MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4390121829 · doi:10.1353/wlt.2024.a916097

I'll Do Anything You Want by Iolanda Batallé (review)

2023· article· en· W4390121829 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
J. R. Patterson

Bibliographic record

VenueWorld Literature Today · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPostcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNothingObligationPower (physics)SurrenderLiteratureLawPhilosophyPsychologyArtPolitical scienceEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Reviewed by: I'll Do Anything You Want by Iolanda Batallé J. R. Patterson IOLANDA BATALLÉ I'll Do Anything You Want Trans. Maruxa Relaño & Martha Tennent. Padstow, UK. 3Times Rebel. 2023 (©2022). 226 pages. SEXUAL STORIES ARE DIFFICULT to tell well. Writers get bogged down in the complexities of the emotional gymnastics of sex, to say nothing of their problems with the physical. With I'll Do Anything You Want, Catalan writer Iolanda Batallé sets herself a difficult routine, navigates some tricky maneuvers, and dismounts beautifully; it is a complex story told very simply, and she has the 2013 Prudenci Bertrana Prize to show for it. "I'll do anything you want" is a very tempting phrase, and a frightening one. Tempting because to wield such open, direct power over someone is rare. It is frightening because its vulnerability makes it dangerous. It is a key to a strange, destructive place where nothing is left behind. (Even Meatloaf knew where to draw the line.) Another danger running through the book is hagiography—which is really just a different end of the same stick as sexual domination. "The people [End Page 73] who would have listened without judging are dead." This kind of glorification of the dead is another kind of complete surrender, of responsibility and obligation to oneself and others, and can only result in isolation. Comparisons drawn between Batallé and Anaïs Nin are more thematical than stylistic; Batallé has a voice all her own. While the topic of sexual freedom versus sexual imprisonment may be Nin's, some of the literature mentioned in the text offers a vision of Batallé's distantly ominous approach: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Heart of Darkness, and Hemingway's short story "The Old Man at the Bridge," which deal with issues of communication, possession, and fatalism. Not that the book is dismal. Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent's translation moves the text along at a brisk clip. And a string of humor and light threads through the entire text. The big reveal is telegraphed to an Anglo audience the way it isn't to a Mediterranean one, but that is a matter of culture rather than translation. That is the beauty of translated works: simple, natural truths in one place are surprises in another. J. R. Patterson Gladstone, Manitoba Copyright © 2024 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.400
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.012
GPT teacher head0.226
Teacher spread0.214 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2023
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueWorld Literature TodaySame topicPostcolonial and Cultural Literary StudiesFrench-language works237,207