PATHETIC PERIPHERAL

Notes on Elvira Navarro's RABBIT ISLAND

• liked it overall. slippery, oblique, uneasy short stories

  • elvira navarro interested in periphery, loss, obliqueness, memories, dreams, isolation, absence. not really families (though there’s two fam stories i really liked) and not really relationships (thou there’s two relationship stories i was lukewarm on) but the broader arcs of relations between people, how they’re strained and who ends up cast out alone.

• top floor room (woman dreams other people’s dreams), notes on the architecture of hell (architecture student sees institutionalized brother enter church, tries to learn more), and memorial (woman receives fb invite from account impersonating dead mother) the standouts for me.

  • regression (floating grandmother) good too. liked paris périphérie but acknowledge that’s just as much about it being relevant to my interests than it is really working as a short story.

  • gerardo’s letters and gums both ok, a little too similar for the same collection i think (women on vacations with distant boyfriends)

  • most of the others a little… idk thin? like the kid goat mystical creature and the woman with the rabbit paw earring not bad but just kinda flimsy, more sketches than stories

  • titular rabbit island story not bad but not a standout

• translation is fine, there’s a few moment with present tense narration that feels a little ungainly but overall no issue. benefits from not being dialogue-heavy

on the three highlights: 

• notes on the architecture of hell

• about insanity, obsession, family, aliens, breakdowns, stigma. slips from older brother’s insanity to narrator’s, portraying them both as degrees of belief, from which it follows the cathedrals and seminaries and cemeteries are the places of shared obsession. architecture student studying buildings from aerial “demonical perspective,” older brother using the newfound equilibrium from the mood stabilizers to spend all his days at cathedrals. implications that the brother has extraterrestrial knowledge that drives him crazy due to mysterious mexico nasa job. final scene of older brother floating away through the walls in the upper reaches of the cathedral, the narrator realizing he’s been watching them, the two perspectives aligning: 

  • “…suddenly his shadow moved from the dome to the old building and began to pass through the rooms. He was able to catch glimplses of it thorugh the thin, improper, immodest curtains. There was no pause between one romm and the next as if the walls had been demolished.”

  • liked this line, which functions as a thesis statement of sorts: “Everything he’d thought until that moment was turned upside down and he told himself that the universe of delusions didn’t exist only on an imaginary plane. Something existed, and illness might be just an excuse, the lid covering the other life his brother lived behind everyone else’s backs, perhaps even his own.”

• top floor room

• about obsession, incomplete knowledge, ascension and descent, solitude heightened by being surrounded by ppl. the loss of one’s own dreams: “after months of being dispossessed of a part of her life, and with its recuperation now in sight, she nevertheless found it hard to come to terms with the loss of her own personal dreams.”

  • lovely close, need to think about why image of solitary woman at margins of world works better here than in rabbit island: perhaps bc we know what drove her out there more so than rabbit island man? his quest aesthetic, hers driven by necessity?

  • example of surrealism through working internal logic. of course she has to go out away from the dreams

• memorial

  • huh just realized these three stories i liked are in order in the middle of the book, trying to remember if i read them consecutively or if there was there was a reason the reading experience of these specifically stuck with me? idk idk

• anyway memorial: there’s a technique navarro uses several times across these stories where she shifts perspective quickly and seamlessly to convey how and when a character becomes a peripheral being. in top floor room and rabbit island, for example, our parting image of the two main characters is through the eyes of someone else watching them from afar. a final image that shows them at a remove from the reader and society at large, pitiable characters driven insane, visible at the outer limits of society only if you squint and still receding

• in memorial this is inverted in a particularly interesting way. probably the most deeply personal and least socially isolated story: here the character is not insane to the world but in private spaces due to her grief. the facebook request from an account impersonating pepa nieto, her dead mother, is at first an entryway to one mode of surrealism: something breaking what we know as the logic of the world. the continuing accumulation of details that only her mother would know and photos only her mother could take good but again, familiar. i was wondering if this was gonna end in nervous breakdown or insanity like the two preceding stories but then the story follows a different path: the fb account posts pics of long-forgotten vacations, audio files of spousal arguments, photos of the mother going into the hospital… not interested in the daughter but the mother, the mother and daughter in relation to each other. not terrifying but knowing. retracing a life.

  • the new information about the father’s cruelty disrupting the memories of the daughter: “…those suspiciously saccharine scenes made her think that what her mother hoped to achieve through the fb account was to invalidate her daughter’s memory. leaving only those recollections in which pepe nieto played a role, with the result that her past would be completely filled by her progenitor, excluding all experiences in which that woman was not present. as if her life had only involved episodes to which her mother had been a witness.”

• a banishment of sorts. the daughter’s worst fear, the childhood memory that resurfaces when she stops checking the facebook page, is the mom existing beyond a locked door but not letting her in. so what is the final memory, the mom’s response to a cry for help— the daughter’s only attempt at communication, a wailing “mom!”— left on her page? an essay pepe nieto had written for the cancer society, one of the only possessions the daughter had retained full possession of after her death

  • “she’d kept that story, along with a silver paperweight in the form of a lizard, a gemstone ring and brooch inherited from her great grandmother, the only things of any value belonging to her mother that hadn’t been shared among her aunts.”… revisiting something she already possess, the fb account a reconfiguring of the larger process of grief: old things seen again through new eyes…

• navarro flips it: the daughter merges with the mother and the the mother emerges alone, watching the daughter come towards her.

  • “she began reading the story with the impression that her own bewilderment was merging with her mother’s”… after so much disconnection throughout the collection, this moment of union, of joining…! 

• pepe nieto’s account is a recounting of her experience in the hospital. dispassionate unpleasantness, mostly: initial disorienting, patients in pain around her, doctors and nurses and visitors watching her. we realize the mother the outcast here; in all these stories only here do we see the pathetic outside at first through another’s eyes. here she is the incomprehensible damaged one, the outcast, the stranger on the periphery gazed at warily by the healthy normal masses… but “none of this bothers [her]. [the mother] was curious to know what else was going on.”

• the mother’s final grafs contain three vivid images: first, a nurse handing her a lung capacity test thing, which she was unable to complete. then, “early one morning i saw a dark liquid coming from the tube in my mouth,” a parallel to the opening of the story, where the friend request from an “apep otien” (pepa nieto backwards) makes her daughter’s “bitter gastric juices “ rise again. and then the closing graf:

  • “the most beautiful sensation i had was when i saw my daughter arriving, calling ‘mom, they’ve taken it out!’ she was radiant with joy and hope, her eyes were shining brightly and, even though i was still lying flat on my back, i understood that i would eventually leave that bed.”

• banger. the daughter— who has always resented her mother and struggled with self-image issues because “she’d inherited her father’s plump ungainliness” instead of her mother’s beauty”— seen through the eyes of the mother for the first time. a story about connection after death instead of dissolution in life. all the more piercing because it’s the only one we get in this collection. still a loss— the mother is dead over a year now by the time the daughter reads the story— but for once the revelation is a moment of love and unity, an argument that the lost soul on the periphery can still be seen and brought back into the fold by a loved one. we see the daughter not as she sees herself but as the mother did: beautiful, radiant with joy and hope, a shining beacon of love in striding into this bleak hospital room telling the mother that they will be leaving together