The Box
A Novel
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
Of course, each thing has its own sides to every story.
In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it never ceases to snow, a small white box falls from a coat pocket. It is made of paper strips woven tightly together; there is no apparent way to open it without destroying it. What compels a passing witness, a self-described anthrophobe not inclined to engage with other people, to pick up the box and chase after the stranger who dropped it?
The Box follows an impenetrable rectangular cuboid as it changes hands in a collapsing metropolis, causing confluences, conflicts, rifts, and disasters. Different narrators, each with a distinctive voice, give secondhand accounts of decisive moments in the box's life. From the anthrophobe to a newly hired curator of a renowned art collection, from a couple who own an antiquarian bookshop to a hotel bartender hiding from a terrible past, the storytellers repeat rumours and rely on faulty memories, grasping at something that continually escapes them. Haunting their recollections in one mysterious woman who, convinced of the box's good or evil powers, pursues it with deadly desperation.
In this mesmerizing, intricately constructed puzzle of a novel, Mandy-Suzanne Wong challenges our understanding of subject and objects, of cause and effect. Is it only humans who have agency? What is or isn't animate? What do we value and what do we discard?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wong's inventive latest (after the essay collection Listen, We all Bleed) is a feast of knotty sentences. A physical and metaphorical box, small enough to fit into a pocket, travels through multiple locations as a series of narrators share observations and philosophical tidbits. "I shall wrap the question of responsibility in a question equally roundabout and relative," one declares. So it goes, from a snow-covered street to an art gallery, an antique shop, an airport bar, and elsewhere. The initial discoverer of the box, a self-described "inveterate mumbler," comes upon the box after it falls from the coat of a pedestrian. While the multiple narrative voices share a Proustian excess, the forms and focuses of their accounts vary. The penultimate chapter, for instance, is built around the story of a murder, and gradually reveals the victim, witnesses, and perpetrator. The final section, set in a train station and told in a series of emails (with much of the text crossed out but still legible), contemplates that crime as well as others, and asks thorny questions about the functions of narrative. The elaborate wordplay and run-on sentences eventually grow tiresome, though they entertain in short bursts. Fans of experimental fiction ought to check this out.
