week13. the taiga syndrome –
I’m not exactly sure what to make of this book. I read it within an afternoon but I think the shortness of it made it all the more dizzying. The whole thing read as those old-timey, black and white, noir detective movies that narrates as an inner monologue. It was very helpful to have those connections to classic stories like Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. I think it helped me to better understand the themes that were being mentioned and subverted – it kind of grounded this story in a way, as it was sometimes difficult to grasp what was going on. (At least for me it was.)
There was some details I missed on my first reading simply because I was too caught up in trying to figure out exactly what was going on. I was confused a lot during the short story because I felt there was a lot of unexplicit explanation in the story that I didn’t pick up. While I was reading some of the more explicit scenes – the ones where they the narrator and translator explore the red light district and find the recently pregnant women incorporating their breast milk in their sex work – I couldn’t quite understand this aspect of the story on a broader note. The stuff with the vomit, tiny figures, and ‘homunculi’ definitely freaked me out. I think the more disturbing part – at least during my reading – was that I didn’t understand why they were there, why their presence was relevant during the story. Perhaps, I was busy being shocked at their mundane and casual mentions to figure out why they were relevant. After thinking about it some more I think it has something to do with infanticide and the nursery stories mentioned before.
Anyway, really odd book to choose to be the closer of the term. I think the morbid-ness and the disturbing aspects threw me off a bit. I think it’s a good book and well-written but to be honest I just don’t want to think about it any more. I’m sure there are some really great concepts and ideals to take from the book but I don’t want to think about vomiting up tiny people or grown lumberjacks soliciting recently pregnant sex workers for their breastmilk. No thanks.
Question: so did that wild child die at the end? Was he killed by a mob of lumberjacks? I wasn’t super clear on that. Also what do you think the book meant by ‘falling in love’ or ‘falling out of love’?
4 replies on “week13. the taiga syndrome”
“I don’t want to think about vomiting up tiny people or grown lumberjacks soliciting recently pregnant sex workers for their breastmilk. No thanks.” You are right, it is a strange and disturbing book with which we close this week. There are many loose ends in this narrative, and that initial impression was deliberately sought by the author. Somehow, she wants us to “fail” to find the meaning of what is happening. But, on the other hand, like the detective in Borges’ story, when trying to solve these questions we end up being victims. It is also possible that you are not in the ideal mood to read these types of books. And it’s OK. What would you modify in the novel to make it more accessible to readers?
Hey Jasmine, I agree that this book was pretty disturbing. Combining an already taboo topic of sex and sex working with such vulgar events makes the read pretty unsettling. I hadn’t thought about these scene’s connections to the fairy tales though, and I think you make a good point there. I honestly am not sure if the wild child died either, but it does seem like it.
Hi Jasmine. Yeah the book had some interesting themes and I found it hard to follow most of the time. The time skipping didn’t help much with that aspect, but I can appreciate how well it executed on the eerie atmosphere. I honestly don’t know what it meant by ‘even falling out of love ends,’ but I assume maybe that means eventually you get over a lost love.
I completely agree that it was a strange book to end off the term. The word that kept coming to mind for me was “eerie,” and I think that is the perfect depiction for all the weird little aspects within this novel. The few times that I had put the book down, I felt uneasy in a way, and I think it’s because you said it best – “I don’t want to think about people vomiting up tiny people…” It was interesting how the book referred to it in such casual way almost making us question whether or not vomiting up tiny people was odd. Can confirm: it is incredibly odd.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!