Abyss is the second of Pilar Quintana’s novels to be translated for Anglophones, following The Bitch which appeared in English in 2020. In the latter, a married and childless woman named Damaris, wanting some company during her listless days, adopts a dog. She watches soap operas and does house chores. But the dog has its own agenda – and Damaris feels fatefully marked by the early death of a childhood friend who had been swept out to sea. Through these modest materials and deceptively uncomplicated prose, Quintana not only builds suspense, but creates a disquieting aura around Damaris and her unfulfilling days.
In Abyss, published in Spain in 2021, Quintana goes further into the persistence of disenchantment among women. This time the narrative’s voice is Claudia, a woman in her mid-40s who recalls moments growing up in the Colombian city of Cali with her mother and father. She was seven or eight years old then, the time of her first Communion. The father owns and manages a supermarket. Her mother, a person of fiery emotions and bleak depressions, alternately dotes on Claudia (but with a critical tongue) and disregards her. The mother often reads her magazines – and remarks on the deaths of Princess Grace (car crash) and Natalie Wood – and since Karen Carpenter, also mentioned, died in 1983, I take that year as the precise time of the story. Fatality darkly tints the air. The mother interrupts Claudia’s homework:
“’Listen to this,’” she said, reading a few lines which explained that one part of the road had a very sharp curve where drivers had to use their brakes and steer carefully. Then she looked up: ‘The princess didn’t.’
‘That’s awful.”
“She kept driving straight, plowed the retaining wall right down. Can you imagine?’
‘Terrible.’
‘She was tired of all her obligations.’”
In addition to talk of celebrity women who committed suicide, there comes news of suicide in their own midst. Quintana won’t allow her narrator to say too much, thus preserving the diffidence of the child in the adult speaker’s perspective. This stance also suggests that the adult Claudia is still startled and captivated by her early experiences – and made wary.
Quintana is a master of restraint and the paced accumulation of significance. One doesn’t have the sense that Claudia is aggrieved or traumatized by what she had keenly perceived. On the contrary, even as some of the events she describes are harsh and reckless, she and Quintana want us to regard such emotional turbulence in the mother as familiar, widely shared among women, and perhaps insoluble.
Just as Damaris’ husband in The Bitch was hardworking and dedicated but not attentive and perhaps dull, Claudia’s father comes off as a plain but benign character – not an oppressor, but whose presence is oppressive. In the meantime, the mother gives Claudia plenty to worry about – the possibility that she would run away, pursue other men, or worse. The child’s mind is on alert – but she will not weep and seems to have learned at a young age how to maintain her balance. She has a partner in this effort – her beautiful doll Paulina, given to her by an aunt. But Paulina also has a trial to face.
The original title of the novel, Los abismos, leads the reader toward multiple plunges. The first one is found in the parents’ apartment; Claudia stands at the top of the stairs and looks down: “The upstairs hall overlooked the living room, like a balcony, and had the same tube railing as the stairs. From there you could gaze down at the jungle below, sprawling in all directions.” The “jungle” comprised the mother’s many lush houseplants. In the second half of the novel, when the threesome takes a rare trip outside the city to stay at the house of friends, the word “jungle” takes on density, and so does “abyss.” The alternating dangers and leaps of freedom embodied in “abysses” ultimately form the locus of Claudia’s self-awareness – an earned knowledge and an empathic attitude toward her mother’s struggles:
“I wanted to face the abyss again, to feel the luscious feeling in my belly, and the fear, the desire both to jump and to run away.”
Claudia speaks as one who has peered at the world and its humans. Quintana gives her room to observe the ordinary and the landscapes of Colombia – as well as the secretive maneuvers of adults. If the mother was “tired of her obligations,” Claudia as storyteller does not tire of her responsibility to look unflinchingly at distress. Part of that responsibility, she knows, is never to let us off easily, even at the end.
