I used to think about my experiences (particularly in love) as being connected by a web of (trivial/surface-level) resemblances that I would have liked to trace out in some kind of senseless intimate diagram. I think this is one reason why Marie Redonnet’s Candy Story resonated so much with me, as the narrator Mia’s personal life is evoked through recurrent images, events, doubles, and half-rhymes (literally — the cast of characters includes people named curtz, rotz, witz, kell, yell, lill, lise, line, lina, and so on).  Story-wise, Candy Story is about one summer of a writer who does not know how to begin her second book after publishing a semi autobiographical novel, is experiencing the deaths of people close to her, and has various lovers who share a tendency to disappear on her (and also to call her candy).  There’s also some murderous intrigue with two seaside villages turned oil cities.  (Conspiracy, like intimacy, is after all a matter of resemblances, resonances.)  Which is to say that Candy Story is pretty sui generis, but my brief summary, which I guess suggests some kind of baroque autofiction, doesn’t capture the effect of Redonnet’s spare prose, or her tenderness.