Anja’s boyfriend, Louis, is a former artist turned NGO consultant from a working-class family in Indiana. Set in Berlin during an affordable housing crisis, it’s told in a close third-person point of view by Anja, a biotech researcher specializing in cartilage architecture, which is not yet a real thing although it (growing cartilage cells to be used as building materials) sounds like it could/will be. (It critiques parroted critiques of capitalism.) Oval is a near-future dystopian novel exploring love, grief, and the nuanced relationship between empathy and generosity. But Oval is more than an anti-capitalist critique dressed in a fictional narrative that thankfully avoids sounding like it comes from a teenage boy dressed in a Che Guevara shirt. Volunteer work, however, within the hegemony of neoliberalism (stay with me please), is evidence of privatization’s neglect of social programs-at least, that’s what I imagine the two main characters, Anja and Louis, in Elvia Wilk’s Oval would say, given they consider philanthropy a form of money laundering. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “None.” She lives in Baltimore and teaches at Towson University. Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl (2019) and The Glass Eye (2017).
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