[Published by World Editions on February 7, 2023, 220 pages, $17.99 paperback]
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The genres are collapsing into each other. In poet Keiran Goddard’s debut novel Hourglass, stand-up comedic monologue meshes with the talky poetry of self-inventory. A headlong rush of entertainment pervades the idiosyncratic phrase-making of verse. The comic spirit is the quirky narrator who relates the rise and fall of his love affair with his unnamed amour. Hourglass is a sort of blabby rom-com minus one of the participants, the “you” to whom he addresses his remarks. She has been gone for five years.
The relationship begins when our hero pens one of his essays (4,004 words), “Maybe the Real Price of Oil Was the Friends We Made Along the Way!” (“Back then, I sometimes had ideas.”) His editor, the “you,” accepts the piece and asks to meet him at a bar. The terse sentences that comprise Hourglass allow us, like “you,” to get engaged quickly – which, I realized, put she and me in the same place relative to the narrator. We both want to know more about this curious character:
“I couldn’t stop talking.
Why do babies’ mouths always look so sticky? Are they actually sticky or do they all just look sticky?
You responded by leaning over and kissing me and then asking if your mouth was sticky.
It was but I thought the right answer was no so I said that no your mouth was not sticky at all.”
Apparently, she finds him charming. He finds her the most beautiful thing in the world, but we learn little else about her. The old-timers used to say that the essential charm of good talking rests upon sincerity, spontaneity, and the willing revelation of character – and our man passes this assessment, though the revealed character lacks a certain depth. His idiosyncratic statements don’t add up to a defined person. Maybe Goddard is simply telling us that the uttered sounds, the life-in-language, are all we ever get from each other aside from stroking, in which case relations become a matter of how much tolerance one has for logorrhea, or at least garrulity.
One of those expressive habits is a coy repetitiousness. Before meeting his unforgettable beloved, he had a passing relationship. First he says, “She told me that she didn’t want to spend any more time with me while we sat in a café she liked to go to because it had nice bread.” And then, “I could never figure out if the bread was actually nice or if it was just warm,” followed down the page by, “I stayed and ate more of the nice warm bread that might have only been nice because it was also warm.” This habitual echolalia is supposed to be endearing. Charming people are often suspect, especially if they exude much charm but not much else. One suspects that they have something to conceal, namely their utter dependence on the appreciation of others.
But our man (“a huge and hairy person”) doesn’t come off as deceptive – his unfettered odd commentary has much appeal. As with his lover, it is just a question of how much you can take. And he isn’t oblivious: “I was the type of bonfire that burned weirdly and too fast and then someone would have to ask what the smell was and why the smoke was such a strange colour.”
To help things go down smoothly, Goddard produces his brief chapters as micro-essays — almost all are two pages long. Each comment is followed by a break, and many of those comments are one sentence in length. But this form also represents the shape of thought – an obsessive urge to articulate everything that occurs to the character. Some of it is trivial or reiterates the already-said with a new metaphor :
“The days you were not there were the days that my stomach was full of loud and hungry birds.
And then I would see you and the birds would go quiet, as though you had fed worms to the birds, or maybe just killed them.
Most likely you had fed worms to the birds because they were always noisy again once you had left.
Unless you were killing the birds temporarily and then resurrecting them to keep me company while you were away.
That also seemed possible. Less possible than you feeding them worms, but still possible.”
There are a few other strands of content. He occasionally says something to indicate that he is concerned in a slant way about social justice: “I think that all wage labour is coercive and I am angry that we have to do it at all.” (He had worked in a bookshop, unpacking boxes.) Then there is his mother, a crude old woman whose cheerless demeanor suggests that her son had been inadequately loved. His lover departed (worn out, it seems, from his verbosity) and his mother dead, our man seems to be in a permanent state of mourning and heartache:
“Maybe it’s just O.K. to do nothing, not because I buried my mom in a cheap plywood box, or because I have wasted love, but just because it turns out that the nothing is actually the something of life.” He tells us that upon reading this text, “you” would say “that I don’t have to talk about everything that is happening to me.” But he does have to say every word of this story. And I, for one, had to listen to the end.
[Published by Europa Editions on February 14, 2023, 208 pages, $25.00 US / $32.00 CAN]