I have an obsession with body-swap and body transformation stories. I always blame it on the Quran, a book that is full of stories of transformation, a book that was enforced into every detail of my childhood.
I have my long list of metamorphosis stories and novels, but I also keep a closer-to-the-heart list of works where transformation is not a device, but the core itself.
I love Kafka, but I am not a big fan of The Metamorphosis, although I think every writer should at least read the first seven pages. I think The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the 1886 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, is the true modern classic of metamorphosis, the one that quietly shaped everything that came after, including Kafka.
The closest body-swap novels to my heart are The Body by Hanif Kureishi, Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov, and Sirat Ali al-Zaybaq, an arabic epic filled with stories of disguise, transformation, and concealment.
That is why when I first read about Isla McElroy’s novel People Collide, I knew I would read it. A novel about a body swap, where a husband wakes up in his wife’s body while she disappears into his. But when I started reading it, I found myself, page after page, sliding into a deep pot of honey.. thick, slow, intoxicating and infused with highly intelligent writing and construction. The prose is elegant in a way that forces you to reread sentences and paragraphs, almost against your will, lingering there, slightly dazed, because it taste so good on the tip of your tounge and clit whichever you are using for readings,
McElroy is a precise writer. I couldn’t find an extra sentence in the whole novel. You can feel the effort and concentration behind every line. Some writers might write something like “she smiled at him and said,” but even such simple sentences, McElroy turns into cooked and delicately plated.
Throughout the novel, Isle McElroy, builds these small, almost invisible details. There is a scene of pursuit in the streets of Paris where the narrator is wearing hotel slippers. The scene stretches into a full chapter—full of revelation and surprise—but as readers we remain tense and irritated, because like the narrator, our movement is constrained by shame and by the limits of the body, both are coming out of walking in the streets wearing slippers.
The sex scene at the Pompidou Center toilets is one of the best written sex scenes I’ve read in a long time. It’s a masterclass in how to structure a sex scene so that it reveals the core of your work, and give name to the unnamed desire. The choice of words and details is meticulous.. wet, intelligent, literary, elegant, and dirty at the same time. The husband, now in the wife’s body, is confronted with his own body as something external, something estranged. And in the middle of it, she asks:
“Are you close?”
“How would I know?”
It’s funny, but also provocative, without breaking the charged vibration of the scene.
And finally, when you reach the last chapter, the core of the novel reveal itself. It is not about body swap. It is about love, how it stretches across time, across bodies, across absence. Love between partners, between mothers and their children.
It is a tender, sensitive novel, one that gives you the quiet joy of reading, and leaves you with something unsettled, something still moving inside you
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