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Fragrance has long been used to mark who is civilized and who is barbaric, who is pure and who is polluted, who is free and who is damned.
Focusing their gaze on our most primordial sense, writer and perfumer Tanaïs weaves a brilliant and expansive memoir, a reckoning that offers a critical, alternate history of South Asia from an American Bangladeshi Muslim femme perspective. From stories of their childhood in the South, Midwest, and New York; to transcendent experiences with lovers, psychedelics, and fragrances; to trips home to their motherland, Tanaïs builds a universe of memories and scent: a sensorium. Alongside their personal history, and at the very heart of this work, is an interrogation of the ancient violence of caste, rape culture, patriarchy, war, and the inherited ancestral trauma of being from a lush land constantly denuded, a land still threatened and disappearing because of colonization, capitalism, and climate change.
Structured like a perfume—moving from base to heart to head notes—In Sensorium interlaces eons of South Asian perfume history, erotic and religious texts, survivor testimonies, and material culture with memoir. In Sensorium is archive and art, illuminating the great crises of our time with the language of Liberation.
"A novelist and perfume maker serves up a lyrical memoir, sensuous and sensual, that crosses decades and continents...[Tanaïs is] a sharp observer of the world...A heady pleasure of language in love with the author's many subjects, and perfectly suited to them." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Novelist and perfumer Tanaïs blends in this beautiful work memoir, history, and notes on perfuming to interrogate love, violence, and generational healing. Throughout, rich imagery and language are married as Tanaïs moves through their ancestral trauma to discover a place of healing...Readers will find more than just their olfactory senses heightened by this beautiful meditation." - Publisher's Weekly
"This memoir from writer and perfumer Tanaïs is as ambitious as it is wide-ranging, telling the story of their experience as an American Bangladeshi Muslim femme moving around the world in a wise and engaging manner that asks deeply relevant questions about queerness, gender, colonization and South Asian identity." - Vogue
"In Sensorium does to the senses, particularly smell, what Toni Cade Bambara did to sound. I have never come close to experiencing a book that reminds us to accept the calcified histories and fluid futures deeply packed in our senses. What an absolutely unique and momentous book! Tanaïs has made a book only they could write, and my body is so, so thankful. Stunning work." - Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy
"Lyrical, expansive, aching, and alive, In Sensorium invites us to behold and be humbled, to boldly redraw the old maps, to not only recover what has been erased, but to wildly create what has never been and is forever possible. 'I write to imagine freedom, even though I write in the language of power.' In this book, language is a portal and language is a world and language is a syncretic invention. Kaleidoscopic in scope, each page unfolds into a dazzling spiral as Tanaïs weaves personal histories into the history of Bangladesh and South Asia. These meditations on ancestral violence, war, the feminine divine, scent, erotic dreamscapes, rage, belonging, beauty, liberation and familial inheritances pulse with voluptuous longing. This work requires attention and deep devotion." - Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart and My Baby First Birthday
This information about In Sensorium was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tanaïs is the author of In Sensorium, and the critically acclaimed novel Bright Lines, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize. They are the recipient of residencies at MacDowell, Tin House, and Djerassi. An independent perfumer, their fragrance, beauty and design studio TANAÏS is based in New York City.
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