Blue Hunger

Reviews

Blue Hunger is irresistible, evocative, dripping with desire, and brilliantly written—Viola Di Grado is a genius. Blue Hunger is a most vibrant novel about lust: beautifully written and full of sensuous images, Viola Di Grado’s book is a powerful literary journey into food and sex and the city. In depicting the constant foreignness of falling in love, Di Grado reveals herself as a true master of style. Viola Di Grado is, most importantly, a powerful and original writer; the fact that she also writes, movingly and with complexity, about members of the LGBT population, renders her work all the more singular. Blue Hunger is a devastating study of the ways in which grief renders everything, even the self, foreign. A gorgeous grotesquerie of lust and despair backdropped by the writhing rhythms of Shanghai. Sticky, neon, and electric, Blue Hunger drips with desire, danger, and hunger in myriad forms. Blue Hunger’s is a disorientating world made strange by grief—a world where words have lost their meaning, and identity fragments. In luminous and startling prose, Viola Di Grado lays bare the risk inherent in human relationships, the capacity we have to inflict and enjoy pain as well as pleasure, and the disassembling power of grief. Bold and addictive, this is a carnal, sensual, drug-and-sex-infused trip of a novel. A sensuous and biting account . . . It’s worth indulging in this visceral story. Haunting . . . An erotic and disturbing depiction of the effects of grief. Readers will be fascinated by the novel's scenery, psychological acuity . . . Queerness, grief, isolation, dependence, and love merge in this novel of geographically-based healing and descent. Italian author Viola Di Grado simulates the fever dreamlike state of an all-consuming love. It’s lush, dreamlike, and once started, you won’t be able to stop thinking about it. A masterful narrative that conveys the ecstasy of new love . . . The final scene is a spectacular feat, managing to be both unexpected and exquisitely tender. Di Grado’s prose is exhilaratingly dynamic, made up of fragmented paragraphs that look and sound like prose poetry and that use poetic language in surprising and edgy ways. Di Grado’s black comedy, pungent metaphors and controlled ambiguity announce the arrival of a considerable talent. Written in lavish language and with beautiful metaphors. I’ve read and loved her novels, which center around young, unconventional women. A subtle meditation on language and its failures. Expand reviews