This recently-translated Mexican novella from 2002 was first published in English in 2017 by Feminist Press in the USA, and then in Britain in 2018 by And Other Stories, as part of their Year of Publishing Women (a response to Kamila Shamsie's 2015 'provocation' about inequality in literary fiction). The US edition was longlisted for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.
-----
Slippery, literary psychological horror. It addresses current topics: the revival of neglected female authors, and gender boundaries, but was first published in Mexico in 2002.
Some readers will pick up a hint from the introductory Note from the Author, but I'd recommend reading the translator's note first: it explains some important points, and it makes the narrative and its symbolism somewhat less opaque. I read it just under halfway through. Up till that point, merely looking up the writer Amparo Dávila (thank you to other reviews for indicating the character was named after a real person), and assuming that references to 'disappearance' related to political arrests in Latin American countries had left me frustrated. The disappearance is actually that of women authors and Dávila in particular - and the possibility of expression readers are robbed of at the same time - layered with the widespread murders of women in Mexico which would also become the subject of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. The title is a reference to the bones which most easily distinguish a female skeleton from male. Another character, Juan Escutia, is also named after a real person.
Understanding this background meant that I could enjoy the book to an extent from an analytical viewpoint, although the genre and atmosphere isn't one I like much in book form. (I wouldn't have read this novella if I weren't working through a few books eligible for next year's Booker International.) I noticed echoes of Hitchcock films combined with the paranoia engendered by living in a dictatorship - as in some other Latin American, or Eastern Bloc literature and film - but many English-language readers have compared it with David Lynch. I didn't feel a Lynchian atmosphere, but the possibility that facets of the story are not amenable to clear and specific interpretations, and are instead simply eerie and dreamlike and things-in-themselves is very Lynchian. I still craved concrete interpretations of certain points (e.g. the symbolism of the character of the Seducer, and some of the last reactions of the False Amparo when the narrator says he is going to visit True Amparo) but I have not been able to find any so far in other reviews online. If it were a type of book I enjoyed in itself, and wanted to spend more time with, I would probably have spent longer trying to think of my own.
I was impressed by the skill of the translator in dealing with gender ambiguity in the narrative. The Spanish shows some other characters addressing the narrator - who often asserts his own maleness and masculinity - using feminine word forms, which English does not have, a significant linguistic drawback. Frequently, the narrator did not feel convincingly male: like a character an inexperienced woman writer had created by attaching a number of stereotypical chauvinist male behaviours and ideas to a stream of other inner thoughts that (in a way I couldn't quite pinpoint) sounded more likely to be from a woman. He sometimes described and analysed his own actions in ways that sounded a lot like women analysing a man; I thought a few times of the question "Is this a reverse?" (i.e. someone posting a dilemma in a forum as if they were one of the other people involved). Of course one cannot trust such impressions absolutely (and these days gender-based assumptions about narrative styles are discouraged), ergo ambiguity.
I thought that the three characters' talking to the narrator as if he were female could be seen as their assertion of equality: his with them and theirs with him. (He felt this habit to be an affront.) They were making the male female, as opposed to claiming male/masculine characteristics and words for themselves because of male as the default culturally and linguistically, and being more powerful (as they are perhaps implying he has been doing, and as women have done to get ahead in male-dominated spheres. This could be related to the late 20th-century shift from forms of feminism about women being or becoming more like men, to feminism about asserting femaleness in itself - although that may have been a very Global North current, of limited relevance to conditions in Mexico).
[A typo or error that stood out: a doctor, of all people, wouldn't be getting cellulite and cellulitis mixed up.]
As Dávila wrote psychological horror, The Iliac Crest presumably contains references to her stories (which I have not read), and to other Mexican literature I don't know. A couple of journal/blog reviews mention Julio Cortázar.
The ideal reader for this book probably enjoys psychological horror blended with highly literary writing, has a keen eye for feminist interpretations and theory, and a good knowledge of Latin American, in particular Mexican, literature. That isn't me.
The Iliac Crest reminds me, in its claustrophobic twisty-turny atmosphere, of some other books that were listed for the Booker International and its predecessor the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (and which I didn't always want to read in full); I wouldn't be surprised if it were on the longlist next March.
No comments:
Post a Comment