When we approach reading an object like Green Girl, we must issue a caveat to the reader: we are in the presence of an formless, rough, and polymorphic novel. But this lack of finish reflects the author’s intention, Kate Zambreno.
Green Girl is her debut novel, originally published in the United States in 2011, and now offered in Federica Principi’s translation in Italy for nottetempo.
What is a Green Girl?
What is a Green Girl? The most faithful translation could be “an immature girl,” a woman not yet tempered by the difficulties of life. The plot is rather slender and revolves around the figure of Ruth, a young American transplanted to London.
Like many girls barely more than twenty, Ruth does not know what to do with her life. To make ends meet she works as a perfume clerk at “Horrids.” It is unnecessary to spell out the reason for the mangling of the name of the world’s most famous department stores.
But even in her job she consistently fails at her sole mission, which is to sell to women—young as she is, or older—the fragrance “Desire.”
The importance of staging a role to understand who we are
By night, instead, she lives a life inspired by the Nouvelle Vague. An existence that experiments with every field of feeling, especially sex, though excluding any political value from this experimentation, for that time is no longer the era, no longer the historical moment.
The story of Ruth is narrated by an unnamed voice, an omniscient narrator at once ferocious and deeply critical, almost moralizing, at times maternal. Here unfolds the most interesting mechanism of the entire novel. We are in the presence of a tale that could have been written by a director grappling with the leadership of his crew. Zambreno’s cinematic prowess is striking, but so too is the question that underpins this pursuit.
Whose direction is it?
Is there room for autonomy of action, or of thought, within the artifices tied to the image that a woman offers to the world, and thus of herself? And whose direction is it? Are we all externally steered?
Ruth often does not grasp her own intrinsic motivations, which push her into action and frequently propel her into humiliating situations. It seems that, once she begins a path, whether casual sex or recreational drug use, she cannot understand how she arrived at making such a choice.
There is a weariness in her doing, and likewise a meticulous determination, which can be explained only by the awareness of never being able to access the true nature of her own identity.
Are we all actors?
Are we all actors? And in what other way could we understand who we are if not by playing different roles?
This central question is carried by an unmistakable style. Incomplete sentences, lack of punctuation, repetitions of fragments that possess the cadence of hypnosis. A deliberate syntactic variation, which at times may appear cloying and irritating, but which serves to emphasize a sense of fragility that permeates the entire book. And which spills into the lives of all of us, the readers.
Green girl is undeniably a manifesto for that generation trying to define its place in the world, but also for all preceding generations, who perhaps have stopped looking for that place, whether because they earned it, or because they are tired of asking questions (this second hypothesis more probable). At least the capacity to look back and question ourselves, who we are or were not, whether we could have been different, whether this search ultimately makes sense or whether it is better to hush and simply live.
