Márcia Barbieri’s Provocative Literary Work ‘The Whore’

Description

Sublunary Editions, paperback

Translated by Adrian Minckley

Publication Date: March 7, 2023

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In a long, delirious monologue driven by bile and cocaine, a prostitute named Anúncia recounts the story of her life, remembering and sometimes inhabiting the men and women who left the deepest scars on her psyche—her absent father, her mentally disturbed mother, the son she never wanted, the parade of lovers like the poet and the philosopher—all the while drawing grand conclusions about the nature of sex, life, and death from her own experiences. In a world ravaged by pollution and unceasing war, the narrator’s acid tongue condemns anyone who believes that filth and depravity have more to do with copulation than the misery inflicted by exploitation and inequality.

In acidic, relentless, and sometimes dream-like prose, Barbieri conjures a figure at once singularly human and divine, an androgynous, eternal being made of viscera and utterance. The Whore, more than anything, is an interrogation of interiority, and the ways in which the emotional and spiritual interior is not only inseparable from one’s physical form, but, in fact, strengthened by acknowledgement of the body.

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