The Bruise Book

I went to a CAConrad reading because I had heard many good things about him but had never read much except a poem here and there online, and it was at this reading that another reader also impressed me and her name was Magdalena Zurawski. She brought her dog with her, a little white thing who she placed on a chair while she read, and afterwards I bought her book and she signed it. When I came home and added her book on Goodreads, I realized that it was already on my to-read shelf, along with several hundred others that I routinely forget about, and that I had become interested in her book a while back when I read one of her blog entries that made me curious about her voice.

Immediately, I was captivated by the voice of M-- who doubts herself at every turn, but not in the way that Bernhard's characters do, with all that dizzying semantic motion, and all that excess that produces involuntary guffaws in me, though there is an obvious stylistic reference there, but more perhaps like Lydia Davis in its neuroticism, yet ultimately less distancing than either of them, so that its style did not become a barrier, but a way of entry, so that it reminded me a bit of Sheila Heti's book which I read in an equal amount of zeal, but like that book, it has the ability to surprisingly disarm the reader, with pure emotion and honesty, though reassuring the reader all the while with its knowingness, that this will not be some vacant gesture or icky flick.

Thus the first half of the book grabbed me with its realness though realness is a weird word for it because the narrator was struggling precisely with her realness. She was struggling with the role of her imagination, and the fittingness of her own skin to this detached occupier of the bruise, which is constantly watching herself watch herself. But I loved the angel she invents that takes a physical form in the evidence of the bruise. And how murkily that was written, so that the imagined had, if anything, more force than the real. But a messy force.

But I felt that about halfway in, the book loses a certain something. It gets tedious, and I no longer buy that it is trying to do this thing, but rather that it has started to do this thing and so it must continue. The searching becomes an empty form of the search, just there to satisfy the reader's thirst for the story of the search, and not a genuine one because the genuine search I felt was in the beginning, with the angel and the bruise and G-- and the school cafeteria and her first thoughts of L--. Maybe what made that part seem real to me was how chaotic it was, and how not at all like a search, but more just the narrator being confused about everything, and that rang true with me.