A book a day: Lisa Tuttle: my death

Títutulu Original: My death

Year of publication: 2004

Translation: Regina López Muñoz

Valoración: Quite recommended

An extremely simple premise and just 140 pages are more than enough for Lisa Tuttle to offer us a surprising subtle, fine, psychologically complex, ambiguous novel and with a sinister touch. The definition is not mine but of the narrator of My death When he talks about The second wifefifth novel by Helen Ralston.

Doesn’t all this a bit Borgian sound? Ok, I know that I see Borges everywhere but My death It has a very dot of the Jorgito roll.

And that the beginning tells us about a middle -aged writer in the middle of the vital and creative crisis that decides, the result of a kind of Proustian revelation, write the biography of Helen Ralston, writer, model and lover of a more or less known painter of the beginning of the century.

What initially seems another damn a novel about the writer’s block or a simple “literary research”, thanks to coincidences, mirrors, parallels and unfolding, in a mystery novel that at times approaches science fiction to end up becoming a reflection on gender and identity, about sex, about the art and role of women in the same throughout history break

Three are the aspects that I would highlight above all in the novel:

• The evolution of the atmosphere of the same, from the almost initial (and ultrabritish) tea with pasta to a second half that touches the dreamlike, the gothic and the dark.
• The management of the symbolic.
• The author’s exploration in the narrator / Helen relationship and how it moves between fascination and intimidation, between overwhelming and “disgust.”

That said, a short and surprising novel, with a transit of the most interesting of the costumbrista to the darkest of the soul. And all in 140 pages, hear.