Paradise Rot, while it is mostly piss*, is also so much more than that. It is the story of a young woman discovering her sexual desire caught in a sticky, suffocating environment. It is of detachment and dependency, shame and desire, mold, fermentation, and the sweetness that arises out of decay.

How to describe the prose? Evocative, atmospheric, suffocating, poetic, sticky, enveloping, dreamy, colorful. It speaks to the senses: textures, sounds, feelings, colors — it is viscerally physical, tied to the prominent themes of biology and the body. You can almost feel what Joanna is feeling, smell, hear, see it all. It stays with you, like the residue of a sticker on a book you couldn’t completely remove.

Though I have said that this novella is about more than just the piss, the piss is still so integral to it. To me it represents the inherent grossness of humanity, the shame we learn to feel for our bodies, but here it is turned into something desirable and forgivable, even something bizzarely aesthetically pleasing through the prose. The piss is opportunity for heightened intimacy and connection. It reminds me of a tumblr post on kink along the lines of “kinks often boil down to a couple of things, one of which is being seen at your grossest and most disgusting and still being desired and loved”. I don’t think that the piss here is a kink**, but the sentiment is the same.

Paradise Rot also touches on mental health issues, introducing them very subtly and then more and more obviously. Self-deprecation, drunkenness, social isolation and codependency at once, culminating in mental breakdowns. Here, too, the piss comes into play: it shows the comfort and ease Carral feels in Joanna’s presence, how she lets go and lets herself relax. The urine’s stickiness binds them together, shaping them into one, because, as we all know, rotting fruit become mush and melt together, no longer distinguishable from one another.

On a reread, I think I could say more, but all in all, Paradise Rot surprised me in many ways, and I can’t wait to get a physical copy of this so I can annotate it and delve into it more.

*This is a joke, there isn’t that much piss as some people make there out to be.

** I also don’t think that just because the author uses piss as a way to convey her message it means she has a piss kink; I frankly don’t think that reducing a weird and disgusting element to a kink is a productive way to engage with books and media in general, seeing as it is often taken as a way to say “This is obviously a kink and therefore I do not have to engage with and understand the literary aspects of this theme”.