Woman Crossing the Seine

Woman Crossing the Seine Rodrigo Palacios Woman Crossing the Seine, Rodrigo Palacios’ masterful anti-novel, is set in Earth’s Hyperreal, Heaven or Hell, and back, where an infinitely-dimensional woman by the name of Belle ventures away from home, somewhere in the American Midwest, unbound into the whirlpool of a timeless matrix. In her many vertiginous images and adventures, she constantly breaks unpredictable boundaries with her sexy elegance, wit, beauty, and even madness. However, we always see Belle not far from 13 rue d’Ulm, near École normale supérieure in Paris’ Latin Quarter, where--one day-- “to my astonishment, she sat on the bed, unscrewed her left arm, took out with the right index finger her left eye and purposely separated from her feet, one by one, her delicate toes, placing them all on the night stand next to the bed...” Belle is oftentimes accompanied by her sidekicks, Valley Girl, Satie, and Al Mightie, who expose to us her many personalities’ intricate qualities, in a never-ending grafting and re-grafting of totally unexpected, perplexing, images and ironic resolutions. Along the way, the characters meet, as if by magic, everyone and anyone from: Philosophers, such as Derrida and Husserl, to death camp kommandants, slave masters in the American Deep South, inquisitors, and beasts. With the help of Belle’s mischievous posse, her thought-provoking and, on occasion, grim, hilarious approaches to each encounter and peripeteia, we end up immersed together with her in her matrix.