Poet, novelist, and translator Anna Moschovakis unsettles readers of An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, a narrative meditation on the obsessions one clings to in the face of chaos. In an uncanny near future, a seismic event has disrupted Earth's crust, leaving everyone to live through continuous earthquakes. While not all of them are large, they are nearly constant.
This catastrophic event is not the first thing to upend the novel's first-person narrator, however. Her lackluster career as an actress seems to have finally petered out. Facing the chasm of unfilled days on shaking ground, she develops an obsessive focus on her young, attractive housemate, Tala, which quickly sharpens into a desire to kill her. When Tala inexplicably disappears, the narrator spirals through her own existential dread, reliving memories of what it means to be a woman in a world that's always watching. Her hunt for Tala soon dissolves into a more hallucinatory hunt for stability in an increasingly unstable environment.
Reading Moschovakis's prose is a singular experience, not least of all because of its inherently poetic sensibility. Her lyrical turns of phrase, unexpected juxtapositions, and associative iterations are perfect for An Earthquake's narrator as she slips into the book's long, existential stare. Sometimes, that stare is a literal one. The narrator stares at a brochure, at the "dark shapes on its bright surfaces," and then out a window: "a small hole, the size of a lime, in the middle of the lower pane.... I leaned over and brought my eye to the hole. A rabbit rustled in the strip of dirt by the chain-link fence. A rabbit? I blinked. A squirrel. A ragged brown squirrel, looking down, doing something with its hands." Even that which one sees with her own eyes can shapeshift unexpectedly into something mundane yet disturbing.
In this world of constant movement, there is one thing that ultimately catches the eye and keeps it. As she explains, "When Tala arrived, from nowhere, nothing looked the same. The possible had bled through its container, like the skyscrapers through their frame. Tala became the missing piece, the perspectival shift." The narrator's fixation on Tala appears disturbing at first and yet increasingly understandable. Shifts, of course, are not easy to live with. But they are, Moschovakis ultimately suggests, the only state of being one can depend on. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: Anna Moschovakis's An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is a poetic, thought-provoking novel that embraces the mind's recursive attempts to make order of chaos.