Art Monster
Reviews
By Kat Solomon
The unnamed narrator of Margarita García Robayo’s novel The Delivery (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) hails from the Caribbean coast of Colombia and, like García Robayo herself, now resides in Buenos Aires. A writer who pays the bills by turning out copy for a local ad agency, her current assignment is to write from the point of view of a “happy” cow that is about to be slaughtered and turned into organic beef. The narrator believes that she is bad, “bad in the sense of evil . . . I never learned to be compassionate with my family.” Questions about motherhood, belonging, and exile hang over this quietly unsettling work.
García Robayo is the author of several novels and short story collections, two of which have appeared previously in English from Charco Press: Fish Soup and Holiday Heart, both translated by Charlotte Coombe. McDowell seems like a natural choice as translator for The Delivery, having worked on other Latin American authors such as Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, and Lina Meruane, whose work also touches the realms of horror and the surreal.
García Robayo’s narrator is alone, rootless, and cosmopolitan, while her sister still lives in their old neighborhood in Colombia, married with children, conventional, and loyal. Her sister’s skin is “white like meringue,” while her own is darker, as if the sisters are two sides of a coin, one light, one dark. Her sister frequently sends her boxes of fruit from Colombia, but the fruit inevitably rots by the time the packages arrive. Sometimes the sister includes a photograph from their childhood, but the liquid from the rotting fruit often blurs their faces, turning them into “ghosts.” One day the sister abruptly announces over a Zoom call that she and her family are departing on a cruise to an unspecified location. That day, a large wooden crate arrives, the “delivery” of the novel’s title. The narrator is reluctant to open it, but after a brief absence, she returns to the apartment to find her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in years, waiting for her, the box in pieces on the floor.
A sense of the uncanny hovers over The Delivery. Did the narrator’s estranged mother arrive in the box, shipped like rotting fruit from Colombia? Or is she a ghostly projection of the narrator’s unconscious? García Robayo plays lightly with this mystery, using it to sustain the reader’s interest but never insisting on solving it. This hesitation between supernatural and psychological explanations for otherwise impossible events marks The Delivery as belonging to that narrow genre that the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov described in his study The Fantastic:
The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.
Readers are likely to lean toward a psychological explanation, but the narrator’s own disinterest in solving this mystery suggests that for García Robayo, the real question is not how but why the mother has appeared at this moment in time.
The narrator is abrasive toward her neighbors and distant toward her boyfriend, Axel. Glimpses of a possible caregiving inclination appear when she is tasked with babysitting the twelve-year-old son of one of her downstairs’ neighbors. She also befriends a stray cat who lives in her apartment building and who has a tendency to disappear and reappear when least expected.
The narrator appears insecure about her status as a single, unmarried woman who has devoted her life to writing instead of to family, like her sister. She suspects there is something monstrous about her nature, imagining her thoughts as worms that might burst through her skull:
I imagine my head as home to long worms that bang against the walls; worms that grow, slow and immense; worms that coil up as they grow so they can take up more and more space. I’ve left them there for years, hoping that time would roll over and squash them. But time has only been a stimulant. One day I’ll have worms sprouting from my head like a medusa.
Medusa is a classic symbol of destructive female power; by directing the male gaze back on itself, she turns men to stone. This sense of fraught femininity haunts the narrator, as if she is trying to decide if she is a monster or just a regular woman. The narrator of The Delivery begins the novel feeling and acting like a monster. Will this uncanny encounter with her mother heal her primal wound, freeing her perhaps to occupy the motherhood role?
For the English-language reader, this imagery might call to mind the oft-cited concept of the “art monster” from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation:
My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.
As the writer Claire Dederer has noted, not having children is often all it takes for a woman to be conceived of as monstrous. The Delivery thus feels like it is in conversation with a number of recent literary works, fiction and nonfiction, in English and Spanish, in which motherhood and artistic production are assumed to be inherently contradictory acts. I’m thinking of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, and Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra. As in many of those works, The Delivery suggests the possibility of reconciling these acts of creation, while leaving plenty of room for uncertainty. At the same time, The Delivery manages to feel strikingly original, as if García Robayo has succeeded in finding her own uncanny language for exploring these very old questions.
Kat Solomon is a writer living in the Boston area. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in Chicago Review of Books and on the Ploughshares blog. Her short fiction has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2022 and has been longlisted for The Wigleaf Top 50.
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