A woman in a repressive, patriarchal, oil-rich nation goes on leave and decides not to return to her husband and her job. The nation, ruled by an illiterate despot and his clueless minions, have no idea what to make of this, but it certainly isn't the Proper Order of Things. When the nameless woman arrives in oil country to hide, she begins to feel as though she is drowning in a place where everyone is covered with oil and all the men begin to blur together.
Part of me really wants to give this book four stars on principle, but as wowed as I was by the language and subject matter, I really didn't enjoy reading it as much as I thought I ought to have. I think it's because the only really clear thing that happens in the book occurs at the beginning and is contained in the publisher's blurb, and the rest is a surrealist mash of images, thoughts, and impressions. Don't get me wrong, it's an excellent surrealist mash: visceral, powerful, moving, occasionally very funny, and allows for a fascinatingly fractured narrative perspective that feels simultaneously repetitive and exploratory. But the book is quite short, so to have a stylistic bait and switch was a bit jarring, and when you're writing about a place where everything is drowning in oil and people blur together, the descriptive language and plot do, too. But overall, this is a thoroughly remarkable book, impressionistic, dense, infuriating, and beautiful.