![]() ![]() Even if it falls short of its ambitions, Bunjevac’s forceful, uncomfortable vision will linger with readers. Eerie, symbolic images fill each page: owls, snakes, eyes, the moon. The work, however, is stunning to look at, with elegant full-page illustrations, painstakingly crosshatched and stippled to resemble woodcuts or antique photographs. ![]() Bunjevac wrote and drew the volume to process sexual trauma she experienced as a girl in Serbia in the afterword, she dedicates the book to “all forgotten and nameless victims of sexual violence.” But this extended visit to the inner fantasy world of a disturbed mind may be too acutely real for many readers to take (and the surprise twist is a bit pat). This leads to dreamlike sexual encounters and strange visions, before the shock of an unreliable narrator revelation. ![]() While working as a janitor at a zoo, Benny develops an obsession with a former classmate, stalks her, then finds a sketchbook filled with evidence that she returns his interest. Bunjevac’s retelling follows Benny, a sexually deviant man who, coming across an alluring former classmate, concocts an elaborate, disturbing. This unsettling, horrific erotic fantasy begins with a hypnotic series of stories within stories: an unseen narrator tells the tale of Bezimena the Old, a wise woman in a mythic Grecian setting, who in turn sets into motion the story of Benny, an awkward, disturbed young man living in the early 20th century. The author’s jumping-off point is the myth of Artemis and Siproites, in which a young man is turned into a woman as a punishment for the attempted rape of one of Artemis’s virgin cohorts. ![]()
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