Then, Beowulf says wistfully, „Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust.“
I laugh, but Beowulf looks dead serious.

______________________________________________________________________

Ethical? Bunny repeated like she’d never heard the word, even though obvious she had, she is so, so smart. She has been going to the best schools in the world since she was five. She can play the oboe and she can fence and she speaks three different languages. Ethical, Bunny said, like we’d made the word up. Like it was just some silly monster we were trying to make out of our own hair, which she herself lovingly braided for us.

Bunny by Mona Awad

What a ride! What an absurd, surreal, bizarre, demonic ride. This is not a book, this is a journey – and a deeply unsettling one at that. Funny though at times as well. Hard to describe, hence why I just use a lot of adjectives here. This was awesome!

Set in the life of Samantha, currently enrolled in the writing workshop of a prestigous arts school, we discover her work, her peers, her life through her eyes. Behold the grimy, gory wonders that we will discover there. Her peers in her writing workshop just call themselves „Bunnies“. They seem to be the incarnation of the perfect rich girl, hence why Samantha has nothing to do with them. But then one day they invite her over, for one of their „Smut Salons“. From there one everything gets really strange.
It is not easy to pinpoint the genre, but it is somewhere between horror, satire, literary fiction, fantasy, magical realism and art piece.

This plot oscillates between the surreal and the outright bizzare. And it does so via beautiful language, witty syntax, metaphorical and allegorical tropes throughout the work. I do love the bizarre, so this was practically made for me. But I would guess that this is something for the acquired taste (bluntly spoken: not for everyone). This book needs to be approached with a very open mind. The author made sure, that we have in our main character an unreliable, possibly mentally ill narrator. As someone who worked as a psychotherapist for half a decade, I soon fell into the trap of diagnosing Samantha. I saw at least some symptoms of schizophrenia, possibly depression with psychotic symptoms forfilled, was contemplating whether the mentioning of a schizophrenic article was hinting at that. Spoiler: The definite answer never came. So the question whatever really goes on there stays with us, how much of this is just metaphor and allegory, how much is psychic illness or just the over-arching phantasie of a writer? We will never fully know for sure and I like it that way! Sometimes nothing kills a good plot more than overexplaining. And like in life, some things can never be fit into the small categories we humans invented for most of the things we know. Everything is up to our interpretation, as the book itself tells us: „I wanted to leave it open. To interpretation.“
Another big topic the novel touches on is loneliness. Feeling cut off from your peers and suffering for it. Samantha has her own way of dealing with it, as we see clearly as the story unfolds. It was sometimes painful to experince her struggles with social contact and healthy behaviour. A lot of times I viscerally felt the struggles Samantha went through.

This is such an amazing read. I love when authors take themselves not too seriously. Mona Awad does a brilliant job at this, it is simply a delight. The self-ironic and referential parts bloom throughout her work, my favourite being the „Kill your darling“-part (not gonna say more as you best experience that for yourself).
I think the main reasons why this book engaged me this much is, that it reminded me a lot of my own time being a language and literature student (my native tongue german in this case) at university. Although not 100 percent the same professional group (although we had a lot of writers and I myself have a little experience in that) I could see some similarities of the behaviour Awad hilariously as well as brilliantly depictures.
And the other, probably more prominent reason: It simply kept me engaged through the WHOLE book. Not one single site, not one word leaving a bored or empty feeling. As a reader I am easily bored when the plot line seems predictable to the point where I DNF the book, because I don’t see a point in reading it anymore (given that the language part is not well executed as well). „Bunny“ was as unpredictable as it was adventurous, avantgarde, reminiscent of concept art at times. And a work of art it is indeed. Or is it bluntly trying to not be that? To quote again: „It’s all a matter of perspective.“

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 stars, one of my favourite reads this year!

Trigger warning: Mental Illness, Physical Violence, Disturbing Content, Blood, Murder