The Visit (BlazeVOX Books, 2024) is a coming of age novel as well as a suspenseful mystery, that includes chapters written in verse, to delineate the line between two worlds. But what are those worlds and where do they intersect?
Luna, a teenager in Slovenia in the 1990s, finds herself far from home at a faraway work camp in Finland for a summer experience before starting college. While she and her best friend had planned this adventure together, for reasons that are not clear her best friend Djamila remains at home in their small village. The work group has come from all over the world... Some are friendly and others hostile: Daan from the Netherlands tries to engage Luna in a political argument about Slovenia’s war for independence from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
“Do you blame yourself for what’s happening in Bosnia?” He asks.
She put down the knife.
“Blame myself? What do you mean?”
“I mean, not you, personally, obviously.” Daan pushed his curls to the side and stared at Luna. “But if Slovenia hadn’t declared independence, there would be no war, right? So your country basically caused it.”
He entraps her in an unwinnable argument on their first day at breakfast. Another young man, Kurt, a bit older than her, later asks her about her life in Slovenia, and experience of the war, an ice breaker that begins their flirtation.
The prose is rich with photographic detail: the romance of being in the woods in summer by a fire with a guitar, friendships and alliances. It plays like a film with silken ease. But in between chapters are the ghostly verses of a lost soul wandering elsewhere... a place that once was home? So the reader is aware that the idyllic beginning of this tale is going to take a turn or two before it ends.
The kitchen is dark
the dawn
slowly creeping in.
Which dawn it is
I do not know.
I slept through one night
or two
or how many.
I need to get on with work....
After Luna mistakes Kurt’s lustful attentions for love, her mind and actions become irrational. Or just immature? Because she is having adventures that open her world beyond her small town, at the same time she starts obsessing over this unattainable man. Kralj really captures all the contradictions of that time in young adulthood where folly and the adventure toward maturity mingle.
Then more of the haunting verses...
As Luna returns, she finds out her best friend Djamila will not be joining her for their planned college life together, away from their small town in the college residences in the old city, the one they were so charmed by on a high school field trip together. The reason remains mysterious. Luna is by herself to navigate the social landscape and the physical landscape of a new city. When she tries to study her medical text books,
“...a familiar heaviness rose in her chest. It made its way up to her throat, snaking around it, tying it up; her airways became narrower, then narrower, until she couldn’t breathe any more.”
While she tries her best to function, have fun with friends and tolerate frenemies, the panics toggle with their opposite, a retreat from the world and the “whiteness” of depression, only cured by hiding in her room. When a jovial and annoying new roommate suddenly appears who demands Luna’s attention, Luna starts walking the city, each step of the landscape detailed in prose that again has a filmic quality that brings the reader step by step into Luna’s world.
“But autumn was still around. In the park, some of the leaves on the trees were still green, the mountains surrounding the city shone in golden light, and the few people out this afternoon, on the cobbled streets in the old town, walked slowly and had smiles on their faces.”
Her walking sprees become obsessive and her attempt to get medical help for her symptoms of anxiety and depression are scoffed at by a doctor, the very profession she aspired to.
I have never written about a novel that could be considered a mystery, so rather than a spoiler alert, I must stop my synopsis and analysis here.
By The Visit’s satisfying end we come to understand the source of the ghostly poetry that laces through the chapters, the reason for Djamila’s absence and the place of Luna’s family through her personal struggles. This is a page turner that would hold great appeal to a younger crowd, but it also gave me a kind of feeling of forgiveness of my own complicated youthful follies back in the 1990s. Kralj’s fresh and photographic prose is a pleasure from beginning to end.
Gisela Heffes’ experimental novel Ischia first published in Spanish in 2000, and recently translated by Grady C. Wray (Deep Vellum, 2023), begins with an unnamed female narrator waiting for her friend Lara to come by her unkempt apartment, while her bags are packed to go. She is a young woman who seems to be in a vague sort of immediate trouble, but the dense rambling prose, a document of her every thought and action, does not reveal what that trouble is. It is a mystery. She plays American rock music, she drinks beer, she ruminates in a paragraph that is a whole chapter long, waiting for the phone to ring, only to miss it while she is using the bathroom.
“When I got there, the telephone would stop ringing, but even so, and with everything that was happening, I’d lift up the receiver to note that on the other end they had already hung up.”
Our protagonist seems to be too late, or lost, for something. The question is, will she somehow synch with the world she lives in, as she and the reader examine each random thought and episode in a chronology that is wholly her own? It is slowly revealed that this is the mind of a young woman who witnessed domestic violence while too young to recall, the information passed on from her brothers. Her preverbal memories are vivid in a way that only can be evoked by smell, and Heffes executes that poetically, beautifully.
“The mothball smell of the family, the smell of soup or noodles, the smell of a car when they used to take Marcos, Herman and me to Mar del Plata, the smell of stinky shoes, the smell of trees, of jatamansi, of slate, of a book with dog eared pages, of a mantilla, of a cigar box or arak. My life filled with smells and for a long time I submersed myself in them.”
Then we are back in the apartment, waiting for Lara, another play list, a phone call answered in secret code words. Ideas about a place called A Great House of Perdition, that morph into a porn film version. She wakes in a wet cave, or is it a nightmare? The reader will have to embrace the difficulty of this text, as well as embrace the beauty of it in its insistence on great imagery, strung together in the strung out protagonist’s mind. Without paragraph breaks to delineate one memory from the next, the reader is on a trip with our protagonist, unsure what is real and unreal.
Then the parts that struck me most, the vivid and uncompromising thoughts on a loveless childhood, the source of this broken sense of reality, rendered in this breathless prose.
“There were always people that wanted to play the good guy, although at times they did it like shoving something in the face of those unfortunate poor people who would come up to them with the nuisance of need between two crossed eyes. But with love its different: How does one beg for love, how does one go up to someone and ask for a hug... because without it one will die of sadness?”
Books like The Visit and Ischia despite, all of our training always make the reader wonder: How much of this is based on the author’s life, or to use a millennial term, “Is it autofiction?” That is a question for the reader to ponder, but from reading the author bios one would not think so. They are literary fiction practitioners who weave the imagery of lived life and a sense of place with whatever they wish. For any reader who loves suspenseful fiction, a strong feminine voice, interesting takes on the psychology of trauma, these books are powerful voices in a genre of their own. The part of each that won me over the most, as someone who usually reads poetry and non-fiction, was the language. Even as they take on the familiar form of the coming of age novel, though through a strongly feminine lens, both books are free of cliché or tired tropes. They are truly innovative stylistically, experimental, and suspenseful.
Karin Falcone Krieger’s recent writing appears in BlazeVOX Quarterly, The Colorado Review, Moonlighting, The Decadent Review, Tofu Ink, Hunger Mountain, and in the anthology, “A physical book which compiles conceptual books”. She writes Wild Working Gardens, a weekly newsletter about gardening by the moon. She occasionally types poems made to order for wonderful strangers on her vintage typewriters. These and other projects can be seen at www.karinfalconekrieger.com.