An Author and Character's Power
From The Taiga Syndrome, by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana):
I remember the child I imagined when I looked at the businessman. When I looked at him out of the corner of my eye all I saw was a boy — a monster more than a child in the strictest sense of the word. Something eager in the open mouth. The rows of sharp teeth. The chubby hands. Some sort of giant lumbering fool, the sight of whom caused more disgust than terror. The verb “to inundate.” The presence of the word “saliva”: something sticky and dirty and discarded. Something difficult to escape. Power always produces these kinds of sensations.
As much as Cristina Rivera Garza writes The Taiga Syndrome as a modern lyrical detective story her characters are meant to live, she writes it equally as much a journey through the feelings within those characters that you are meant to decipher as a reader.
This passage displays her mastery.
Garza builds into her narrator’s remembrance a picture of a man both recalled and elusive. She offers you enough to also glimpse him out of the corner of your eye and also begin to determine what and how he is.
What comes as a thin concrete foundation to everything else. Sharp teeth; chubby hands; open mouth. He’s a powerful man surrounded by an aura of slop. This man comes across as scary but not without fault. His slobber belies the fear beneath; such is “the sight of whom caused more disgust than terror.”
How, elusive, comes in patterns Garza lets you interpret. I felt sweaty in my own mindfulness of the sticky, dirty, discarded something akin to the drippings from a mouth. I felt trapped by “inundate.” The businessman oozed around me like a poured vat of slow-setting industrial glue.
He’s real though. At least his power of entrapment and uneasiness is real. He surrounded me with his slop of a being and cut into me with his teeth.
I think I let it happen though. At least I believe Garza let me let it happen. She surrounded me with these parts of him I had to complete into a whole.
Power of a figure, and of an author.