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 type of novel: taut and narratively ambiguous, a ebook of riddles or a riddle of a ebook.

It takes place in an unnamed metropolis at a second not not like the current, narrated by an actress who could also be shedding her thoughts. Early on, this unnamed determine remembers her last stage efficiency, which ended together with her breaking character and acknowledging to the viewers, “One thing is going on that I don’t perceive.” In the meantime, the town by which she lives has been beset by earthquakes, not merely a swarm, or a fundamental jolt adopted by a sequence of aftershocks, however fairly an ongoing state of disruption, seismicity as spasmodic “actions that convulse the bottom beneath us, that nearly by no means cease, not fully, in order that now movement, fairly 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 ebook 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 harking back 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 ebook 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 provide 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 associates, 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 method: 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 appreciate that it by no means actually occurred.” That admonition resonates all through the ebook.

Much more, the narrator’s displacement emerges within the construction of “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Floor of the Earth.” Composed of types and fragments, it employs a spread 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 might not add up.

“What if all, and even half, the individuals on the planet weren’t strolling round with a headful of language on a regular basis?” the narrator wonders. “What if all, and even half the individuals 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 way in which 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 concern,” Moschovakis writes, “that the alternative of insupportable isn’t tolerable however one thing extra like ecstatic.”

In the meantime, the narrator seeks that means wherever she will discover it — within the brochure’s pointed questions, as an example, which embody “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, tough to interpret, or to see. Even the brochure blurs to irresolution. “The sunshine made darkish shapes on its vivid floor, quicksilver abstractions,” the narrator remembers, “which prevented the phrases from seize. FL_R_LF it appeared to learn, in large 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 tough place for a novel to reach at, a type 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 certainly one of us. The place do we discover ourselves, in spite of everything, 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,” after we are continually assailed?

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

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