The Time of the Novel

A bookseller embarks on a surreal ontological quest in poet Mimosa Montes’s brilliant debut novella (after the collection Thresholes). Upon waking in the two-bedroom apartment she’s just started renting for the summer, the unnamed narrator is momentarily confused as to where she is and when, and sees bloodstains on the sheet. She’s also plagued by visions of rabbits with horns. These destabilizing visions, coupled with thoughts of suicide, compel her to “become a narrator, so that I might appreciate the world.” Determined to “pass through time like a tongue without a body,” she stops paying her phone bill, quits her job at a bookstore, and puts an indefinite hold on her mail, all in pursuit of the silence her “experiment” requires. The narrator considers the boundary between life and art on a visit to an artist’s open studio in her building, where she observes a painting in progress bisected by a green line (“Something was getting worked out.... Though nobody, not even the painter, knows where this green really comes from, nor where the essence of this green is going”). For such an abstract story, the ideas conveyed are succinct and artful, and the narrative moves toward an unexpectedly poignant conclusion. This is luminous. (June)