2023-06-17 15:57:42
“I’m a sick person… I’m a hateful person. And I’m not an attractive person.” That’s how Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Cellar Hole” started, in 1864. A psychopathic voice claimed to be sick and spiteful, but the reader immediately understood that the society it was reporting on was actually , sick and spiteful. The position of absolute weakness from which that voice rang mutated into an absolute strength of literature, clairvoyant and highly addictive.
There is now a sequel for our present that no longer deals with the absurdity of aristocratic hierarchies or the misfortune of lowly officials, but with the madness of our progressive shift of emphasis to the digital. Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan begins with the startling discovery that the increasingly informal and antisocial chaos of real life is held together only by the diligent curating and staging of a surrogate self on social media.
As with Dostoyevsky, a single voice takes center stage, speaking from a position of utter weakness: a post-migrant day laborer in her early 30s in contemporary London, childless, in a sorry relationship with an indulgent softie, full of unsatisfied ambition, sick with envy and narcissism. She herself, apparently the child of Indian immigrants, remains as nameless as the people she talks about – the “man I want to be with” and the “woman I’m obsessed with”.
Life between blue hooks
The first comes vaguely from the literary world and is a big hit there; everyone wants to take photos with him, and a large literature house invites him to give a lecture “on a topic that nobody cares about anymore”. He, naturally white, is married to an equally white but unsuccessful artist who makes sad collages showing bloated figures from behind.
In addition, however, he keeps a “chaste harem”, as the narrator convincingly analyzes, a “stockpile of lovesick female attention that he likes to stir up when he is bored”. One of the odalisques in it is said “Woman I’m Obsessed With”. Why from her?
Because, so the unspoken answer, she is best stalked on social media, where she is constantly posting some status symbol of the 2020s, Japanese clay pots for 600 dollars each, which are only used for serving simple dishes, cooked from the finest ingredients, grown in their own garden. The true harvest of this exhibitionist existence comes from the countless comments from a following that is growing by the hundreds every day.
It is a life between blue hooks and lip-service rebellion against the injustices of the world, racism, classism et cetera, while the whole performance speaks of nothing but the eternal persistence of one’s own privilege.
moral ambivalences
So the novel is a deliberate crash course not only in the disgusting machinations of social media, but also in the essential identity-political discourses of our time. In an apodictic sociological tone, short chapters deal with all the topics that also concern the “taz” editors every day, and read like this: “The building was designed in such a way that the workers did not waste their productivity with daydreams.” Or: “I seriously ask myself, like so many intelligent women who are supposedly for letting women tell their stories, who fight for women’s lives and women’s independence, can be so ruthless and possessive when it comes to a man.”
Patel’s forte is moral ambivalence, uncovering blind spots in the notorious ritual of indictment, as one would expect from the camp of the contemporary left: “Since George Floyd,” it once said, “white liberals have gotten much better at disguising themselves — now they’re posting photos of their Thanksgiving dinner and writing underneath, knowledge, what this day stands for and enjoy the company of friends.“
The novel is Patel’s debut. She is believed to be part of a collective called 4 Brown Girls Who Write, with “Brown” alluding to her Indian origins and suggesting that the author could be as critical and envious of white privilege as her narrator. This suspicion leads, among other things, to the fact that the opinions of the readers are extremely divided, as a quick scan of the reviews on the British Amazon site shows. The critics also accuse her of exaggerated zeitgeist and the annoying navel-gazing of a self-proclaimed elite, which, even in a state of material poverty, allows itself to be decadent with exaggerated feelings.
There’s something to it, but “I’m a Fan” is practically required reading for anyone who is interested in these zeitgeist and decadence phenomena. To put it in the language of sales algorithms, if you like Leif Randt, you’ll like Sheena Patel.
Sheena Patel: “I’m a Fan”. Translated from English by Anabelle Assaf. Hanser, 240 pages, 20 euros.
#Sheena #Patel #Essential #reading #social #media #age