Re.La.Vir Format: Paperback

RE.LA.VIR renders rape through the narrative filter of an online hypertext program. Juxtaposing savvy technical language and graphic scenes of sexual violence, the novel creates an alternative techno fictive space for representing lived experience.

The pages of RE.LA.VIR are the scrolling text of a computer screen, as transitory and erasable as the body of the raped woman. RE.LA.VIR reenvisions her, offering the female speaker a wider range of voices and positions to act from than is allowed in traditional rape narrative.

A no-prisoners, technofictive onslaught against literary convention and human sensibility. With all the delicacy of a snuff film, Ramjerdi's excessively experimental debut uses hypertextual interactivity and the device of a scrolling computer screen to produce an oppressive story of a generic rape victim. I do not know the woman I am until I am raped. This mantra, repeated endlessly either in fragments or whole, sums up what story there is here. Ostensibly a virtual-reality program specializing in custom-fitted rape narratives, Ramjerdis hypernovel incorporates commands, queries, and deconstructed words and meanings, along with multiple violent, threatening voices, delivered chat-room style, which serve as a kind of postmodern Greek chorus. But the main event, the images corresponding to the rape variations, have a uniform, sickeningly graphic quality: an ER doctor examines a victim, describing her thorough sexual mutilation for the record while a cameraman records the visual evidence; a woman is sodomized to death on the beach with a log, then brutalized postmortem and dismembered; others see action courtesy of a flute, an exhaust pipe, a gun barrel, etc. From time to time meditative, lyrical moments intervene, usually deathlike in their imagery (a city street in falling snow, a red leaf falling, etc.). And in the end is a woman's Paradisecomplete with bondage. Certainly such experiments in storytelling have to be undertaken, but when the level of sensation weighs in in excess of the level of sense, it's just as certain that they all dont need to be published. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.