Fiction, 2022
One of the things that always confused me about religion was the voice of God. How do you know that what you hear, and what you are praying to, is the intended source? What if in the mixed channels of words and directions, you hear the voice of something else? This deception sat uncomfortably in my brain. I needed clarity of source, enough to point to a person, thing, or being. In Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, the distinction I craved collapsed to a staggering degree.
Lia is happily married and has a teenage daughter. Slowly but fiercely, tumours are spreading in her body. Tumours of cancer, the devil, her past, and God branch at such a rapid degree that they begin to sound the same until eventually, I don’t know if I’m reading a divine or malignant voice. And more importantly–given the ease with which they blend–if any distinction even matters.
Told from shifting narratives and timelines, the novel is less interested in painting a picture than in curating a collage. Fragments of cancer in her brain are juxtaposed with a bully at school, and the force of her illness as it takes over her body is compared to violent sex. Mortimer’s writing rhythm is sharply unique, and if it puts you off in the first few pages, stick with it. Once you get into the groove of it, it feels more like prosy-poetry than it does plain prose. The result is a cellular-level electric buzz that culminates in a dizzying linguistic climax, in a death, if you will.
Song - Casimir Pulaski Day - Sufjan Stevens
Film - Belfast
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