Book Review | Horror art straight from the heart of the patriarchy: Lisa Taddeon’s bloody novel seeks ways to break bars

Culture|Book review

Novel

Add Taddeo: Animal. Marianna Kurtto, Finland. Gummerus. 408 s.

Joan leaves New York for California when her lover commits suicide in front of her in a public place. Dating partner and great love Big Sky sees the event and disappears:

“Once he had asked me where I belonged and I didn’t understand the question. Now I understood. I belonged to the same group as a man lying dead on the ground ”.

This is the crystallization of the American author Add Taddeon the spirit of the first novel: the book threatens violence, sex and trauma. Joan belongs to the gang whose violence interventions have cut off from what can be perceived as ordinary.

The incident drives Joan into the gorge like an animal. He moves to Topanga Canyon, a suburb, a miserable rental apartment that is not allowed to use an air conditioner. He looks for Alice to think he’s tapping the pieces of the past together.

The animal is not a very easy novel. Joan is a stuffy and monotonous selfie. Sex, either as an impulse or as an exercise of power, dominates his thinking. He schematically seeks refuge in toxic relationships.

Yet Joan’s attentiveness signifies the beauty and intelligence of prose: “I have been called a whore. I have been condemned not only for the acts I have committed against other people, but also – brutally – for the things that have happened to me. ”

Taddeo’s previous work was non-fiction prose. Three women (2019) deals warmly and analytically with their individuals ’relationship to sex and the gendered system.

In the same way, the novel appears in Joan. Three women the protagonists live in a patriarchate like a cage. Perhaps Animal comes up with their own ways to break bars.

The novel drives to and from the miserable edges of their protagonist’s system. In all of her relationships, Joan gets into some sort of conflict, or the whole relationship ends in a bloody accident.

Joan’s actions are also motivated by money and luxury, the glimpses of which seem to catch on to her as well. Because of his expensive watch and revenge, he commits murder.

I wonder if this is a bit too much, makes sense to ask.

Ehkei: The work is meant to be overwhelming and hanging. More of a horror art from the heart of the patriarchy than a reasonable account of the early and later stages of an orphan.

Animal also wastes observations and crystallizations. It weaves a sticky gloomy net that pays off even when the story goes blank.

The animal reminds for example Fleabagin and I May Destroy Youn works such as Ottessa Moshfegin torpid A year of hibernation (2018) is akin to it in its humor.

There is some kind of indecision in the work as a whole. As if it were a bit of a read thriller but still more of a quality novel in the category of literary fiction. Most importantly, it works: Animal complicate things.

On a moral scale, Joan describes herself as “corrupted”. He is a person whose borders and world have been crushed with extraordinary cruelty time and time again. There is no father or mother who has injured and been fatally injured. Could he even be part of a different kind of world?

Joan’s dream about it condenses into Big Sky. “I would have liked to walk that man inside me,” he notes, but specifically Big Sky means an escaping horizon to him all the time. In the end, the most essential act of the book is in addressing it: you, the recipient of the story, are Joan’s daughter.

Marianna Kurtto has translated the work well and attentively. Laconicism and a certain interrogation are also transmitted to Finland.

Despite the wobbles Animal will be remembered as a success. Its feminist dark humor is irresistible:

“Sometimes it’s hard for me to travel even a block without seeing the silent abortions hovering over people’s heads.”