The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Perturbation, My Sister by Kristin Prevallet
Nicole Cooley

Kristin Prevallet. Perturbation, My Sister. First Intensity, 1997. 80 pp.
Paper: $10.00.

In its preface, this book offers itself as a reading of surrealist Max Ernst’s collage novel The Hundred Headless Women (1929). Prevallet defines her writing strategy as “writing one paragraph for each collage, and then re-arranging the order of paragraphs to fit into my own chapters.” Thus, the text does not simply appropriate Ernst’s use of collage but rather it re-invents the art form itself. Prevallet does not narrate Ernst’s collages—in other words, she does not perform an explanatory function—but rather she complicates and unsettles Ernst’s terrain. Structured into nine parts, the book follows an associative rather than a linear logic; as if it were a long poem, elliptical and full of silences, we can track motifs and tropes throughout the text. Prevallet writes: “She fainted at the sight of so many fragments, for she thought her mind was frazzled. Luckily, it was just the world, crumbling around her.” Fragments function as textual poetics, yet this text takes enormous pleasure in its brokenness. In fact, everywhere in the book is a sense of play. Interestingly, the preface employs the language of psychoanalysis—with references to Freud’s work on dreams, jokes and the unconscious. Indeed, the dreamlike world of this book includes not only people but also phantoms, birds and wolves, and the settings are various, among them a garden full of plastic flowers, the winter Alps and the Seine. Perturbation, My Sister raises a number of compelling questions, such as what is the relationship between text and image? between modernism and postmodernism? and, finally, between dream and the act of writing? [Nicole Cooley]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Perturbation, My Sister by Kristin Prevallet Nicole Cooley Kristin Prevallet. Perturbation, My Sister. First Intensity, 1997. 80 pp. Paper: $10.00. In its preface, this book offers itself as a reading of surrealist Max Ernst’s collage novel The Hundred Headless Women (1929). Prevallet defines her writing strategy as “writing one paragraph for each collage, and then re-arranging the order of paragraphs to fit into my own chapters.” Thus, the text does not simply appropriate Ernst’s use of collage but rather it re-invents the art form itself. Prevallet does not narrate Ernst’s collages—in other words, she does not perform an explanatory function—but rather she complicates and unsettles Ernst’s terrain. Structured into nine parts, the book follows an associative rather than a linear logic; as if it were a long poem, elliptical and full of silences, we can track motifs and tropes throughout the text. Prevallet writes: “She fainted at the sight of so many fragments, for she thought her mind was frazzled. Luckily, it was just the world, crumbling around her.” Fragments function as textual poetics, yet this text takes enormous pleasure in its brokenness. In fact, everywhere in the book is a sense of play. Interestingly, the preface employs the language of psychoanalysis—with references to Freud’s work on dreams, jokes and the unconscious. Indeed, the dreamlike world of this book includes not only people but also phantoms, birds and wolves, and the settings are various, among them a garden full of plastic flowers, the winter Alps and the Seine. Perturbation, My Sister raises a number of compelling questions, such as what is the relationship between text and image? between modernism and postmodernism? and, finally, between dream and the act of writing? [Nicole Cooley]

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