ABOUT UNCLE

A poet’s first novel tackles the member of your family you never really know.

Swiss author Gisler’s first novel, translated from the French by Stump, is a case study of “Uncle,” the odd brother of the narrator’s mother. He’s an antisocial veteran turned vegetable peeler in the kitchen of the local nunnery. He has a scarecrow effigy of his dead father and carries a pendulum everywhere he goes. He has no friends and no involvement with any other people—until the narrator and her brother come to stay at his house by the sea and get swept up into his domestic rhythms. What they observe defies easy explanation—for one thing, he can disappear into the plumbing. Gisler’s long, winding sentences depict the delicate dance between a peculiar man and the young adults who are forced to handle him: “My brother was sick of finding the toilet covered in shit every morning, and he told Uncle You’re not a dog, right, and Uncle didn’t answer, he was standing in ballerina position in the yard.” Indeed, Uncle straddles the line between human and animal, which becomes abundantly clear when he gets sick and must be taken to a hospital that treats animals and, well, uncles. His hospitalization is just the beginning of a series of alarming discoveries through which Gisler asks if we can ever really know the people in our families. Perhaps acceptance doesn’t require understanding—when Uncle gets in the mud, we pull up our pants legs and join him.

Gisler uses the domestic scene to capture a family member turning feral.