"Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking" by Han Smith

An audio book.

Each section is a numbered "Portrait". In an unnamed country (ex-USSR?) "the almost daughter" and some class-mates are interested in going to a casting session. They prepare, practicing poses. The men behind the cameras offer them deals - they have contacts. They overhear a man saying he's surprised that such average girls turn up. They say that one of them has an interesting melancholy face. The almost daughter is interested in the difference between whore and escort. Her mother is in contact with a Bristol women, learning English. Her brother looks at online porn.

There's a project to recover a monument from the river. She camps with Oksana (a rebellious classmate) on a dig to look for bones - "they're not lost because we're looking for them". There are people who think that hiding the military glory in museums, into the past, is an act of traitors. There's a gymnasium - people show off by exercising in the part outside. The girls are involved in a protest against glorifying the past, against pride and blamelessness. The girls are arrested, put in an institution, though not as bad a place as they'd been studying.

There are characters called "Woman with a cave inside her", "Ghost of the ghost of the ghost of the ghost" and "Ghost of the ghost of the atrocious ghost". Repetition doesn't end there - where conventional elegant writing would aviod repetition, this book glories in it - "the is the portrait of the althetics field outside the town, which was still the althetics field outside the town"; "the heaviest things were other things", "she had two knitted cardigans again, and one of them was the same and one was different; "Valia mouthed at her from behind the man, and what she mouthed was"; "which said most of the word for museum in tall letters. Only the last of the letters was missing" ; "So this is the portrait of the night before the casting, which starts as a portrait of the word for casting. On the night before the casting". Perhaps that's to do with English not being some character's first language.

"casting" means being set into a role- male/female. Men control the past. The girls try to be what the men want - futures abroad (Milan, etc) are hinted at.

I'm not convinced. I suppose I don't get it

Other reviews

• A K Blakemore (I like opacity and allusion probably more than most, and still found the lethargic pace of the novel’s early sections frustrating. By its close, however, I’d come to see the viscosity of the prose as essential to the project of a novel so attentive to the obfuscations and deceptions of propaganda.)
• volume.nz (Experimental and daring, this is literature that pushes at the edges of the novel, illustrating fiction’s role in excavating the past, emotionally and physically. The Goldsmith Prize judges commented: “Composed as a series of portraits, some fragmentary, all multi-faceted and allusory, Smith’s novel is a hallucinatory window into what it means to excavate the past in a world committed to its erasure. At once a poignant coming of age story and an exploration of how language is shaped by ideology)