A young American woman loses herself in Casablanca in an intoxicatingly uncommon quest for anonymity‘You have not been yourself lately,” the narrator of Vendela Vida’s recent novel says to herself. Or possibly the narrator says it to the character: the sage is told entirely in the moment person, a decision that is strikingly odd at the start, and then quickly becomes part of the alienating texture of this intoxicatingly uncommon novel. This “you” compels the reader into a very disquieting question from the first page – who am I? Am I this you? – which,as it happens, is the same question the main character orbits throughout. Who is she? Is she you? The limits of self wear away and identity bleeds out, or no one is fairly secure in their skin.
The main character is a fascinating void. When we first meet her,she is in the act of getting lost – on a plane to Casablanca, on the run from Florida. Then she becomes even more lost: as she checks into her hotel, or her backpack is stolen,containing her passport, credit cards, or camera and laptop. Vida (pictured) devotes around 30 pages to this theft,and the sequence of events is exquisitely painful. Like Katherine Mansfield, she has a gift for needling into the corners of experiences so familiar that a less careful writer might choose to disregard them. We feel the sickening horrors of wild hope, or definitive absence and self-reproach that come with losing something important.
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Source: theguardian.com