This review is part of a special week of pieces here at Strange Horizons which focus on speculative fiction in translation published by US small presses. These publishers are being impacted by the Trump administration's recent revocation of a number of grants made by the National Endowment of the Arts. Rachel Cordasco has compiled a list of works appearing in recent years from these houses. The health and breadth of speculative fiction relies on the work of these presses. Please support them and their work.
The Fake Muse is published in the US by Open Letter.
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The Fake Muse is one hell of a ride. Metatextual, stylistically dexterous, and formally deviant, Max Besora’s second book published in English (translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem for Open Letter) is the rare novel that feels genuinely novel.
Structurally, the book is divided into three parts of unequal length. The first, and longest, “Welcome to the V@lley of the Bronx!,” is a series of first-person introductions to a bizarre cast of characters living in and around New Barcelona, which is situated in the titular “Valley of the Bronx.” Written with a minimum of capitalization or punctuation, each chapter begins with a given character introducing themselves in an at first uniformly shallow and casual tone, sharing their name, zodiac sign, and biographical details before descending into increasingly absurd and violent acts.
A man transforms into a vampire to punish a distracting moviegoer. A model falls in love with a giant hamster who speaks in famous quotations, shoots lasers from his eyes, and leads a global animal liberation movement. A man psychologically plagued by his baldness finds a cure that works too well, becoming “the kingkong of the bronx.” A criminal is captured by a gang of female Nazi Satanists, who turn him into a sexual slave of the “Hitlerian matriarchy.” A detective inspector obsessed with the esoteric power of numbers keeps tabs on it all.
If there is a thread running through this chaos, it is in the Holofernes family—older sister Amanda (seventeen years old; Scorpio), younger sister Isabel II (thirteen; Libra), father Javier (fifty-five; Leo), mother Leonor (forty-eight; Taurus), and dog Molecule (three; Gemini)—each of whom are introduced in their own chapter. Their stories intersect occasionally with those of the other characters’ (e.g., the family dog Molecule is inspired to bite off Mrs. Holofernes’s nose by the hamster Manuel’s animal liberation manifesto), but these five chapters form the most coherent narrative in the first part of the novel.
In the opening chapter, Amanda is raped nightly by her father, whom she depicts as a tentacled monster. The following stories get wilder and more detached from reality as they go; however, a thematic link between sexuality and monstrosity emerges again and again, so that all of the dark absurdity can be read as attempts to process the sadly very realistic horror experienced by this girl. Another recurring theme, the link between animal agriculture and the treatment of women, also clearly emerges.
The language in Amanda’s chapter retains a colloquial character throughout but comes into focus as she expresses her rage, in evocative images of flaming chasms and sharpened knives. The text is littered with skull-and-crossbones symbols, which eventually take over the chapter’s final page, as Amanda disassociates from her identity and becomes “mandyjane deathlove.” And throughout the novel, the actual words tell only part of the story. Various symbols, icons, photographs (often described as being posted on Instagram, fitting with the internet-fueled language), visual effects, advertisements, newspapers, and more break up the text, which itself fragments across the page to indicate obsession or madness or the cessation of consciousness in death.
The frequent visual aids, ranging from a Christmas tree to a hamster shooting lasers from its eyes to a woman with her pubic hair shaved into a swastika, seem less intended to provide new or different information from what is in the text than to serve as emphasis or punctuation. An overwhelming sense emerges that the author must have had a great time putting it all together. And it is indeed impossible not to speak of the author very specifically when discussing this novel: The metatextual turn of the final two parts is presaged by the fact that, in and among these introductions to his fictional characters, Max Besora (forty years old; Aquarius) claims his own chapter. In it, he first verbally and then physically grapples with an “important critic/writer/prize juror/very locally famous commentator” who takes the dim view that literature is a product like any other and that authors should be active on social media. (The present critic takes the warning to heart.)
The novel’s second part, “Mandyjane Gets Her Revenge,” is written as a farcical stage play, bringing together most of the characters previously introduced into a single narrative. The interior perspectives of the first part are jettisoned for an almost totally exterior view built on dialogue and stage directions. This breaks down significantly, however, when Amanda/Mandyjane narrates a sexual encounter with Johnny the Vampire in graphic detail, concluding that “I’m a woman, can’t you see what I am, what they’ve made me into? Because all this is about suffering.”
Mandyjane and Johnny go on to plot the murder of the Holofernes parents, while Detective Inspector Thadeus and his policemen pursue them in the blended tones of a slapstick noir. Throughout, the script’s dialogue is over-the-top dramatic, expository, cryptic, and expressive—a soap opera plunging into the absurd. Pronouncements seemingly weighted with meaning break down into the meaningless, as when Javier, the father Holofernes, declares, “The day will come when there are no fathers left, no mothers left no left no flamingos left no recognizable music left.” (It doesn’t make much more sense in context.) Eventually, the text itself breaks down into two pages of blurred lines, the script’s conclusion replaced by a three-panel comic of black-and-white photos.
This leads into the final section, “The Fake Muse,” which takes the form of a dialogue in which Mandyjane interrogates her “capricious demiurge” of an author, Max Besora, at gunpoint about why he would write such horrors for her. Here, the earlier reading of the text as metaphor is dissected, with Mandyjane proclaiming, “Now I can transcend the historical and patriarchal limitations of my natural fictional condition, and divert the recursive structures of my thoughts of my traumatic past.”
In the earlier “Max” chapter, the fictionalized Besora—who has just, for example, depicted a thirteen-year-old girl being groomed online by someone with the screenname “Marquis de Sade 3000”—defends his work by “[making] it clear that i wasn’t a psychopath or a rapist or an abuser BUT MY CHARACTERS WERE and that only the lame-brained confuse the narrator with the author at this stage of the game.” (Tell that to Twitter.) But in this final section, Mandyjane critiques Besora for playing into stereotypes of abused women seeking revenge. Here the real-world author risks being a little too clever in his metatextual conceit. As the argument proceeds, the layers of attack and defense accumulate in such a way as to almost be designed to give Besora an out on any possible criticism. “No, look, I’m not really serious,” he seems to be saying, which risks undercutting the ability of the work to say anything at all.
Besora escapes this trap by dialing up the self-mockery. As shatter marks begin to visually consume the final pages, a sexually humiliated Max Besora is bound and whipped by Mandyjane while loudly proclaiming himself to be a good male feminist, clearly getting off on his own degradation. As the unreadable text falls away, this scene is helpfully illustrated by black-and-white photo cutouts.
Questions of the artistic legitimacy of graphic content are left unanswered, except by the existence of the work itself. For all the incorporation of serious subject matter, both the earlier encounter with the “important critic/writer/prize juror/very locally famous commentator” and, ultimately, the subjugation of the author to his character seem to send a lighter message: Art breaks down when examined too closely, so you might as well enjoy the ride.