Author(s): Magda Carneci

Novel | Eastern Europe | Translated fiction

Carneci is very well-known for her role as prominent writer in ‘80s and ‘90s Romania, but is also well-known for her dual focus on the poetic and visual arts. She is the President of PEN Romania, and has received several international grants in literature and art history.

Review:

"What poetry does in FEM is the opposite of over intellectualizing. Carneci charts how birth, something every mammal undergoes, has transformed and transcended to accompany so much meaning that it can barely be contained by sound or language." -Sarah McEachern, BOMB Magazine

"You know the saying in film studies, "Every frame a painting"? In this book, almost every sentence is a poem." -Travel Through Stories

"Like the north ends of two magnets, the two storytellers' refusal to meet tantalizes, inviting the reader into the no-man's land, in which they may question--or even participate in this exchange of identities. Carneci's own active approach to living in a body, in fact, is exactly what she begs her listener/reader to adopt, and her appeal is so breathtaking, it's a wonder anyone could refuse." -Lindsay Semel, Asymptote

"Poet Carneci's rich English-language debut records a woman's dreamlike ecstatic experiences and revelations...Full of strong imagery, this heavily symbolic work is a notable entry in international feminist literature." -Publishers Weekly

"...Carneci is, in the end, an original writer and a masterful stylist, whose mastery of language comes vividly across through Sean Cotter's dexterous translation. Her stylistic ingenuity is felicitously rendered by her translator...Her novel transgresses feminist ideology, proposing a vision that implies a change in human perception, a vision attempting to unify the outside and the inside, the object and the subject of all human experience..." -Los Angeles Review of Books, Alta Ifland

"This novel is not about plot or character, it is about impressions, images, the beauties of nature, the female body and strange visions." -The Modern Novel

"FEM is a protest novel, a feminist text written with the fervor of a true poet, a book that registers the pain of women in a still male-dominated world. Beyond its feminist radicalism, this novel's readers will discover an impressive quality of mind and artistic refinement that attract our empathy." -Mircea Cartarescu

"Magda Carneci is a leading international literary figure. So this searchingly philosophical, psychological and yet also brilliantly visceral fiction should come as no surprise. Yet its sustained and virtuoso interrogation of identity, gender and the struggle to become is astonishing. Brilliant, sensual yet also intellectually and politically charged, this is the sort of book that can change lives. -Fiona Sampson

"Profound, mysterious, emotional and gripping, FEM is a luminous and inspiring work of literature by one of the world's most valuable authors." -Deborah Levy, author of The Man Who Saw Everything, Hot Milk, and Swimming Home

"An author with a strong personality, whose voice has always been distinct within the '80s generation [of Romanian writers]." -Octavian Soviant, Observator Cultural "Magda Carneci is not only a distinguished poet, translator, and art critic but a first-rate novelist, who uses her storytelling gifts in FEM to open new worlds for the silent auditor of her strange visions. The narrator describes herself as "a tamer Scheherazade," but she is fierce in her quest to charm, instruct, and awaken readers to the particular challenges of a woman picking her way through the maze of modern life. These tales, spun from seemingly inconsequential moments into existential reflections on the nature of everything under the sun, will haunt your days and nights." -Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood

"Hard to sum up in just a few words, FEM is a psychedelic novel about the essences of femininity. A poetic prose that left me with the impression that it would fit wonderfully into a new wave of aesthetic oneiricism. A novel for the cognoscenti, FEM is scandalous and provocative in equal measure." -Marius Mihet

"An initiatory text, a text of depths rather than postmodern surfaces, a total rather than fragmentary text, FEM puts forward a metaphysic of the senses, an intense concrete and sensorial experience, like a springboard to revelation, transforming biological conditioning, intuition, and so-called female sensuality on the road to knowledge, to a 'different logic,' an 'integral logic." -Adina Dinitoiu

"What Magda Carneci undertakes in FEM is not only profound, but also honest: an honesty that is sometimes cruel and bewildering, sometimes constructive and generative, an honesty that only great writers are capable of." -Stefan Borbely

"FEM: a remarkable novel, a read not to be missed." -Daniel Cristea-Enache