Ruins, Child

http://www.renaud-bray.com

http://www.renaud-bray.com

Winner of the 2024 Novel Prize, Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child is an irreducibly original debut hybrid novel?a startlingly beautiful and unclassifiable bookSet in what may be the future, and centered on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth. Like a precious old mirror that’s been dropped, it’s a book that is looking up at you, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the novel may recall Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast, often vernacular, often overheard: “The woman is old, I hear children saying nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless.” It’s a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: her female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalization. “Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.” A surreal musing, Ruins, Child uses the lens of urban infrastructure, botany, social commentary, folklore, choreography, and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.