The Goldsmiths prize-shortlisted debut from British-Greek author Aea Varfis-van Warmelo opens with a confession: “I have never told this story before.” The narrator, who bears the author’s name, goes on to tell the reader that she is a liar. From Humbert Humbert’s self-justifying account of abuse in Lolita to the devastating misinterpretation at the heart of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the trope of the unreliable narrator exposes the dangerous gap between the stories we tell and the truths they obscure. In Attention Seeking Behaviour, the reader is asked to examine their own capacity for trust.
A young woman aspires to be a writer – yet she has paused her postgraduate degree in poetry. She works unfulfilling jobs that demand little from her and has a lot of sex, which she describes as offering her “solitude”. She does all this while lying compulsively.
She lies for fun, to flirt, to steal, for sympathy. She lies out of a desire to hurt others, but also to preserve her own privacy. Lying is, as the narrator claims, universal, though success at lying is not.
She regards fraudsters and scammers with derision: they are “divorced from reality” and give her “second hand embarrassment”. In her eyes, her own lies are somehow purer. Grief and trauma pulse beneath the story, as the narrator is haunted by the dead bodies she sees in parks and floating in canals.
She says she has called emergency services, but her account is slippery: the harder we try to grasp it, the more it slips through our fingers. Can we believe a word she says? Attention Seeking Behaviour draws the reader through personal confession and a gripping narrative of misadventures while dating, but the novel loses some of its momentum in its discussions of deceit.
An essay on Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System for classifying facial movements to determine deception disrupts the narrative drive. When this bleeds into the narrative, her boyfriend says: “No more. Please.” These sections interrupt the flow and lack the immediacy achieved elsewhere.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
