I knew I would read Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s Mary and the Rabbit Dream the first time I heard about it. It sounded like exactly my kind of thing: a fresh style of historical fiction, with a strange and subversive story to tell. It was published in the UK by Galley Beggar Press—and maybe that should have been a red flag for me, as they are the publishers and champions of Lucy Ellmann, whose Ducks, Newburyport I have begun three times, never making it more than 30 pages, but more significantly (because I still believe Ducks, Newburyport may be worth yet another try) whose Things Are Against Us I absolutely hated. On the other hand, I didn’t hate After Sappho, which they also published, and I do try, on principle, to push my own reading boundaries. So when Coach House Press here in Canada put out their edition of Mary and the Rabbit Dream, I promptly picked it up and happily began it.
Happily began it . . . and much less happily finished it. I did finish it, because it really does tell a weird and fascinating story, and I genuinely wanted to find out how it ended. It is about Mary Toft, an impoverished laboring woman who in 1724 claimed to have given birth to rabbits, although as Kiss-Deáki tells it, the tall tale was never really Mary’s but was a scheme cooked up by her overbearing mother-in-law to get attention and hopefully money from their wealthier neighbors, who value rabbits much more highly than they do poor people.
The fraud is carried on for some time even as interested and increasingly expert men (always men) investigate, and in case you’re wondering what counts as “evidence” of the rabbit births, well, bits of rabbit (and sometimes of other animal parts) are shoved up into Mary’s body so that she can be seen to “birth” them. It’s exploitive and horrific, and Kiss-Deáki emphasizes Mary’s great suffering along with the appalling indifference to it of those around her, all of whom are using her—and more specifically her wracked and wretched body—for their own purposes. This includes her mother-in-law and her accomplices, but also many esteemed men of science and medicine, who stake their reputations on disproving what is advanced as an extreme example of the fairly widely held theory that what a mother feels, sees, dreams, or otherwise experiences during pregnancy impresses itself on her unborn child. “I just dreamt of a rabbit,” Mary says at one point,
I really did, all my dreams are full of rabbits now, rabbits and hands, they are vile, they are nightmares, but I had one dream that was not vile, not a nightmare, it was a little rabbit, a little rabbit in my womb, ears pink and its little nose shivering pink
and although she is rambling feverishly and we know that she is confusing the nightmare she is currently enduring with a miscarriage she previous suffered, her interlocutor does not.
There is a lot that is good and interesting about this novel, especially the way that, while it centers sympathetically on Mary and her experience, it also uses her story as a device to expose the cruelty of misogyny and the punishing self-satisfaction of a certain species of scientific certitude. There is a particularly harrowing scene in which a powerful man, determined to break her and expose her as the fraud he is sure she is, threatens Mary with live vivisection, explaining to her with truly menacing “objectivity” that
a vivisection is an operation undertaken on a live body through a series of incisions for the purpose of the betterment of science.
Never mind what might be for the “betterment” of poor Mary Toft, whose eventual confession (in Kiss-Deáki’s version, at any rate) is a damning indictment of everyone’s readiness to make her suffer. (Nobody cares, and off she goes to jail.)
What wasn’t so good about Mary and the Rabbit Dream—and here I have to insert the obligatory disclaimer, as other people may feel very differently, and indeed other people do, unless they were lying in the blurbs they provided! so, what didn’t work about Mary and the Rabbit Dream for me—was Kiss-Deáki’s writing. In parts, it is (as my quotations may show) intense and effective, if you like a spare style. But those short snippets do not capture the oddly stilted and highly repetitive quality of the writing, which at times I found almost comical. A sample, and I promise it was not cherry-picked:
Ann Toft is opposed to it. All the women are opposed to it.
Even Joshua Toft is opposed to it.
But Mr. Howard insists.
And Mary Toft has no opinion.
Mary Toft has suffered too much to have an opinion.
Mary Toft has been listened to too little her whole life to have the courage to form any opinions of her own.
And now she has no opinions. Not even if she tries.
She has suffered too much.
She is stunned with pain and fear.
She is fearful of the women around her. She is fearful of her surroundings.
Everything, right now, inspires fear.
She is the ideal person to use for people who wish to use other people for their own ends.
I suppose you could call it rhythmic or incantatory or something, but I’ll stick with stilted and repetitive, especially because the tic of repeating phrases from line to line is so consistent across the book and serves (to my ear anyway) no purpose. What or who is that supposed to sound like? Is it meant to create an impression of archaism?
I might have tolerated the long stretches of this kind of stuff better if they hadn’t so often devolved into heavy-handed comments on what is perfectly obvious from the story itself, about how vile and prejudiced and uncaring the men are; or about how unfair the whole system is, especially to Mary (as happens in the example above); or about the symbolic meaning of what is going on. The worst such moment was this one, right after Mary, in excruciating pain and exhausted from relentless examinations, breaks down and begins screaming (“she slips down on the floor, she starts screaming, she screams and screams and screams”):
Sir Manningham asks,
“Are you done?”
