There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn

“In the world of this putative novel, far more fantasmagoric poem than fictional narrative, the first thoughts of a child and the dying thoughts of a post-nuclear race blithely coexist; it is a land where erotic impulses, social hierarchies, alternative cultivation and “a death god’s radar” mix with a moral ambivalence that recalls Lewis Carroll and a violence and artistry that recalls Lautréamont and Samuel R. Delany. Purporting to track “the paradise and wasteland of utopian desire,” two characters, Gardner and M, coax us into their mental adventures with a slipstream of avatars and misfit angels, and with each other. Both are gendered female and live in a city where women normally “do not sleep piled up on themselves as male captives in sloughs of despond,” but who do engage in a variety of bodily trials and tribulations designed to gauge the limits of their world (i.e., of our ruined dreams of the ideal). M comes upon a man who gets separated from a group of dirt bikers mindlessly jumping a ditch; Gardner, “on the shore of her own giganticness,” gives birth to Caesar and leaves him to M and a variety of others. A lot of the action is bleak in its characterological affect, uncompromising in its brutality (and ecstasy) and difficult to figure out. “Frankly, women want to own men for the sake of revenge.” This book will convince readers of all sexes to surrender as many as possible.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

These hybrid writings, staged as they are between fiction and theory, the domestic and history, abstractions and androgeny, the rational and the nonrational, the creator and her artifact, organize themselves against normative ideas while using whatever tolls of novelistic, philosophic, autobiographical, or poetic discourse present themselves to advance their tellings. Concepts such as narrative, character, and binary thinking are manipulated and scrutinized but not adhered to methodically. The writing is also a response to literature and the things of the world: it does not separate one off from the other. Marquis de Sade, rocks, Balzac, war, Lautremont, amazons, Jane Austen, news, Jan Bowles, utopias, Ludwig Wittgenstein, child's play, Saint Augustine, censorship are probable points on its strange map. in the world of this work, words themselves may become characters and instincts are regarded as if they were books. Complex ideas and simple rheetorics mingle, yielding impure theories, precarious stories, and fabulist games.
—Carla Harryman, 1995, Preface

"Carla Harryman is a great wide-awake visionary reading her is like playing Olympic ping-ping in eight dimensions! In her work we encounter the libido's fierce games: the willful sense and non-sense, the endless reversibility. Rampant story and rhetoric (our culture's self-descriptions) are raised up, then promptly guillotined for crimes against honesty. Through this florescence of creation and destruction, Harryman wages one of contemporary writing's most radical critiques." —
—Robert Glück

"There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn is a work of magical intelligence and wit, opening up words and ideas in ways that are both startling and moving. Carla Harryman folds out ideas revealing more meanings and connections than seem possible, yet each new image settles irrevocably inside us, no experience, either literary or personal, remains the same once you've traveled through the worlds she creates. Her newest work is an alchemical gem that sparkles." —
—Jewell Gomez