No Touching

June 21, 2021
Rouf’s fresh debut follows a woman pushing her boundaries in order to gain a sense of agency. Joséphine, a depressed, unfulfilled 30-year-old philosophy teacher in a subpar high school in the Parisian suburban of Drancy, finds her requests for a transfer eternally ignored. “Every year I feel like I’m acting in the same movie—or perhaps I should say the same scene is playing me,” she thinks. She copes by taking Xanax, and when she can’t sleep, she routinely goes to a strip club to drink a bottle of champagne. Then, after taking a pole-dancing course, she begins dancing at one of the clubs as Rose Lee, and her dreams of dancing in high-heeled stilettos, making lots of money, and exploring her newfound sense of power animate her dreary days spent teaching. She becomes close with Fleur, another dancer, and their relationship lingers on the edges of intimacy. After her Rose Lee persona and her identity as a teacher collide, she’s forced to consider her next move. While the story is a bit wispy, the direct and infectious prose convincingly delves into Joséphine’s inner life as she seeks self-reliance on her own terms. It’s a rich character study, but don’t come looking for plot.

July 1, 2021
It begins as an escape. When Josephine dons high heels and sees herself in the mirror of her striptease class, she begins to see her body as beautiful. The surge of power she enjoys while dancing is nothing like her thankless day job teaching philosophy, where her only bright spot is one receptive student. And then she auditions at a strip club, where her reservations are whisked away by the glamour of the stage and the other woman she becomes once the makeup is applied and the music begins--Rose Lee. Signs of her new life sometimes bleed over into daylight hours, like the day she accidentally brings to work a Chanel bag that no teacher could possibly afford. But when her two worlds collide one night at the club, she vows to put an end to her double life. Brimming with eroticism, Rouf's novel is a pitch-perfect rejection of the bland existence of educators in a broken system, as her liberated heroine explores a more brilliant, colorful life, although one not without its consequences.

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