ISCHIA

A traumatized woman’s mind strays far and wide while waiting to catch a plane.

Heffes’ deliberately digressive and often feverish novel, first published in Argentina in 2000, concerns an unnamed narrator planning to leave town with two friends. The destination and purpose of the trip are vague, but the need for escape isn’t: The narrator describes feeling trapped in her apartment and growing up in a large family with seven brothers and a violently abusive father. Rather than lingering on the particulars of that, though, her mind can’t stay still. She riffs on music, fantasizes about opening a "Great House of Perdition" rife with drug-fueled and sexual transgression, implies she might be observing things after having killed herself, suggests she’s adjacent to a drug-running scheme, goes on drug binges, and on and on. At a certain point during her psychic meanderings her friends’ names change to wished-for destinations—Brussels, Prague—while her own becomes Ischia, after the Italian island. Heffes clearly establishes a character with a destabilized past (“ever since I was little, nothing had scared me more than memories”), which explains the name-changing, the dreamlike narrative, and the constant search for different venues and new sensations. But as a reading experience it can be draining: Each of the book's 10 chapters is a long unbroken paragraph, and the story is often rife with non sequiturs and tonal shifts. Credit translator Wray for sustaining a mood of anxiety amid the neo-modernist antics and Heffes for striving to pinpoint where emotional damage fractures storytelling (“there are some things you just can’t describe because they’re like melodies in your soul in a vaporous state”). But rather than an immersive trip into a broken psyche, the book reads more like overheated Calvino.

A rambling, frustrating experiment.