Habilis
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A hallucinatory exploration into the origins of humans and
human language perfect for fans of Brian Evenson and Eimear McBride.
Lucy, a young woman with an uncertain past, finds herself
thrust into a mysterious anthropology museum that converts into a disco club
each night. Moving through its labyrinthine galleries, she tries to construct
an origin story for herself and for her species. But as the night progresses,
her grip on language and identity slips away until the exhibit captions rupture
the text, transporting us to East Africa, where the lives of three
people—British anthropologist Mary Leakey, an Indian indentured laborer
building the Uganda Railway, and a curator with too many secrets—interweave to
reveal the darker side of the search for origins.
Surreal, spiraling, and daringly innovative, Habilis
is all at once a historical reconstruction, a psychological horror, a mystery,
a ghost story, and a creation myth. But above all, it is a meditation on
language, desire, and the stories we tell about ourselves—especially those that
might unravel us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Quinn draws the reader through a surreal labyrinth in her beautiful if uneven debut. Told alternatingly in vignettes and placards from a museum exhibition, the narrative follows Lucy as she spends the night in a museum-turned-disco ("It's radical I know, but we were facing bankruptcy," her curator-friend Dina explains of the hybrid concept). Lucy was left on a train as a baby, and while the placards in the museum trace the evolution of humankind, the vignettes trace Lucy's personal history and her unknowable lineage. Each series of texts mirrors Lucy's life; for example, Lucy has recently learned that she is losing her ability to speak, and the placards dive into language acquisition theory and evolutionary perspectives on language. Things get stranger as Lucy moves toward the center of the museum; when she finally reaches it, she encounters a longer, nonlinear placard about British anthropologist Mary Leakey, an Indian indentured laborer working on the Uganda Railway, and a curator working in the National Archives. While an interesting formal move on Quinn's part, the story itself seems to sometimes get lost in its own structure. Still, the prose is often luminous. Though Quinn tends to stagger in her ambition, there's much to admire.
