Sterling Karat Gold

December 12, 2022
Waidner (We Are Made of Diamond Stuff) spins a vivid if unwieldy tale of the fantastical measures a trans playwright takes against hate crimes and persecution. In the surreal opening, narrator Sterling Beckenbauer is attacked with lances by a picador on horseback in a present-day Camden Town estate. They’re wearing a flamboyant outfit, but queer people get attacked here no matter what (“I knew a gay who looked straight like a Gap advert,” Sterling reflects. “Got hassle still”). Sterling then visits Chacki Smok, their bestie and partner in avant-garde theatre project Cataclysmic Foibles, who presses Sterling to write their next playscript so the pair can collect some much-needed cash. After Sterling is pinched by Kafkaesque cops and charged with assault for the picador incident, Chacki helps Sterling identify two witnesses, sex worker Elesin Colescot and Iraqi immigrant Rodney Fadel, and the four become friends. The line between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly blurred as Sterling’s trial turns into a grotesque production of Cataclysmic Foibles, complete with a bird-like judge who’s running a crew of transphobic bullfighters bent on destroying Chacki, Elesin, Rodney, and Sterling. Though a thread involving Sterling time-traveling with Rodney spins out of control, Sterling’s ideas for their final play make for a satisfying note of revenge. Despite the bumps, this is great fun.

Starred review from January 15, 2023
A Londoner is the subject of a surreal trial in this kaleidoscopic novel. Sterling Beckenbauer knows a thing or two about loss. "Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism," they reflect. "Lost my country to conservativism, my language to PTSD." And after they're set upon outside their flat in Camden Town in London by several bullfighters, they're in danger of losing their freedom--while later, at a football match, they're accosted by two police officers dressed as club officials who inform them that they're being arrested for assaulting the bullfighters. (They later learn they're also being charged with "forcing arresting officers to go to Hendon, Travel Zone 4, on a Saturday.") The timing couldn't be worse for Sterling, who's just about to launch the latest installment of Cataclysmic Foibles--"a quarterly series of DIY artists' plays"--with their "bestie," Chachki Smok, a costume designer. Things then take a turn when Sterling learns that they'll be allowed to stage the next play, but only if it also functions as their trial. And as for that trial, it's presided over by a judge who's "​​a tall, blue-bodied frog, spindly, with the head of a fledgling bird," and the spectators include "a pig in a religious habit" and others with "frog-shaped white hearts beating in, or on, their funnel-shaped chests." Add to all this a time-traveling doppelg�nger, a spaceship, and a "PINK SPIRE WAKING UP APROPOS OF NOTHING AND COMING FOR ME WITH ITS CRUSTACEAN LIMBS AND ITS HAIR-FINE JETS," and you have a novel that defies the laws of literary physics--Waidner seems incapable of not surprising their readers, and the novel, despite its serious themes, seems like it had to be incredibly fun to write. Still, it's a sobering look at the way underrepresented communities--migrants, nonbinary people--are treated: "They know what it's like to be on the receiving end of a system poised against them; to be positioned as the aggressor, the danger, when having nothing, nothing, on the other side." This novel is part Franz Kafka, part Hieronymus Bosch, and part Monty Python, but mostly it's completely sui generis. And it succeeds on every level a novel can. Dizzying, unsettling, and extremely smart.

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