Tuesday, October 19, 2021

The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan ★★★★☆

A dark painting of a prostrate woman in red in a spot of light completely surrounded by darkness filled with wolves the caption reads Nobody Is Ever Coming For You
“We weave necessary fictions, and sometimes they save us. Our minds, our bodies.” 
- Imp

“You know now that you’ll never be sure what happened?” 
- Dr. Ogilvy 

Wow. So there are unreliable narrators and then there are schizophrenics. Had I never read PKD I would have been unprepared.

There are chapters where it is a Tai Chi flow of pure crazy; tangent overlapping tangent. I had never really understood the phrase ‘Keep it together.’ 

Kiernan cleverly draws you into the character’s predicament by overlapping real works of art, fiction, and history with imagined ones: she leaves you uncertain. 

I spent two hours desperately googling a sculpture that does not exist.

Or does it? 
I want to see it.
I need to see it.
I saw it (in my mind.)
It is the truth that I saw it.
It is a fact that it does not exist.
I’m not lying.
I lied.

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