“He watches grey-haired ladies weeing in their nappies and smiling. They smile tiny smiles and they smile broad smiles. When they give off big smiles, old ladies quiver. Old ladies in aspic. In buses they piss and smile to themselves.”
This is not a what I would call a fun story to read. It’s unflinching about the physical ignominy of aging. Lots of shit. Piss. Shrunken genitals. Atrophied genitals. Under surveillance by a police state, Artur and Isabella perform sex acts on each other and obsess about hats and garden gnomes and chocolate balls – bits of stuffthat they invest with meaning whilst their bodies degrade.
I’m really selling it, I know.
There’s something quite Beckettian about the grimness of this story – the highest praise I can give. It’s an exploration of the humiliation of embodiment, about whether souls exist without the inevitability of excrement. The end is weird and esoteric and offers no closure – just a different type of unease. I think it’s fantastic. But I suggest that you don’t read it over lunch.
English translation published in Doppelgänger, Istros Books (UK), 2018 and New Directions (US), 2019. Read online here
A Personal Anthology 