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jjjreads's review
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Animal death, Classism, Death, Stalking, Grief, Medical trauma, Death of parent, Animal cruelty, Child death, Terminal illness, and Schizophrenia/Psychosis
emi98's review
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
"A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She's not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family."
Within the countryside there is the things you don't see in the city: a sense of isolation and disconnect that is claustrophobic when you may be facing troubles; a compulsion of anxiety, darkness, and fear the worst is about to come.
The mother Amanda was very well written, with her constant interjecting thoughts of her daughter and the measure of safety, or the "rescue distance" (which was the original title of the book, one I believe should have been kept), where she continuously calculates the reachable space to her child in order to stave off any potential harm to her:
"I always imagine the worse case scenario. Right now, for instance, I'm calculating how long it would take me to jump out of the car and reach Nina if she suddenly ran and leapt into the pool. I call it the "rescue distance": that's what I've named the variable distance separating me from my daughter, and I spend half the day calculating it, though I always risk more than I should."
It's an incredibly brilliant and intimate detail of parental anxiety that establishes such a good dynamic of a mother/child relationship; in contrast, the relationship between a local woman at Amanda's vacationing spot, Carmen and her son David, one irrevocably changed through contamination by poisoning of one careless mistake, makes for a disturbing contrast. One of the more brilliant moves was this mounting, dread-invoking fear continued with the fact that no matter how close children are, even right beside their respective parents, their hostile surrounding makes the rescue distance lose its power, as indicated by Amanda near the end:
"My mother always said something bad would happen. My mother was sure that sooner or later something bad would happen and now I can see it with total clarity, I can feel it coming toward us like a tangible fate, irreversible. Now there’s almost no rescue distance, the rope is so short that I can barely move in the room."
The run-on sentences, familiar in the Spanish language (and perhaps lesser so in its translation, but I digress), serve well to the unravelling of the duo's vacation, propelling the reader to critical moments (the deformed children, the poisoning, the greenhouse, the hospital) . The subsequent rhythm of the dialogue via sentence structure created a momentum that made it easy to finish in a single sitting (an hour for myself).
The novella took inspiration on the usage of pesticides and other (obviously harmful) chemicals dumped without concern in Argentina (although not the only country by far). Soy, the main culprit, is one of the largest monoculture cash crops, and reports of surrounding communities to these farms are devastating to read; people's health, security, and livelihood are all severely and at time, irreversibly impacted by these processes. Below is an excerpt from an interview with the author on the general foundation of this story:
"This story could be set anywhere. In fact, the first time I heard about pesticides and their terrible consequences was through a documentary about this subject in France. But, mainly because of corruption, Latin America has the worst agrochemical regulations and agreements. And Argentina, in particular, is one of the biggest importers of soya—one of the products more related with pesticides. We spread this soya all over the world; it is the base of a lot of our food. Soya is in everything: cookies, frozen fish, cereal bars, soups, bread, all kinds of flour, even ice cream!"
(Since when does soy have to be in everything? Will we one day see the impact of this consumption in our own communities? How haunting the innocent description of the waxy soy fields are in the work; how haunting when we discover the moment that everything is a danger to you?)
The deformity, whether through physical, mental, or spiritual matters, of the children is a central topic of this book. Although defects are a sensitive topic in the disability community (as many of the times it's used to demonize said character(s)), disability here is shown as a symbol of preventative violence towards children. The sense of wrongness isn't laid with the child---such as morality, or by God-willing, the latter common in many Latin-American communities, more so in countryside backgrounds---but rather the actions of third parties that harmed these children. Disability, loss, chaos; these and more are all the outcomes of poison, and are supposed to disturb our conscious.
We learn that transmigration of the soul is offered, by a village grandma (rather more a village witch), as the most tangible cure to these poisoning that often killed. Transmigration, or the movement of the soul after one's death, can serve its spiritual representation at how shattered whole communities are at violence; the hospital I suppose is supposed to represent some type of purgatory: there are worse things than death, and how those things can be both fleeting and never-ending. This act also, I believe, explored the fear of parents with their children---the othering of your own child, on how your child loses every sense of who they are and you of what they are---and inevitable consequences after the "worst case scenario" happens. <spoiler/>
The narrative is told entirely in dialogue, where there is little to no explanation for certain details or events. It's exactly as if someone who in the midst of a death-inducing fever would recount to you, as per the conversation of Amanda and David (italics):
(That is not important.
How can it not be? That's the story we need to understand.
No, that's not the story, it has nothing to do with the exact moment. Don't get distracted.)
I wouldn't say this was a new type of literary genre, I have seen comparisons to the horror sci-fi; almost fantastical, almost uncanny, but still unable to deny many facts of reality, (examples include VanderMeer's Annihilation/Area X series). The narration itself, with feverish ramblings and constant interjection, does remind me of Iain Reid's "I'm thinking About Ending Things", or basically any of David Lynch's work (which I believe the author is a fan of)--in particular, some dream sequences in Twin Peaks resonated strongly with this work. Horror is one of the genres to truly explore the effects of the evils of the world, it is where we attempt to translate this horrendous facts and our processing of said facts into a story that is absurd, yet so easily identifiable to the reader. Could something so monstrous affect any one of us---even on our best behaviour, even at our most-guarded moments, even when the rescue distance is at zero---and change us forever? Sources say yes.
It was, personally, an unsatisfactory ending just based on how the novel was written, leaving it more of a frustrating mystery (thus reflected in my rating, boohoo). Also, there could have been (even with its novella size) cuts to some dialogue as they were unnecessary (the worms for example: I was not a fan even though the visceral, raw things it's supposed to evocate is something I usually like) and caused a break in concentration in the otherwise smooth flow of the book.
Definitely worth a read… another great work in LA literature! :3c
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death
Moderate: Body horror, Child death, Classism, Death of parent, Grief, and Medical content
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