This Deep Vellum publication of Sphinx is particularly significant, as it marks the first French to English translation of a female Oulipo writer. This is also to say Sphinx is less of a queer romance novel than it is a poetic queering of love itself. This is to say, Garréta's removal of gendered grammar is less an indictment of gender-or sign-bearing bodies-and more of a narrative challenge, a queering of language. The narrator's a DJ while A*** (derived from Anne?) is an exotic dancer. The nameless narrator is a white French native while the character A*** is an expatriate and a person of color. Garréta distinguishes these characters in numerous ways, from their races to their professions. This is not to say these characters are genderless or otherwise devoid of signage. For example, Georges Perec's infamous Oulipian novel La Disparition contains no words with the letter "E." The language constraint that Garréta writes through is far more abstract (and, I feel, far more compelling): the novel's narrator and love interest are not grammatically marked by their genders. To begin, Garréta is one of the few female members in the male dominated Oulipo movement, a body of writers dedicated to Ou vroir de li ttérature po tentielle, or writing built upon the strategic use of lingual or aesthetic constraints.
I was excited even before this book was in my hands. My reading of Anne Garréta's Sphinx was preceded by the novel's mystique.
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