This Immaculate Body, Emma van Straaten
This Immaculate Body follows Alice, who has been cleaning Tom’s flat every Wednesday for a year. As the story progresses, her infatuation with him gets deeper. In an increasingly unmanageable and delusional one-sided relationship, she goes through his daily objects, including his bins and his calendar, keeping alive her belief that he is pining after her too. This is a book best enjoyed with breaks – there are times when Alice’s unpredictable actions become almost too stressful, requiring a buffer. And yet, the reader always finds herself irrevocably drawn back into Alice’s mind; both the necessity of breaks and the inevitability of the return to the book are a true testament to the power of Van Straaten’s writing.
You might be thinking that you have already read your fair share of women unravelling, but you have never read it like this. This book is like an adult version of teenage tumblr infatuations, but on steroids. While the ‘unhinged woman’ trope can be difficult to execute convincingly, Van Straaten does it right, letting us get to know Alice, and keeping her consistent. What starts off as a disconcerting story of obsession soon evolves into the portrait of a woman whose loneliness and mental struggles we find ourselves really caring about. When we want Alice to stop, it’s not just because she makes us uncomfortable, but because we want her to be okay – we don’t want her to face the disappointments that we know await her.
An absolutely amazing debut, This Immaculate Body has been living in my mind, crystal clear, since I first read it last year. Content warnings include body dysmorphia, injury details, and stalking.
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