Review by Booklist Review
Moschovakis' translation of David Diop's novel At Night All Blood Is Black (2020) won the 2021 Man Booker International Prize. Her latest self-authored novel is set in a dystopian landscape in which the earth rumbles, rollicks, and undulates violently, such that walking across a room is fraught with the danger of falling. The nameless narrator, a former theater actor, is struggling with maintaining balance physically and emotionally. Then Tala moves in with our protagonist, and an obsession begins that forms and informs the bulk of the narrative. The vertiginous quality of Moschovakis' prose is emblematic of the disruptive environment that constantly shakes and quakes. Via the narrator, Moschovakis mines the profound psychological dissonance caused by the seismic event and the entrance of an infatuation. The author's strengths include her inventive and stylistic use of language and her playfulness with metaphor, simile, and tropes, all skillfully employed to enhance and enforce the story. Most impressive is her character study of a person caught in the throes of a passion they both do and do not wish to escape.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet and translator Moschovakis's third novel (after Participation) offers a coolly provocative portrait of an aging actor in a city beset by seismic activity. The unnamed narrator gradually reveals the parameters of her strange world, which has pointed echoes of the Covid-19 lockdown, as she struggles to walk around her apartment during tremors and scrutinizes the guidelines shared by authorities ("They say things will return to normal and you will adjust to the change, as if those are similar promises, and possible"). The reader also learns early on that the narrator wants to kill her housemate, Tala, who's at least 15 years her junior. Much of the novel revolves around the narrator's grappling with the reasons for her homicidal desire--a mix of jealousy over Tala's youth and active social life and a desire to be Tala. After Tala disappears, the narrator sets out to find her, hoping to follow through on her plans. Neither the murder plot nor the speculative elements are sufficiently developed, but the narrator's preoccupation with poetic language (she's a staunch critic of "junk metaphors") lends the novel a deep and lively intelligence. Readers of experimental fiction ought to seek this out. Agent: Akin Akinwumi, Willenfield Literary. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A woman who has come to a crossroads in her life travels a city in the midst of a cataclysm to find someone she intends to murder. The unnamed narrator of Moschovakis' latest is an actor at the end of her career. Just prior to an ongoing seismic catastrophe that will alter the basic structures of society, she had an event of her own that rearranged the underpinnings of her identity. At a production in a park in which the narrator had a pivotal role, a protest had broken out and she forgot her lines for the first time in years, but instead of forcing the show to go on, she addressed the protesters directly, admitting, "You're right, you're right--We don't know what we're doing--We don't know what we're doing and we keep doing it anyway…But I'm an actor--I don't speak, I repeat." After this was proclaimed a disaster "of thecareer-ending, unmitigated kind" by the critics, and the narrator was forced to take in a boarder to make ends meet. The boarder, Tala, has what the narrator can no longer lay claim to: youth, beauty, and the kind of self-confident elegance necessary to do things like "cross the room without even stumbling" in the world of constant aftershocks the two inhabit. The narrator's interest in Tala develops into a fixation that, when Tala doesn't return home one morning, becomes a full-blown obsession--to find Tala, wherever she is, and murder her, so that by Tala's erasure the narrator's own identity as someone whospeaks rather than justrepeats can take form. What follows is an existential journey through the largely abandoned streets of the trembling city and through the narrator's past in the world of theater, where, in order to become a character, she first had to learn how to unbecome herself. Told in a multitude of forms, including journal entries, transcriptions, and a form of collage cutup, this story advances the thematic precepts of Moschovakis' earlier work: rejecting binaries for the more shrouded truths that can be found when language, morality, and even individual selfhood are deconstructed. Moschovakis continues to provoke her readers to ask: What is a story? Or, even, what is a life? Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
