Books
The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024)
The Naif
The Naif is a cross-genre text (part novel, part philosophy, all poetry) by artist Valerie Hsiung.
Date: May 2024
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Format: Print
Genre: Fiction, Poetry, Philosophy
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Excerpt in The Georgia Review
The Naif lives in a practiced state of naivety—a language-fasted, resource-starved loop—and it lives as a test: of what awareness, what becoming, what imagination is possible under the scarcest of conditions, conditions that can make it impossible to deceive or beguile (others or oneself). It is a book as glass house reversed, where the person walking by can see all the way in, but the person inside can’t see halfway out—and yet the person inside has made this house. Perhaps because of the danger to the writer’s life that would result from any direct address to the Apparatus, the writer will have to commandeer the Apparatus’ own terms of ‘neutrality’ to forge a secret path and get word (past the Apparatus) into the right hands. As though she, a language worker, under the watchful eye of the Apparatus, has been forced to create these daily logs, to send news to the other world that all is ok. So she must be careful what she says and what she doesn’t; so she does her job, and yet leaves clues throughout: all is not ok.
Praise
“Is it innocence to think that if you hold onto something long enough (community, relationship, attention) the habitual will give way to the extraordinary? The “person of insouciance” relating this logbook narrative evolves through the willful and unsuspecting ironies that threaten to foil the aim of artists and revolutionaries alike. The Naif so deranges intention with particulars—that is, with wonder—as to turn everyday fact into speculative fiction. A new way of living may yet prevail, thanks to Hsiung’s encouragement, akin to the spores of a mushroom, or to winning the lottery, waiting for us all along, as though in advance of the beginning.”
- Roberto Tejada
“Halfway between Kafka’s Singer and Melville’s Scrivener, Hsiung’s Naif wields syntax as both tuning fork and sensor, sounding a singular diphthong at once cosmic and quasi-comic. With minute adjustments to eyeline and plumbline, this naif induces us to perceive human interaction as at once present and potential, threat and promise, banquet and gambit, culture and cult.”
- Joyelle McSweeney
“Is it innocence to think that if you hold onto something long enough (community, relationship, attention) the habitual will give way to the extraordinary? The “person of insouciance” relating this logbook narrative evolves through the willful and unsuspecting ironies that threaten to foil the aim of artists and revolutionaries alike. The Naif so deranges intention with particulars—that is, with wonder—as to turn everyday fact into speculative fiction. A new way of living may yet prevail, thanks to Hsiung’s encouragement, akin to the spores of a mushroom, or to winning the lottery, waiting for us all along, as though in advance of the beginning.”
- Roberto Tejada
“Halfway between Kafka’s Singer and Melville’s Scrivener, Hsiung’s Naif wields syntax as both tuning fork and sensor, sounding a singular diphthong at once cosmic and quasi-comic. With minute adjustments to eyeline and plumbline, this naif induces us to perceive human interaction as at once present and potential, threat and promise, banquet and gambit, culture and cult.”
- Joyelle McSweeney
“A philosophical rumination that pulls us all the way into its depths, The Naif is an abstract painting made of words and sentences and punctuation or lack thereof, a distant memory whose skin you get to touch and feel as you attempt to find your way through its centers and peripheries. The Naif is an attempt for “reconciliation” between what we try to do in life while we have “already gone off course,” while we navigate an intimate piece of clothing dangling on a chair, cheese, mouse, juice gone bad, a lamp, a gift shop, all the what and the who of the everyday guiding us toward the word “transcend.” Kneading a slippery “new way of life” into a shape that is shifting and grounding, Valerie Hsiung shares with us her being in and out of community, in intimacy and in selfness. She invites us to “conduct ourselves according to the pulse of each other without losing the pulse of ourselves” while we immerse ourselves in the pulse of her beautiful language offering.“
- Poupeh Missaghi