This very short Argentinian novel, suggested by Doug, was a shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. We were all immediately attracted to its compellingly intriguing style. It is narrated by a woman, Amanda, partly as internal monologue but chiefly, and ostensibly, to a young boy, David, sitting beside her as she lies in a hospital bed and urging her to remember and understand how she got into this position. She is physically uncomfortable, she can't see, and in fact we will soon discover that she is dying.
The tale that unfolds is one of the fatal combination of toxic pollution and traditional superstition, and of maternal anxiety. Holidaying with her young daughter Nina in a rural farming area, Amanda becomes friendly with the local Carla, David's mother. Carla immediately confides in Amanda her alienation from her own nine-year-old son David, on whom she doted when he was as a baby and toddler. The change dates from an incident six years before, when she was meant to be keeping an eye on a stallion on loan to her horse-breeder husband. The stallion gets free, and she finds it drinking from a stream. The toddler David has followed, and she turns to see him sucking the hands he has dipped in the water. By next morning the horse is dead and David is very ill, clearly dying. In desperation Carla takes him to the local traditional medicine woman. He is saved, but the medicine woman tells her that the only thing making that possible is what she calls a 'migration' - an exchange of David's soul with an unknown other in which the poison would be 'split' and therefore weakened and 'lose the battle'. The body that is saved no longer houses David. From this point on Carla has been unable to think of David as anything but a 'monster'. Although Amanda expresses scepticism, she is also spooked. As soon as Carla has finished her story, she feels the need to check on Nina who is playing with David. With respect to Nina she has always had a sense of what she calls 'the rescue distance' - the distance she knows she can let her stray while still being confident of keeping her safe. But now that sense is disrupted. David comes to seem like a potential threat to Nina, and this comes to overshadow the real, environmental threat to both Nina and Amanda herself. It is only through the apparent present-time prompting of David that Amanda will come to clearly understand everything that has happened.
We were all very struck by this book, but some of us liked it more than others. Its structure is complex, and, despite having found its style so compelling, people in the group generally found the beginning disorientating or difficult. The book begins with a somewhat cryptic dialogue between Amanda and David: 'They're like worms./What kind of worms?/Like worms, all over./ It's the boy who's talking, murmuring into my ear. I am the one asking the questions.' (I'm not sure I ever resolved what the worms were exactly: a sensation in the poisoned body, the connections that make everything clear about what happened, or both?). And the present-time situation is only just established when we are launched into a narration-within-a-narration, as Carla relates to Amanda what happened to the toddler David. Margeret said she never got to grips with the book at all, and, if I remember correctly, Ann said she felt the same until she read it a second time, after which I think she was impressed. Its greatest admirer was Clare, who had also seen the film and was very clear about its message of traditional superstition clouding the simpler and in fact more horrifying reality of toxic pollution. This book, written by an author who was growing up just as there was an explosion of pesticide use in her native Argentina, has been described as 'uncanny', but we were clear that its intention was in fact to undermine the tendency to see things as uncanny and to show how that can divert one's attention from the dangers of reality, and so can be in itself dangerous.
There was some discussion about whether David is in fact really there at the hospital bed, especially as he seems more mature than a nine-year-old boy. In fact, all of David's speeches are qualified by being italicised, and it's clear that Amanda is in fact hallucinating him as a way of working things out in her dying moments, as indeed she finally hallucinates what will happen after she dies. I said I thought that if there was one flaw, it was that it's so clear to the reader early on that Amanda has been poisoned, that some of the tension around her own route towards the understanding of it is reduced.
All in all (apart from Margeret), the group found the book very clever and very moving.
Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here
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