Lou is a French novelist living in London, married to Vår, a small-town Norwegian woman. Together they form a couple with rather unusual ideas about marital fidelity, Vår spending much of her time on liaisons with the teenaged Sydney, and Lou's work in progress detailing his own desperate need for new lovers.
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What is fidelity? In Anatomy. Monotony., Edy Poppy examines this question with an intimacy and ruthlessness worthy of Marguerite Duras. Vår, a young woman from a small Norwegian town, and Lou, a Frenchman from Nîmes, maintain an open marriage. But their polyamorous experiment is freighted with jealousies. Their life in London is broken into by one fascinating stranger after another, until eventually they decide to move away, back to Vår’s rural hometown—a decision that will change the nature of their relationship forever. Anatomy. Monotony. is a novel about sex, love, and the creation of literature in no uncertain terms.
Born in 1975, Edy Poppy is a Norwegian author and former model. In addition to her work in the theatre and as a writer of short stories, poems, and essays, her debut novel Anatomi. Monotoni won the Gylendal Prize in 2005. Edy Poppy is proud to find herself on a list of international writers, all of them "hardcore feminists".
"Edy Poppy’s Anatomy, Monotony is a devilish hybrid. Part autofiction, part literary, cinematic, and musical dance of allusions, and part chronicle of the mute body’s aches and pains and lusts and needs, the novel deftly hits its notes, high and low, to create a symphonic work of tragicomedy."
- Siri Hustvedt
"As a story, Anatomy. Monotony. reminds me of films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt or Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, stories about couples who poke at their marriage with a sharp stick with devastating consequences."
- Ron Hogan
"Beautifully rendered and complex, Anatomy. Monotony. th
"A female, sexually free ‘Catcher in the Rye’"
- Mike S. Ryan, film director (The Turin Horse, Choke and Junebug), who is discussing making a film based on the book