“What a tiny, stupid life I’ve led! I gave up everything for you! My husband, my lovers, my years and days and hours, my music, my capacity to love—gave them all away in exchange for toil, blood, and excrement! For you! For nothing! I’m all alone!”
Reading this book was worthwhile for the ending alone. The ending is inevitable; of course a book about pregnancy and rearing a child must end with the pain of when the child leaves the nest, thankless, and you have that existential crisis of identity: how could you not? This book made me think about how some of the most universal and painful life experiences that humans go through (pregnancy, and the overall relationship of a mother to her child) are experiences that I will never have, that I never can have. I feel oddly excluded, rather than relieved that I don’t have to go through all that. But enough about me.
What a strange book to start off the year with!
First let's get something out of the way. The premise of this book is that a woman is married to a man and gets pregnant with an owl child...because around the same time as having relations with her husband, she also has relations with a female owl.
Yeah. I know, I know. I know. I know...
Some people would have just stopped reading there. But I have this theory however, something I picked up from C.S. Lewis' book about The Reading Life, that you should read an entire book to the end to understand the author's intent. In other words, your boy Lewis never DNF'd anything, even things that he had major issues with. He withheld all judgment till the end.
Do I take that philosophy to the extreme? No, thankfully--I have DNF'd 6 or 7 books as of this writing. I think if I read a good 20-30% of a book and there's just absolutely nothing at all, no reason at all to keep reading, then yes I feel fine with throwing the book in the trash and walking away. But usually there is at least something that a book is doing well and that I can learn from. I try to take as humble a posture as possible in my reading life...difficult, because I am quite human and therefore can be egotistical, snotty, judgmental, and jump to conclusions...but it's my aspiration.
So I kept reading. And I'm glad I did. This style alone is so interesting and well done as to be worth studying. Somewhere between a fever dream and a myth, similar to magical realism but somehow more like reading a Raymond Carver; stark with description but perfect with its dialogue.
Furthermore there's a lot of body horror, there's themes of motherhood and pregnancy and estranged marriage relations and two cultures colliding, there's all sorts of strong themes in this little tight-punching book.
There are different interpretations of what it’s all about. Sometimes it seems like she’s caught between two forms of madness: her owl lover has the madness of the wild, and her husband has the madness of civilization.
Oftentimes it seems the main theme though is rather that her daughters condition is a metaphor for being born with various congenital disorders or neurodivergent traits and the author is saying: just because some people are born different doesn’t meant they’re born “wrong” and that they need to be fixed.
A big deal is made of the fact that the daughter is missing the milestones that have been appointed by a society of people who are different than them…yes they’re missing those milestones but in the meantime they are excelling in other areas. Yes her bones are brittle and she can’t eat with a spoon, but she doesn’t need a spoon, she can hunt and kill and eat her own prey, and she can glide across the room, an amazing trait that none of the “normal” people possess. Maybe her developmental plan should be different!
But while there are all of these themes to read into it, it also doesn't have to be about any of these other things. It's also just about itself; the story is the story. It's about learning to live with the alien, about oneness with something wild and at first disturbing, but being changed. It's about owls and what thinking, eating, and living as a nocturnal predatory bird is like. Sometimes disturbingly so. And last but not least, it's especially about the body horror of being pregnant with a writhing owl baby, which is disturbing—but perhaps only slightly more disturbing than the experience of pregnancy already is, if you think about it.
Having a spouse who is completely opposed to your child-rearing is also disturbing and a very difficult experience that many have gone through--I haven't personally, but we want to, my wife nannies, and it seems like all of our friends have kids, and so we think about kids and parenting about as much as one possibly can without actually having kids. We're thinking of adopting and/or fostering next year. But anyways.
I'm glad I read this. It's really hard to know how to rate this because sometimes it was a one, and sometimes it was a five. But that's life.
Some of the "one" moments included the sex with an owl parts and the way that the carnivore perspective was written about...I think it's interesting to think about a carnivore's perspective on life, but this was implemented in a very grotesque way...there is a bit of the grotesque to the way predators are, but I think the perspective deserved more nuance.
Ultimately what matters most to me about this book is how riveting, heartbreaking, shattering that the narrator's experience is to me. I felt so much, so viscerally in this book, even though I've literally never had any of the experiences of the narrator. Some of these passages hit me hard with those bittersweet moments that summarize so much of the grief of life. Let me leave you with some awesome excerpts.
“I’ve stared so long in the direction where you flew off that the sky over there looks fake, like cheap cloth, like a curtain. If I could reach out my hand and catch a corner of this curtain, then I would pull it away, Chouette, and here you would be, standing in front of me again.”
“I guess a bus may be back for me, or it may not, but either way I’m beginning to feel like it’s my turn.”
