Lovebug by Daisy Lafarge
Daisy Lafarge's lyrical non-fiction book uses metaphors of love and disease to explore ideas of intimacy and contagion
Supposing Daisy Lafarge’s Lovebug were a conventional account of incipient desire – or, more sweetly put, supposing it were a love story – it might feel appropriate to cast the author’s chance introduction to the term 'zoonoses' as the meet-cute. For without the pull of that unfamiliar word and Lafarge’s grappling with the pathogenic world that it disinters, Lovebug might not have come to be.
However, such a causal reading of Lafarge’s work is, while understandable, largely inadvisable. Indeed, the author herself cautions the reader against devotion to overly convenient “origin stor[ies]”, building a case instead for an outlook rooted in “irreconcilability”. For Lovebug, although about love, is no love story: so much “indeterminate matter”, so many “latent monstrosities”, so much “material contagion” across space, time and species is found in it. A lithe and lively work, Lovebug does not obey the codes of its received genre – the familiar essay – nor does it fall in step with the tread of contemporary literary argumentation. It does, however, embrace abjection and, with it, the uneasy unions of the sultry, the sacrificial and the somatic. And, in this way, Lafarge commandingly presents love as a “self-undoing”.
All told: Lovebug – the dexterous meditation on the invisible entities that bind, blur and bloom within, without and between us – demands to be read and be delighted in. Prepare to be bewitched and to ask how to still a beating heart.