People that believe in souls tends to believe in some sort of core, in some real and truthfull identity of things, of persons. Like if in each of us there would be something that you can dig out from the center, something essence-like or true-self-like? But what if we are more like onions? What if peeling us away reveals a layer and another and another… and then nothing else. No core, no more. Like the house of a snail, or a nautilus. Beautiful and complex forms achieved by accretion, by slow adding one layer after the other. Identity by a change of perspective? by a new layer of meaning? By accumulation of perspectives and new meanings?
In one way or another this is an idea that has been around for a while, but recently I saw it espectacularly put in The Dream House, a 2019 book of Carmen Maria Machado. In some ways it is a familiar novel, with a familiar arch. Two persons met, fall in love, one turns out to be an abuser and after suffering, they split. The writer, who is also a main character, allows herself a happy ending. Nothing too innovative here.
The first thing that gets me is that this is a novel on queer people that does not make a statement about it. Perhaps there are many more out there, but I have missed them. This one just gets going before you realize that the relations that are being presented are gay relations. I like the smoothness of it all. I am a cis man, and perhaps I haven’t read enough gay literature (if such thing exists at all) but I have frequently had the impression that literature with homosexual characters made a point of them, put them in your face, so that you have to think about their sexual identity first, and then about the story. Not here, at least not to me. But hey, it is 2021 after all, the book was published in 2019, and this should not be the one great thing of a book, right? To normalize queer people? (as if they would need normalization) And here, it isn’t. Here it is almost a detail.
What totally got me is that this is a book with almost as many layers as it has pages. Because its… chapters? frequently of one page, never more than three, are just that, a new perspective in the story, a new layer. And just like the house of the nautilus, they make the house grow. The tale is told linearly, it starts at some point in time and ends in another one, ahead. There are no flashbacks or time twists. And yet, to say that this is a linear tale would be extremely misleading. Because each chapter, each added layer, is a new perspective in the tale that is unraveling. Or, actually, raveling? Never mind that. If you ever had a caleidoscope, here you have a new one, a caleidoscopical book, that, even better than the old traditional caleidoscopes, it doesn’t turn around a core, but it goes on and on, adding colors and reflexions. A marvel.
I like to write this little paginas of me with some sort of theme, something that makes them round. So now there would be the time to have a last paragraph and a brilliant oneliner on this thing of the layered identity of many of us, of how we build our tales and our life by adding perspectives. But this time I will not do anything like that. I will just say, go out. Close the computer where you are reading this and go out. Find yourself a bookshop, and get The Dream House. Do that. You can thank me later.