Anna Moschovakis’ taut riddle of a novel navigates shaky ground

Anna Moschovakis’ “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Floor of the Earth” is my form of novel: taut and narratively ambiguous, a e book of riddles or a riddle of a e book.

It takes place in an unnamed metropolis at a second not not like the current, narrated by an actress who could also be dropping her thoughts. Early on, this unnamed determine remembers her last stage efficiency, which ended along with her breaking character and acknowledging to the viewers, “One thing is going on that I don’t perceive.” In the meantime, the town wherein she lives has been beset by earthquakes, not merely a swarm, or a predominant jolt adopted by a sequence of aftershocks, however quite an ongoing state of disruption, seismicity as spasmodic “actions that convulse the bottom beneath us, that just about by no means cease, not fully, in order that now movement, quite than stillness, has change into the rule.”

Or has it? Among the many many unusual and vivid pleasures of the novel is that we can’t be sure, since because the e book progresses, the narrator seems to develop more and more unstable, though this can be an phantasm as effectively.

Moschovakis is a poet and the creator of two earlier novels, “Participation” and “Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love”; she has translated works by Annie Ernaux, Albert Cossery and Georges Simenon. “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Floor of the Earth” is paying homage to these writers, propulsive and elusive directly.

Like Ernaux, Moschovakis’ language is spare and impartial, though such neutrality could also be a ruse. Like Cossery, she units the e book in a cityscape that’s each recognizable and barely off, as if rendered from a dream. Like Simenon, there’s a homicide in these pages, or the will to commit one, and to disclose that is to offer nothing away. From the outset of the novel, the narrator tells us that she means to kill her roommate, Tala, whose arrival is portrayed as a catalyst: “The actions, the shaking, the cracking of the concrete patio,” the narrator observes, “started shortly after she moved in.”

Nonetheless, on this second, maybe, we additionally discover ourselves within the realm of the creativeness, as a result of Tala has disappeared. Did she ever exist? Do the earthquakes? The reality is that it doesn’t matter. What compels us is much less the outer world than the narrator’s tangled inside life.

To develop such a sensibility, Moschovakis employs a wide range of destabilizing methods. To start, there may be the novel’s floating forged of secondary characters, together with two loosely held mates, J.P. and Celia, and the mysterious barkeep at a neighborhood spot. “Earlier than the bottom bodily began to shake,” the narrator confides, “I might describe conversations with J.P. on this approach: how first you’re simply speaking, first you’re delighted or bemused, and it goes on, and it goes on and it goes on. After which, the bottom you’re standing on begins to maneuver.” Earthquake as emotional disruption, in different phrases, much less a matter of physique than of thoughts. Moschovakis makes this clear from J.P.’s preliminary look within the novel. “It’s going to cease,” he cautions of the shaking, “and also you’re going to comprehend that it by no means actually occurred.” That admonition resonates all through the e book.

Much more, the narrator’s displacement emerges within the construction of “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Floor of the Earth.” Composed of kinds and fragments, it employs a variety of typefaces and strategies of supply. Moschovakis augments the central narrative with lists, pocket book entries, fliers, a brochure that J.P. delivers — a gathering of runes, of clues, that will or could not add up.

“What if all, and even half, the folks on this planet weren’t strolling round with a headful of language on a regular basis?” the narrator wonders. “What if all, and even half the folks I knew weren’t?” The query is much less rhetorical than reflective, addressing, because it does, the chance that the inside lifetime of others “was not reportable the best way mine was, as a result of it wasn’t taking place in phrases.”

This can be the important conundrum of the novel, or possibly “mechanism” is a extra applicable time period. “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Floor of the Earth” interrogates language as a method of study or remark, specializing in its incongruities. “[I]t turns into clear, on the finish of each episode of utmost panic, ache, or worry,” Moschovakis writes, “that the other of insupportable isn’t tolerable however one thing extra like ecstatic.”

In the meantime, the narrator seeks which means wherever she will discover it — within the brochure’s pointed questions, for example, which embrace “WHAT OR WHO IS HOLDING YOU BACK?” and “HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF THEY WERE GONE?”

And but, for her, language stays shifting and ephemeral, troublesome to interpret, or to see. Even the brochure blurs to irresolution. “The sunshine made darkish shapes on its brilliant floor, quicksilver abstractions,” the narrator remembers, “which prevented the phrases from seize. FL_R_LF it appeared to learn, in huge block sort.” Later, after a nap, she feels “behind me for J.P.’s brochure, which I’d left on the facet desk. There was nothing there.”

The impact is of a profound dislocation, which separates her not solely from the world round her but additionally from herself. “Sooner or later,” she explains, “I misplaced observe of who was asking questions, and who was answering them, of who was main and who was being led.”

That’s a difficult place for a novel to reach at, a form of stasis of the soul. It really works, nevertheless, due to the depth and motion of the writing, which aspires to not decision however to immersion, evoking how such dislocation feels. “The voice in my silent mouth,” Moschovakis writes, “was asking, Can we reside with this? Can we reside with all of this? Can we reside?”

These questions apply to each one in every of us. The place do we discover ourselves, in any case, however in a world outlined by disruption, the place earthquakes actual or metaphorical and different uncertainties assert themselves at each flip? How will we “[s]nap again. Snap into it. Snap to,” once we are always assailed?

“We had been alone and never alone,” the narrator insists, “each issues true on the identical time.” For Moschovakis, then, it’s the asking that’s necessary, for the reason that solutions are, as they’ve ever been, essentially unknowable.

David L. Ulin is a contributing author to Opinion. He’s the previous e book editor and e book critic of The Occasions.