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Oliver A Lover All Over
When their partner leaves them a week after their hysterectomy, Magenta becomes determined to resist suicidal despair by leaving the stale solitude of their downtown apartment, with a plan to ride every streetcar, bus, and subway line in Toronto. Instead, they ride back and forth along romanticized and mythical Queen Street, from Parkdale to The Beaches, from the first to final day of August. The city is heatwaves and thunderstorms, empty storefronts and chain businesses, suffering the paired crises of climate change and gentrification.
An unemployed fiction writer turned sex worker, and compulsive consoler of the lonely, Magenta ruminates on the desires they feel ashamed of, on poetry and books and lyrics, and on their fear of being used as a muse, while Oliver, a comedy school dropout turned gardener who’s abandoned them to live on an isolated farm, struggles with existential ambivalence and his contradictory desire to build a life and a home in the forest vs. the city. As they ride the streetcar, Magenta becomes fixated upon poverty and melancholy, mood-dependent behaviours, disability and remission, and literary clichés and lazy metaphors, obsessively documenting their thoughts and memories of a relationship that lasted thirteen months.
A psychogeographical exploration of intimacy and betrayal, repetition compulsion, open relationships, empathy, therapy, and art, Oliver A Lover All Over is a work of present-tense stream-of-consciousness and self-consciousness, a novel in the form of a mix tape, a collage of the languages of autofiction, songs on late-night radio, journal entries, therapy sessions, and messages exchanged through online dating apps. In their third novel, Maranda Elizabeth employs lyrical experimentation to analyze perpetually lost, unestablished and anti-establishment, alienated thirty-somethings on the cusp of self-awareness.
An unemployed fiction writer turned sex worker, and compulsive consoler of the lonely, Magenta ruminates on the desires they feel ashamed of, on poetry and books and lyrics, and on their fear of being used as a muse, while Oliver, a comedy school dropout turned gardener who’s abandoned them to live on an isolated farm, struggles with existential ambivalence and his contradictory desire to build a life and a home in the forest vs. the city. As they ride the streetcar, Magenta becomes fixated upon poverty and melancholy, mood-dependent behaviours, disability and remission, and literary clichés and lazy metaphors, obsessively documenting their thoughts and memories of a relationship that lasted thirteen months.
A psychogeographical exploration of intimacy and betrayal, repetition compulsion, open relationships, empathy, therapy, and art, Oliver A Lover All Over is a work of present-tense stream-of-consciousness and self-consciousness, a novel in the form of a mix tape, a collage of the languages of autofiction, songs on late-night radio, journal entries, therapy sessions, and messages exchanged through online dating apps. In their third novel, Maranda Elizabeth employs lyrical experimentation to analyze perpetually lost, unestablished and anti-establishment, alienated thirty-somethings on the cusp of self-awareness.
- GenresFictionMental Health
323 pages, Paperback
Published August 15, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 28, 2019
You know how sometimes you get on public transport and put on headphones and stare out of the window and reflect on your life? Oliver A Lover All Over is basically a whole book of looking inside someone else's head whilst they do that, and I loved it. The novel doesn't have a typical structure, it goes back and forth in time depicting protagonist Magenta's relationship with their recently-ex-boyfriend Oliver. But it's about so much more than "just" their relationship, it's about creativity, self-discovery/self-reflection, poverty, city vs. rural living, sex work, vulnerability in various forms, love, friendship, gender, surgery (Magenta is non-binary and recovering from a hysterectomy at the start of the novel) ... and so much more. I found it inspiring in terms of my creative projects too, I want to get stuck in and make them happen. Finally, I know this book isn't cheap as it's self-published (you can get it from the author - Maranda Elizabeth - or on amazon, the e-book is slightly cheaper I think) - I treated myself as it was my birthday. But if you're interested in reading it I urge you to buy a copy if you possibly can in order to support the author and art like this in general - the world needs more truly original novels like this.
November 5, 2019
maranda's mad femme poetics feed my entire borderline soul & i really appreciate this book's chronicle of relationship end & neuroweird relationship with words
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews