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Thora Hjorleifsdottirs brilliantly uneasy new novel,Magma,opens with chlamydia.
He demands to know who shes slept with.
I didnt know it would be such a big deal, she thinks.
Its not like its incurable.
Nobodys going to die.
Its the kind of ambivalent understatement about sex and its fallout that made Lena DunhamsGirlsand Phoebe Waller-BridgesFleabaginto cultural juggernauts.
For such characters, ironic detachment while recounting the pleasure and humiliations of sex constitute personal agency.
But inMagma, as in life, agency can be a brutal delusion.
I kept wanting to take pictures of the book and post them on Twitter and Instagram.
Theyve been hooking up but arent really a couple.
She notes the murkiness of their arrangement: We arent together, but Im with him all the time.
From there, we see Liljas boundaries repeatedly challenged and then violated.
But sometimes he wants me to rest on my knees while he pees over my head.
Once, he peed in my mouth.
I didnt like that.
In Oral Sex, he sarcastically berates her when she wants to stop during sex.
Lilja also feels gratified by his sexual desire for her.
Its almost automatic how he just slips in.
Then hes so gentle that I feel a sting of gratitude.
It was like an extreme version of wiping in the wrong direction.
But he was so horny and so hungry for me that he couldnt stop before he got off.
But I cant control myself Im always crying always sensitive always horrible.
A minimalism of debasement.
InMagma, though, the cumulative effect of many such self-recriminations is a sense of dramatic irony.
The terrifying way that intimate partner abuse can feel banal.
Its not all dire.
There is a mordant humor here.
One feels, around Liljas earnestness, the authors impeccable timing.
Then, in the next chapter, wryly titled Willpower II: For about fifteen minutes.
The humor sneaks up on you; its funny because its not really funny at all.
One way or another, we all lose our virginity somehow.
That would be a sly form of victim blaming.
And to the brutalized, theres nothing more appealing than someone who doesnt seem to need them.
Lilja stays for the same reason so many of us stay because of internalized abuser logic.
We stay, too, because it feels like a choice we are making.