And what Sir Manningham doesn’t realize with that question, is that on this night, at his feet, on the floor, Mary has given birth to something, not a rabbit, but her voice, her own true voice, voicing all the pain, all the anguish, all the misery, all the humiliation.
Honestly, if by this point in the novel, we aren’t able to read her screams exactly that way ourselves, the previous 138 pages were wasted efforts, and besides, it’s just clunky: a moment of high drama, of real emotional consequence, deflates completely with the words “her own true voice.”
Your mileage may vary, as we like to say, which is a reasonable acknowledgment that taste varies and that style is idiosyncratic. That’s what keeps things interesting, when we talk about books! That’s why, as I have occasionally argued at length and try always to demonstrate in my writing here, criticism is, at its best, both conversational and provisional. Also, any book worth saying this much about surely is not a bad book. Books, like people, are rarely all one thing. Still, I really disliked Mary and the Rabbit Dream. I thought that it was badly written. The note on Kiss-Deáki explains that English is her third language, and maybe that accounts for some of the awkwardness I felt in her style—but it also says that English is the language in which “she has found her author’s voice,” so I have to respect that the prose I am reacting to is not accidental, that it is her “own true voice.”
Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies is, like the other novels of hers that I’ve read, a crime novel. Sort of. It is about a convicted murderer, Inés: she killed her husband’s lover, but at the time of the novel is out of prison and making her living running an environmentally friendly pest control business. Then she is approached by one of her clients to provide a deadly pesticide—so that she too can kill “a woman who wants to take my husband the same way yours was taken from you,” or so she tells Inés. Inés, who is not in general a murderous person and who also would very much like not to go back to prison, is tempted only because her friend Manca urgently needs treatment for breast cancer but can’t afford to pay to get it right away. The situation gets more complicated when a connection emerges between the client and the daughter Inés has not seen since her imprisonment.
Clearly Piñeiro is doing something experimental here, creating a genre hybrid in a way that is actually reminiscent of Woolf’s The Pargiters, which I’ve been thinking about for some time because I’m fascinated by Woolf’s attempt to combine fiction and non-fiction, story and commentary. Woolf considered it an unsuccessful attempt and gave it up, turning her “novel-essay” into a novel (The Years) and an essay (Three Guineas). Maybe, I found myself thinking as I made my way to the end of Time of the Flies, Piñeiro should have done the same: if she didn’t trust her story to raise these questions for us, to stimulate those debates, she could have written a companion essay, or a different work altogether, leaving us the crime novel we expected when we picked the book up. It’s awkward, distracting, sometimes (to be honest) boring to have the plot, the suspense that Piñeiro is so good at building, constantly interrupted with these more abstract political sections, especially when they take such an uncertain form, voices themselves interrupting each other, offering competing arguments, incorporating references.
That might be a good explanation for the hybrid nature of Time of the Flies, but it doesn’t necessarily make the book a success. I’d probably have to read it again (and again) to make up my mind about that, which I might do, given that I offer a course called “Women and Detective Fiction.” Last time around I almost assigned Elena Knows for it. Another title I’ve considered for the book list is Jo Baker’s The Body Lies, which is quite unlike Time of the Flies except that it too is a crime novel that turns out to be about crime novels, and especially about the roles and depiction of women in them, the voyeurism of violence against women, the prurient fixation on their wounded or dead bodies, the genre variations that both do and don’t reconfigure women’s relationship to the stories we tell about crime and violence. I thought Baker’s novel was excellent. I certainly didn’t have any trouble finishing it, in contrast to the concerted effort I made to get to the end of Time of the Flies. I really did want to know what happened! But I felt like I had to wade through a lot of other stuff to get there. If I do reread it, maybe that stuff will turn out to be the real substance of the book.
That said, I did quite enjoy Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!, which I picked up quite randomly at the library, mostly because it’s a Europa Edition but also because I vaguely recalled hearing good things about it online. It turned out to be a sharp and very funny send-up of the “great literature transformed my life” genre. Its narrator, whose life is in something of a shambles, reads Treasure Island and decides it offers her a template for turning things around. She adopts the novel’s “Core Values”—BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, HORN-BLOWING—and applies them to her job (which, improbably and hilariously, is at a “pet hotel,” where clients sign out cats, dogs, rabbits, even goldfish), her boyfriend, and her family, with hilarious if also sometimes weirdly poignant results. I have such a love-hate relationship with books that purport to turn literature into self-help manuals that I relished the premise, but Levine uses it as a launching point for something much zanier than I could possibly have expected or can possibly summarize.
Novel Readings 