A review by nightpath
Utopia: A Novel by Heidi Sopinka

4.0

A book full of so much, just brimming with thought and concept and space. It’s intersecting and jagged themes of feminism, performance art and the slow invisible violence of owning a vagina are experienced psychedelically throughout the pages. This is the kind of writing that fills me up wholly. It shows the imperfect edges of movements, and people and snapshots of time without seeming as though it has been written that way for that purpose. Sopinka knows what many people do not; there is no perfect boundary. This is something Romy herself, and Paz afterwards, obsess over. The event horizon beyond which no events can affect the observer. Utopia tells us that such a boundary cannot exist in the human experience. We will never be, can never be, so neat as to fit into the tight laws of the molecules surrounding us.

The characters in this book are artists who love and breathe their art. They are what they produce, they produce what they are. They sell what they experience, they experience what they sell, or don’t sell, or sell under false pretenses. The whole book is centered on the tragedy of this fact. A need to be so close to something, that a person cannot be saved. The violence of it all is profound. Burning matches signed into skin, starvation on a gallery floor, skin to soil and soil to skin and a falling falling falling body. It is as visceral as it is performative. The balance is masterfully written.

A read I won’t forget quickly.