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Antoni Jach

Great art provokes by taking great risks. It goads, teases. When we recognise we’re in the hands of a master, the banal becomes profound, the sacred profane, and the grandest of truths reveal themselves in the most innocent of questions. Take Pauly Shore’s scathing 1994 cinematic rebuke of the complicity of heteronormativity in the military industrial complex, In the Army Now. In it, two gay soldiers signal their intent to defy the US Army’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy and serve their country in a neo-colonial war by asking, simply, ‘Is it hot in Chad?’

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An unnamed visitor and note taker wanders present day Paris in Antoni Jach’s new novel, researching something about the city’s ‘many layers’. This amorphous and arduous quest brings him to a certain library where, while he is waiting for a book on aboveground Paris to be retrieved, a spirited American woman tries to draw him out on his work and why he’s in Paris. He airily responds that his interest lies not only in the city’s underground layers but ‘the buildings and the ether’. He’s remote and strangely earnest yet she’s keen to meet him again, whereas he ‘feels like a barbarian’ in her company and is too neurotically preoccupied with some other kind of engage­ment, an exchange with history, to flirt.

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