September 2, 2024
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.
September 15, 2024
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.
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