Holes - Hilary White

Ma Bibliotheque 2024 ISBN 9781910055984 Acqn 34232

Pb 11x17cm 108pp £12.99

Sometimes I pretended not to notice it (the black hole), but I knew it was always there. To tell the
truth, I started to like having it around. I stuck quite close to it. Not too close, mind you. But it was
useful, above all, to have somewhere to put things. Unwanted things. I am attracted to your
attraction, he said. (I put it in the hole.) Night by night it got a little bigger…

Holes splices forms of fiction and nonfiction. The narrator, a researcher of limits at an unidentified
university, figures her entanglement with an unobtainable love object as the descent into a black
hole. Everything she reads seems to shed light on the non-events that comprise their relationship,
and study collapses into life as she struggles to separate events and forms, reality and ideation.
Holes is a study in thematic fixation, engaging a range of 'obsessional artists' (including Yayoi
Kusama, from whom the term is borrowed, Lee Bontecou, and Carolee Schneemann) for whom
holes-as idea, imagery, philosophy-have proved evocative, inviting, and occasionally obliterative.

'Hilary White is an incredible polymath, and in Holes she gives us a science, an art history, a
philosophy and an extraordinary romance of the hole. It's a moving, darkly funny account of the
ending of a romantic mis-connection against a backdrop of economic precarity, failing
infrastructure, and environmental disaster. Through the eyes of White's narrator, the hole
becomes generative and world-ending, marking the limit of language and also its beginning. I
loved it.' - Sarah Bernstein.

Hilary White is a writer and researcher, currently an IRC postdoc at Maynooth University, Ireland,
working on a project entitled Forms of Sleep. She co-ran the experimental poetry reading and
commission series, No Matter, in Manchester, and co-edited the zine series, Academics Against
Networking. Her writing appears in MAP, Banshee, zarf, and The Stinging Fly. Holes is her first
novel.

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