LITHIUM

Episodic glimpses of a woman’s life in a time of personal trauma.

The speaker of this elliptical novel-in-fragments is a young woman adrift in Buenos Aires at the tail-end of her 20s who has agreed to cat-sit for her ex while he’s in the hospital. The ex is a formative first love, and the malady that prompted his hospitalization appears to have been psychological, violent, and at least partially aimed at his most recent ex-girlfriend, Violeta, whom his mother refers to as “contained.” As the speaker cares for the volatile cats and their new litter of kittens, she also cleans the apartment she once shared, confronted by lingering traces of violence: “a hank of hair as if pulled out by force, long hair,” “blood in crevices between the floor-tiles.” Meanwhile, the narrator’s own life is stalled by trauma. Her troubled mother has recently died; she herself has suffered the miscarriage of a pregnancy she had only begun to suspect; her graduation date is indefinitely delayed by a “backlog of final exams [she’ll] never be able to pass.” Bolstered by a “modest” inheritance from her mother’s estate, the narrator casts about for an experience, an activity, a love, the clarity of a philosophical truth that will deliver her life back into her control with the same kind of “static and well-lit order” that she seeks to return to her ex-lover’s apartment in the wake of chaos. Articulate and piercing at the sentence level, the books suffers somewhat from the same kind of drifting apathy that afflicts its main character. Though it grapples with larger themes—the economic “apocalypse” of life under Argentina’s austerity-driven government, mental health, wealth inequality, and the commodification of youth—the narrator’s own gaze remains fixed firmly inward on a landscape which, for better or worse, resists the “luminous” clarity of early morning light, when “objects have clear boundaries” and “everything is perfectly defined against its background,” and more often slides into shadow, where “objects [get] in the way of other objects, and everything ends up conveying the sense of an irrecoverable loss.”

A novel of skillfully wrought interiors that struggles to find its vanishing point.