The tense enigma of a novel by Anna Moschovakis navigates unstable terrain

“An earthquake is a shaking of the Earth's surface” by Anna Moschovakis is my kind of novel: tense and narratively ambiguous, a puzzle book or a book riddle.

It takes place in an unnamed city in a time similar to the present, narrated by an actress who may be losing her mind. At first, this anonymous figure remembers his last performance on stage, which ended with his character breaking down and admitting to the audience: “Something is happening that I don't understand.” Meanwhile, the city in which he lives has been beset by earthquakes, not simply a swarm or a large shock followed by a series of aftershocks, but rather a continuous state of disturbance, seismicity as “spasmodic movements that convulse the ground beneath us, which almost never stops, not completely, so that now movement, instead of stillness, has become the rule.”

Or do you have it? Among the many strange and vivid pleasures of the novel is that we cannot be sure, for as the book progresses the narrator seems to become increasingly unstable, although this may also be an illusion.

Moschovakis is a poet and the author of two previous novels, “Participation” and “Eleanor, or the Rejection of Love's Progress”; He has translated works by Annie Ernaux, Albert Cossery and Georges Simenon. “An earthquake is a shaking of the Earth's surface” reminds these writers, at once propulsive and elusive.

Like Ernaux, Moschovakis's language is sober and neutral, although that neutrality may be a ruse. Like Cossery, he sets the book in an urban landscape that is both recognizable and slightly strange, as if in a dream. Like Simenon, in these pages there is a murder, or the desire to commit it, and to reveal it is to reveal nothing. From the beginning of the novel, the narrator tells us that she intends to kill her roommate, Tala, whose arrival is presented as a catalyst: “The movements, the shakes, the creak of the concrete patio,” observes the narrator, “they started shortly after she moved in.”

Still, at this moment, perhaps, we also find ourselves in the realm of imagination, because Tala has disappeared. Did it ever exist? The earthquakes? The truth is that it doesn't matter. What compels us is less the external world than the tangled inner life of the narrator.

To develop this sensitivity, Moschovakis employs a variety of destabilizing strategies. For starters, there's the novel's floating cast of supporting characters, including two loosely knit friends, JP and Celia, and the mysterious waiter at a neighborhood joint. “Before the ground began to physically shake,” the narrator confesses, “I would describe the conversations with JP this way: First you're talking, first you're delighted or bewildered, and it goes on, and on. and continues. And then the ground you are standing on starts to move.” The earthquake as an emotional disturbance, in other words, less a matter of body than mind. Moschovakis makes this clear from JP's initial appearance in the novel. “It's going to stop,” he warns of the shaking, “and you'll realize it never really happened.” That warning echoes throughout the book.

Furthermore, the narrator's displacement emerges in the structure of “An earthquake is a tremor of the Earth's surface.” Composed of shapes and fragments, it employs a variety of typefaces and delivery methods. Moschovakis augments the central narrative with lists, notebook entries, flyers, and a pamphlet handed out by JP: a compilation of runes, of clues, that may or may not add up.

“What if all, or even half, of the people in the world didn't walk around with their heads full of words all the time?” the narrator asks. “What if all, or even half of the people I know knew Weren't they? The question is less rhetorical than reflective and addresses the possibility that the inner life of others “was not reportable like mine was, because it wasn't happening with words.”

This may be the essential enigma of the novel, or perhaps “mechanism” is a more appropriate term. “An earthquake is a tremor of the Earth's surface” interrogates language as a means of analysis or observation, focusing on its inconsistencies. “[I]It becomes clear, at the end of every episode of extreme panic, pain, or fear,” Moschovakis writes, “that the opposite of intolerable it's not tolerable but something more similar ecstatic.”

Meanwhile, the narrator searches for meaning wherever she can find it—in the brochure's pointed questions, for example, which include “WHAT OR WHO IS STOPING YOU?” and “HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF THEY LEFT?”

And yet, for her, language remains changing and ephemeral, difficult to interpret or see. Even the brochure blurs into irresolution. “The light drew dark shapes on its shiny surface, abstractions of mercury,” recalls the narrator, “that prevented the words from being captured. “FL_R_LF seemed to read, in large letters.” Later, after a nap, he reaches “behind me for JP's pamphlet, which I had left on the side table. There was nothing there.”

The effect is that of a profound dislocation, separating her not only from the world around her but also from herself. “At some point,” he explains, “I lost track of who was asking the questions and who was answering them, who was leading and who was being led.”

That's a tricky place to get to for a novel, a kind of stasis of the soul. It works, however, because of the depth and movement of the writing, which aims not at resolution but at immersion, evoking what that dislocation feels like. “The voice in my silent mouth,” Moschovakis writes, “asked me: Can we live with this? Can we live with all this? Can we live?“

These questions apply to each of us. After all, where are we if not in a world defined by disruption, where real or metaphorical earthquakes and other uncertainties prevail at every turn? How do we do it?[s]nap back. Fit into it. “Squeeze” when they constantly attack us?

“We were alone and not alone,” the narrator insists, “both things are true at the same time.” For Moschovakis, then, the important thing is to ask, since the answers are, as they always have been, fundamentally unknowable.

David L. Ulin is a contributing writer for Opinion. He is the former book editor and book reviewer for The Times.