Bhanu Khapil, Ban en Banlieue (2015)

It is not a novel so much as a birth, a death, a violent “discharge.” It was born from an accumulation, a messy building up of notes which was―according to Kapil―assembled by chopping it up on a butcher’s block. The body of Ban En Banlieue was assembled through violence, a body assembled by means of its own violent deconstruction. Even unto itself, this might seem like a self-contradiction that cannot be reconciled. Kapil’s beautiful, bleeding, half-dying, half-living, anti-novel is well aware of this.