L'Opoponax

The Opoponax is a 1964 novel by the French writer Monique Wittig. It follows children through typical childhood experiences, such as the first day of school and a first romance. The book has no ordinary paragraphs: each chapter, of roughly regular length, is a single extended paragraph, and the chapters carry neither numbers nor headings. The author addresses the protagonist as "you" and recounts to her the events of the book.

The novel won the Prix Médicis the same year. At the award ceremony Nathalie Sarraute predicted that in ten or twenty years people would see what writer had been honored there. The New Yorker called it "a charming feat of virtuosity", and Marguerite Duras praised it as a remarkable and important book governed by a single strict rule: to use only pure description in purely objective language. Mary McCarthy devoted a chapter to it in her 1970 essay collection. The lesbian feminist independent publisher Daughters, Inc. reprinted it in 1976.