THE FAKE MUSE

A postmodern romp by Catalan writer Besora.

Most characters in Besora’s latest, rendered in staccato bursts of language and emoji-like symbols, introduce themselves by their astrological signs, as with the first speaker, 17-year-old Amanda Jane Holofernes: “my zodiac sign is scorpio aka brave but sometimes violent my favorite color is red and i like romance novels because that’s as close as i’ll get to real love but at the same time it’s all really dark.” The biblical name Holofernes might alert the reader that something violent this way comes, with Amanda morphing into Mandyjane Deathlove to exact vengeance for her father’s sexual abuse. Another character has an untoward attraction to a hamster with intellectual superpowers, evidenced by its writing “a rigorous study on the false truths of humankind designed to emancipate all rodents and animals in general from human servitude.” Papa Holofernes is full of excuses for his bad behavior, while his 48-year-old Taurus wife is a font of rationalizations; not much help when an Exterminating Angel—shades of Buñuel—is afoot. Besora’s slip of a story is replete with a talking dog that knows Catalan better than do teenage humans and old-school linguistic chauvinists bent on keeping Catalan, and presumably Catalonia, pure (“if we neocatalans stop speaking neocatalan to jabber on in that new spanglish how will our beloved language survive huh?”). The grand twist comes when it’s not the rapist father but the author himself who comes under interrogation: Says Amanda accusingly, “You...forced me to be sexually assaulted by my own father, and to become a hysterical and merciless killer, repeating all the clichés of ‘abused-woman-seeks-revenge.’” That meta-referential scenario doesn’t add much to a talky story in which not much happens, but readers with a bent for Cortázar and Coover might enjoy the proceedings.

A slender, elusive story that enfolds other stories, surpassingly strange.