Is it possible to work with a material so long and still not understand its condition? We are figures briefly draw in space; given temporary form in exchange for consciousness, sense, a chance. We are ready-mades, disposables. How do we live every last moment as this -- savant dust? [p. 166]
My desire to read this short novel was sparked by my discovery that it was, in part, about the narrator Edith's relationship with her mother, who suffered a brain haemorrhage when Edith was eight years old, and effectively became a different person whom Edith knew as Naomi. (I was ten when I experienced something very similar, though I did not bestow a new name on my mother.) Edith becomes an sculptor of some renown, and the eponymous Burntcoat is her home, a converted warehouse that's spacious enough to accommodate her works.
But this is a pandemic novel, though not quite our pandemic. Burntcoat features a hantavirus called Nova, which she caught from her Turkish lover -- who in turn caught it when set upon by looters while trying to retrieve food from his closed restaurant. The frame of the novel is Edith looking back from the vantage point of her late fifties, aware that the long-dormant virus is reactivating in her body, and that she will soon die.
Burntcoat felt like a set of unfinished stories: Edith's relationship with her mother (who dies while Edith is studying art in Japan); Edith's father, who leaves the wife who's no long the woman he loved and remarries; the pandemic itself, its social effects recognisable, if magnified, from our own experience; the ways the world has changed. In the end I think it's a story about bodies. There's a lot of graphic sex between Edith and her lover, and the whole novel is replete with human physicality, from pissing as a sign of dominance, to the scars of Edith's mother's surgery, to the gradual putrescence of a corpse.
I wasn't exactly disappointed -- Hall's writing is never a disappointment -- but this was not the book I'd hoped it would be.
Fulfils the ‘one word title’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.
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