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Translation by Emma Ramadan
Anne Garreta's slim novella Not One Day, translated into English by Emma Ramadan, begins with a simple, brow-raising premise. Garreta's narrator, who I'll refer to as "they/them," proposes to write every single day, for a period of two weeks, about women in their life: those they have desired and those who have desired them in return. This sounds like the routine libertine novel you might have come across at some point in your life: fictional memoirs in which a masculine voice recounts their various sexual pursuits. But Not One Day is actually the opposite, turning the genre on its head by focusing on queer desire and memory.
This comes as no surprise to those familiar with Garreta's first novel, Sphinx (1986). The pathbreaking work recounts a Parisian love story in which the genders of the two protagonists are never revealed. Rather than becoming a gimmick, the story's genderlessness is freeing for the readerly experience. Not One Day performs similar acts of dynamicism amidst a few moments of uneven prose, ultimately proving to be a provocative and at times contradictory representation of desire.
The protagonist organizes the book into several sections, each named for the first letter of a woman they met, referring to them as A·, B·, C·, and so on. These sections resemble an artist's sketch, throwing the reader into a gesture of a place: a faraway club, a car, or a university classroom, in which the narrator then remembers the woman at the receiving end of their desire. These encounters are thrilling, but hard to pin down. It is as if the particularities of their selves fade away behind the anonymity of their name. Or, they become buried under heat of the...