Filtered through Tiny’s hallucinatory descriptions and vivid musicality, Chouette’s outbursts (and her, um, taste for blood) make for a synaesthetic reading experience – this is prose to sink into, more than buoyant enough to take a reader’s full weight.ĭelivering a flagrant “screw you” to some of society’s favourite lies – that motherhood is painless that pain is somehow noble or clarifying that healthfulness is the same as goodness – Oshetsky has produced a troubling triumph that is brave enough to leave its biggest questions unanswered.Ĭ houette by Claire Oshetsky is published by Virago, at £14.The novel opens in Sacramento, California, where our protagonist, professional cellist Tiny, finds out about her pregnancy. Like all the best fables, Chouette locates a current of human darkness pulsing just below its surface.
“It’s as if all of the small creatures who creep and fly into our home are looking forward to that special day to come when you hunt them down and eat them alive!” “It’s as if your home is adapting to be precisely the home you need, owl-baby,” exclaims Tiny, as troupes of animals and insects move into their dilapidated house. What is true love? Is it “tough”, insisting on discomfort in the present for the sake of happiness in the future – or is it unconditional, all-consuming, defined by its total absence of provisos? Chouette follows a mother on a fierce (and sometimes futile) quest to bend the world to fit her child.
While Chouette makes short shrift of Tiny’s career as a cellist, music holds tight as a way for mother and child to connect. Sanding the edges of her world against glimpses of a more quantifiable reality just out of shot, Oshetsky conjures two fictions at once: “My poor girl’s wings are bruised and battered from beating against her box,” describes Chouette’s mother as she snatches her from neonatal care.įrom metaphor to music, the novel is navigable via its constant invocation of sonatas and symphonies (“I hear Arvo Pärt’s plaintive duet for violin and piano, Spiegel im Spiegel, playing in my head”, recalls Tiny before her daughter arrives).
And you’re the one who, one day, will teach him.” That openness is a way of life for Tiny, who prefers to speak in metaphor: “That way, no logic can trap me, and no rule can bind me, and no fact can limit me or decide for me what’s possible.”Ĭhouette’s magical-realist text mirrors that slippery ambiguity often, it is hard to decipher Tiny’s descriptions of how something feels from how something is. “All the time he keeps saying to me: ‘She needs to learn,’” muses Tiny, but “you don’t need to learn anything.
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