An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A formidable, uncanny, and utterly unique new work from accomplished novelist and poet, Anna Moschovakis, whose translation of David Diop’s Frêre d’âme (At Night All Blood Is Black, Pushkin and FSG) won the 2021 International Booker Prize
After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world.
Darkly comic, deeply resonant, and hallucinatory in tone, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth will appeal to readers of Annie Ernaux, Dionne Brand, and Sheila Heti.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
