Protected: You Should Know I Found a Dead Body

As a poet (and debut novelist), reading Attention-Seeking Behavior was a familiar experience. Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s writing is unique in that she chooses to draw from poetry’s toolbox. The novel is recognizably poetic in its heightened prose style, its immersive setting, its turns of phrase. It juts into the wider territory of autofiction and is voiced as such. The narrator is a woman who is clever, literary, a bit anxious; she is fascinated with both her own and others’ behavior, and above all, with the role of language in shaping those behaviors. Think Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Joanna Walsh, and, recently, Solvej Balle. She is also a compulsive liar, and she thinks you should know this. And yet, at the same time, the novel is criminal and sexual. (Now, think Fleur Jaeggy and Ann Quin.)

Varfis-van Warmelo, who was first a poet, uses her additional fluency in the first person to subvert the unreliable narrator trope in fiction. Varfis-van Warmelo takes what Jonathan Culler describes as the overheard quality of a poem’s lyric “I,” which both invokes and creates a presence in a single moment, and she keeps this “I” talking, for hours, under a bright lamp suspended from the ceiling. Thus, this is a novel about bodies and sensations, lit up by language. The bodies are the main character’s body, her boyfriend Normal Ben’s body, the dead body she says she found in the park, the collective body of “everyone,” and your body—you, the body created the moment a verb appears on a page, no matter the stated or implied pronoun. 

The verb of choice in Attention-Seeking Behavior is should and it is attached to feeling, to telling, to knowing. As the narrator spins her tale of lies upon lies and truths that may well be lies, the reader is spun out. Do we know by feeling? Do we know by telling? Do we feel and thus know? Do we tell in order to feel? By authoritatively and essayistically splicing her scraps of truths and lies with accounts of lie detection methods and their often-unfounded claims to truth, the narrator takes the reader on a vertiginous journey through what it means to come to life through language, in all senses of that phrase. By the end of the novel, this continual intercutting of discursive historicising with lyric moments flickers and shimmers with lack of presence, leaving you lying and alone and utterly delighted with yourself.

– Kimberly Campanello
Author of An Interesting Detail