too vulgar, filled with rage, who else can you blame but her parents?

The author keeps saying ‘and if you did not have to die’, but she did and along with the years of decay, so too died her chance to be a writer, a scientist and worse was the end of her belief in herself. Maybe it’s not that she, like any of us, had to die, but so alone, in the ‘crap hotel’. What of her mother, Dorothy? Dorothy, Dorothy, are you there? Were you ever? There always needed to be a ‘fella’ didn’t there? Why didn’t you protect your daughter? It seems not even boarding schools, college was far enough away to change her fate. Her genius couldn’t save her, in fact, it likely fed the fury, for sometimes clarity is blinding.

She believed the world, due to men, had no place for a woman. She was a star that Warhol didn’t make, but who would forever be tied to him. Even years later she certainly didn’t seem to be sorry for her crime. He was simply a target all her years of pain honed in on. The novel is written almost like a dream, a terrible dream you can’t shake off. Soiled memories you want to deny, paste into a scrapbook and burn to ash, as good as forgetting. The shadow of death seems to be the only friend, at the end, in her corner. Death, an ever present companion, showing itself in the blood she coughs up into her hand. The years reach further back one moment, Dorothy and Valerie in the desert, caught up in her mother’s disastrous love affairs, ‘known for her bad taste and bad judgement’, and then bam, we’re in 1988 again, in a sad hotel. It’s too late, Valerie is doomed, you knew this from the first pages. So many years spent as one of the drowning under psychiatric care, just one of many on the fringes of society, one of the forgotten… we cannot change the ending. Catch a whiff of complete ruin as it runs through the pages.

Why couldn’t she have taken her degree, let her genius shine? Can dissecting the dead, the trajectory of their lives provide us with anything concrete when it’s all just fiction? Maybe. Maybe it’s as close as you can get sometimes. How can you not feel a bit unhinged after reading Valerie? Not all readers enjoy non-linear stories, for me this scattered way of writing fits Valerie’s disordered mind and life. I keep picking my brain wondering how different the outcome would be today, better or worse? Raw, painful, disturbing!

Publication Date: August 6, 2019

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I really tried to read this book several times and I just couldn't get through it. I almost never leave a book unfinished but this one is the exception.

A strange trip of a novel about the woman who attempted to kill Andy Warhol. Like many books dealing with mental illness, this one uses form to help to convey the confusion of mental illness. But that literary device sometimes works at the cost of readability.

Wow another Swedish author I am in awe of.
Valerie Solanas was a figure I was aware of (famously tried to assassinate Andy Warhol) but never truly understood her motivations. Stridsberg opened my eyes to the complexity of Solanas in a moving, yet disturbing manner. While the author clearly took liberties with her character's thought, I was hooked from the very first paragraphs.
Fascinating read.

So brilliant a literary novel that deserves all rather awards .Complex multilayered will be recommending to everyone an incredible five star read. #netgalley #fsg .

Valerie is an engrossing whirlwind, partially biographical...altered, twisted and fantastical. It's deeply rooted in sadness and encourages you to explore that emotion. Stridsberg's prose is fascinating.

Valerie Solinas, best known for her attempt to kill Andy Warhol and her SCUM Manifesto, was a tragically insane character. Probably never properly treated, even when she was in hospital at various times. This novel uses a non traditional narrative that really works for the imaginative fiction created under the guise of Valerie' s life. Fans of the whole Andy Warhol/ Factory era will not one to miss it although the story is fictional. I especially enjoyed the dialogue between Valerie and her doctor. Well done.

Copy provided by the Publisher and NetGalley

Very complex and the exact definition of literary.
One you must read for yourself. No review will give it justice.
Thank you NetGalley.

I loved this. I don't have much else to say so I'm going to repeat myself. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this.

Brilliant ~ Layered ~ Intellectual

tl:dr: Our fifteen minutes of fame can feel like a lifetime for some.

I've never wanted to read Swedish more than today when I finished up this book. This book is probably one of those classical described as literary. While the book isn't terribly long, you will want to pour over some of the languages. The text is layered and complex. There were moments when I was totally lost and had to start again. But, in some ways, that only made the book stronger.

The book is about the person who shot Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas. The author imagines scenes and situations with that real person. There is something so 60's art about creating fake conversations with a real person. I wondered if Stridsberg was drawn intellectually to Warhol and his peers who played with reality and artificiality.

The complexity of the text mirrors the complexity of the message. Solanes had real things to say about the position of women in her society and the way that fame is a position against women. Those issues about women in society have, sadly, not changed drastically in the decades since Warhol was shot. The complexity of this book brings focus to these issues. Solanas' life is seen as a result of the society she is in, and as a reader, you are inevitably led to thinking about how our society frames our own lives as women.

Wonderful, difficult read.

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.