Creating a Blutbuche and Barebacking archive: An analysis of Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch (2022)

Blutbuch, Kim de l’Horizon’s debut and semi-autobiographical novel, portrays a homosexual protagonist resisting constraints upon their body, gender and sexuality – the normative and taken-for-granted division between the two sexes. As the protagonist adds new academic materials and sexual experiences to their Blutbuche (copper beech) and Barebacking (unprotected sexual practices) archive, they also realise how the plant’s cultural history resembles the gender history in European countries across the centuries – interference regulates both the plant’s colour and the human body and prevailing discrimination based on gender and race. The protagonist’s struggle with their mixed emotions towards their Swiss-German family background represented by their grandmother and mother changes from confusion and estrangement to affection and understanding. They undergo an anxious and tough journey while comprehending the complex interconnectedness between language and tradition, tree and body.