Sometimes you just gotta rage.
Lately I’ve read novels where the narrator seems ready to bust off the page and stab me in the eye. Or hurl herself off a high building to meet a messy end, right in front of me. In these novels the narrators behave badly. They don’t watch their language and violence is never far from their thoughts. It’s because they are furious: About their circumstances. About their lives. About their men. They don’t care what I think of them. What a gift. It’s like the friend who finally stops trying to please you. One day, instead of telling you what she thinks you want to hear, she tells you the truth, and the real conversation can begin at last.
Here for instance is the first sentence of Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz, as translated by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff: I lay back on the grass among fallen trees and the sun on my palm felt like a knife I could use to bleed myself dry with one swift cut to the jugular.
What follows is a visceral and primal rendering of a woman who can’t pretend any longer that her life is happy — even though she lives the definition of a perfect life. If life has ever felt like a horrifying nightmare to you — if you have ever thought, however fleetingly, ‘wow, these people all around me actually think they are behaving rationally, when really they are trapped in a nightmare inside their own skulls, and they are living a script in which they never question their values or beliefs, and I’m trapped along with them’ — then you’ll experience your own alienation, and recognize your own thoughts, while reading this brief testimony of a woman who refuses to look away.
After that, I invite you to read Three Plastic Rooms by by Petra Hůlová, the story of an aging prostitute and her relationship with her own body, a novel rendered from Czech into hauntingly poetic English by Alex Zucker. Oh, my goodness. How can there exist a novel that is at once so open to beauty and yet in which every sentence is some new shocker? Here you go. This is that book. It’s the kind of book that nineteen out of twenty readers will say is too upsetting to love, or maybe even finish, and the twentieth person will say this book changed my life or this book convinces me that we are nowhere near the end as a species of exploring all the ways human language can be called upon to express new things.
As I write this, there has not been a single review of the novel on Amazon, which is surprising. It seems the book that would make people angry enough to write about it. Let’s see. It’s the kind of book that you can open on any page and be unbelievably disturbed. Let me try now:
the true mumsyfuckers have enough of that little drama at home, and the fuckshop, a quiet backwater of kissed knees, offers a gulf of solace, because what an orgasm means to these men’s wives was drilled into their heads by all those sex scene disasters you see at the multiplex, which whenever they happen my sticker-inner farts with laughter in my seat, and I would only be willing to moan during them, as I said, for the enjoyment of a man all my very own, so that sitting there in the seat next to me, in the dark, he would get an urge to stroke himself, or maybe just enjoy my sights, or maybe all of me, or, sigh, even love me.
Then consider Heartland by Ana Simo. The novel is the the most genteel of the three, but it’s just as relentless — it’s only that the diction is more elevated. I was inclined to love it if only because it’s 75-year-old Simo’s debut novel but then it performed the amazing feat of surprising me on every page — for its truthfulness, and for its humor.
The mule was the only one of the four departing beasts she could not imagine killing. The other three she stabbed, quartered, and disemboweled with her knife, throwing their livers to the feral pigs that roamed the cemetery at night, and burning the rest until only their teeth and bones remained.
These novels are for the times when you long for a book that does more than provide a catharsis so familiar that it bores you, or when you’re tired of books that end with hard-won yet valuable lessons. These novels disturbed me. These novels exhilarated me.