Femme (very) fatale
Here
is a rare triple: a book (a) with a beautiful cover (imagine the
title and butterflies below in sparkling gold), which (b) I got
the chance to read before its release, and (c) is a mesmerising
and memorable read from an interesting new voice. Well, new to
me anyway, as Clement is a poet, as well as the author of a memoir
and a previous novel whose title, A True Story Based on Lies,
had caused me to pick it up once or twice in the bookshop. Next
time I do, it will be for good.
Meanwhile, The Poison that Fascinates has
the mysterious, elliptical feel of a novel in translation, without
ever succumbing to gaudy exoticism in its depictions of Mexico
(where Clement lives). Instead, what we get is a laconic precision
which generally avoids the purpleness that can characterise a
poet’s prose (”In the rainy season the city becomes
molten, streets turn into rivers that carry plastics, newspapers,
dry willow leaves and small shards of volcanic glass”).
It is a book of disappearances: of murder victims,
of the past, and of innocence. Emily Neale is “half an orphan”
whose mother went missing when she was a child. This gives her
both connection to and distance from the children in the Rosa
of Lima Orphanage in Mexico City, which was set up by Emily’s
grandmother. (”The orphans are permanently mystified by
the fact that Emily does not have a mother but does have a father.
They think she is half of what they are. They act as if being
left with one parent were somehow impossible”). The orphanage
is now run by Mother Agata, who reminded me of the gargantuan
Dog Woman in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry:
Mother Agata is an enormous woman. Her hands
are so large that she can carry most things in one hand. Dressed
in her nun’s habit she looks like a colossal angel that
people stand beside for shade or shelter. Children want to climb
up the trunk, limb and branch of her body.
The language is Wintersonian too, with its compact
fluency and occasional over-reaching - but too much ambition is
better than none. The Poison that Fascinates also revels
in representations of womanhood: from the compassionate altruism
of the mother to the far extreme of the murderess. Emily keeps
notes on female murderers, an account of a different one ending
each chapter. These portraits of dissociation produce some of
the richest and strangest writing in the book (”She felt
her eyes were inside her mouth; her nails were growing backward
into her hands; a monkey bit her face; her feet were run over
by a train; she heard piano music in her arms”) and each
one comes at its subject from a fresh angle.
The murderesses are one of Emily’s obsessions,
along with details of saints and unusual facts. It takes the arrival
of her cousin Santiago to break her out of this controlled world:
I just can’t believe it when I meet
someone who is so controlled by society’s rules and expectations.
You know all about facts. You know all about other people’s
lives and even the lives of saints. But what about your life,
Emily? Have you ever done anything unexpected?
Santiago’s appearance in Emily’s life
will have consequences that, as the blurb promises, change her
life forever, and which ultimately bring together the disparate
elements of the story. The title is from Mexican composer Agustin
Lara: “Woman, divine woman, / you have the poison that fascinates
in your eyes,” and complements the various angles which
the book takes on cultural roles and expectations of women. It
becomes a fascinating puzzle of a novel, reverberating around
the brain and impossible to get out of your head.
John Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
