IN A 1974 ESSAY ON THE POETRY OF LUIS de Gongora, the high priest of the Spanish Baroque, the Cuban novelist Severo Sarduy coined the concept of la metáfora al cuadrado—metaphor squared, or metaphor to the second power. Writing in a period of imperial decline, Sarduy explained, Gongora turned metaphors on their head, hoping to make them new and find vitality in an era of attenuated exhaustion. Where a lesser poet might write that “water is crystal,” Gongora would instead write that “crystal is water.” Looking for his materials in the “eroded, already gnawed-on terrain” of a flagging Spanish empire, he had to refashion the conventional and cliched into the strange and unfamiliar, even the nonsensical. The result, Sarduy noted, was that Gongora unleashed a “geometric multiplication of metaphor”: His rhetorical figures presumed that the reader was familiar with the tropes of a worn-out poetic canon that he at once rejected and embraced. Along the way, according to Sarduy, Gongora took an already perverted language and made it even more perverted. Figuration no longer needed a referent; at the center of his metaphors there was nothing but other metaphors.
Rachel Kushner’s extraordinary new novel, , is a worthy heir to this tradition of linguistic deviousness. Set in present-day France, the book delivers, among other things, a parody of contemporary French fiction and theory, a meditation on the promise and peril of radical politics, an elegy for the soon-to-be-lost way of life of small European farmers, reflections on both modernity and prehistory, accounts of medieval peasant revolts, climate anxiety, white wine, sex, violence, betrayal, and an ars poetica whose central
