Extracts from the Novel Chiaroscuro

Abstract

Chiaroscuro is a short novel that alternates between autobiographical narrative, myth, and queer hallucination. Its title invokes pictorial chiaroscuro — the play of light and shadow that structures both the text and the lived experience of its narrator. The story follows a young protagonist escaping suburban working-class precarity and family violence, carrying the haunting presence of a dead brother, a destructive father, and a mother transfigured into a glamorous, spectral figure. In his flight, queer survival in nocturnal spaces — clubs, prostitution, drugs — intertwines with visionary obsessions: apparitions of Salome as lover and ghost, the figure of Nefertiti, biblical echoes of Mary Magdalene, and apocalyptic prophecy. Structured in veils or fragments the novel unfolds as a mosaic of testimony and mythic parable. Religious and cultural iconographies are not ornamental but constitutive: Salome embodies seduction and threat; martyrs and virgins serve as doubles of the narrator; prophets and the disappeared converse with family histories of violence and silence. In this interplay, memory becomes unstable, queerness visionary, and myth a narrative technology for rewriting trauma. Chiaroscuro is thus a narrative of disappearance and survival that interlaces family archive, queer memory, and sacred myth. It illuminates how gendered life stories reveal structures of patriarchal violence while also re-imagining new forms of desire, identity, and survival. In the tradition of Jean Genet or Jeanette Winterson, the work merges narrative and poetic registers to show how the marginal becomes vision, and how the broken reinscribes itself as myth. Three extracts are included here.