Blue Hunger

Product Information

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.

While the grief theme is familiar from Di Grado’s previous novels, the reflections on trying to live in a different language and culture reminded me of Polly Barton’s memoir Fifty Sounds, and the more bizarre aspects of the central relationship made me think this might appeal to those who loved Children of Paradise. Each sentence lures us further into the flies and blood-filled spirals of Di Grado’s dreamworld and, most importantly, we are willing to follow her. Leaving the glossy core behind, the two women move through poorer, dirtier areas, visiting the hidden relics of the city beneath, or adjacent to, the shiny modern metropolis. The love is unrequited, yet Ruben is determined to exercise her obsession, insisting on disappearing herself to dampen her grief. Another interesting feature of the novel is the use of, and musings on, language, with mentions of English, Italian and Chinese.

To read Blue Hunger is to enter a dreamlike state, guided by irresistible, evocative writing, immaculate details, and vivid emotions dripping with desire.

Despite its shortcomings, Blue Hunger makes for an interesting look at an intriguing city, and at a woman trying not to lose herself completely in its snares, and in her grief. To Beijing in winter, in the snow, on a tour, which, before Tiananmen Square, took them to a hotel room where they had to silently observe a sales demonstration for a knife set. In the gloom of abandoned textile factories and dilapidated slaughterhouses, the two discover an extreme dimension where biting, swallowing, and taking each other in are part of the erotic ritual. In particular, the character of Xu, the mysterious, seductive stranger, doesn’t always work, and while there are moments where she’s more character than caricature, there is a hint of the glossy and exotic about her.

The unnamed narrator’s recently deceased twin brother had long dreamed to open an Italian restaurant in China; there, she thinks more of him than of herself. Viola Di Grado’s charming prose romps through chthonic worlds of nibbling insects, ammoniac seepage and shattering depression, using language that is both glib and scrumptious.

Viola Di Grado’s charming prose romps through chthonic worlds of nibbling insects, ammoniac seepage, and shattering depression, using language that is both glib and scrumptious.A district calculated to demonstrate something, the idea of an aseptic, redemptive, to-be-completed future. Blue Hunger is a novel about an Italian woman who goes to Shanghai after her twin brother's death and finds herself in an obsessive love affair.

Bright lights and city sights rub up against drug laden rendezvous in slaughterhouses, and nights spent at Xu’s apartment, surrounded by rotting food. Miles of golden fields, the kind you see in movies with long takes and farm workers with sunburnt faces.A moment in which the two images – the wicked fox and the amorous woman – no longer coincided, their edges separating like a deck of cards thrown on the floor. In Jamie Richards’ translation of Viola Di Grado’s Blue Hunger, a young woman embarks on a feverish love affair with an illusive yet capricious vagabond in Shanghai.