Wow, that was weird! I knew it was a mystery but wasn’t sure what to expect. It turns out, it’s impossible to know what to expect! I was surprised by the weirdness at the beginning, but it got my attention. It’s anything but a normal detective story, all short sentences from two characters obsessed with poetry and ideas around expectation, gender and violence. I’m not sure I liked it but I did keep listening.
I think it’s more allegory than crime novel but allegory for what I’m not sure. With the excessive number of penises, I think it’s trying to make a point about gendered violence and how female victims are treated by society, but I’m not sure what that point is. And something to do with Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik that I didn’t understand at all until the essay that appeared halfway through the book.
I don’t know if it’s the translation but the excessive use of sentence fragments, and sometimes just a bunch of single words hanging in the air, became quite grating. If she was going for the brevity and “crystalline prose” that Pizarnik admired, I’m not sure this is it. Ideas in sentence fragments might work in a 10-20 line prose poem, but in a novel, it doesn’t have at all the same effect and feels a bit like the novel went through the blender.
The second half was much better than the first, or maybe I just got used to it, I’m not sure. But I still have no idea which I just read!
