PANDORA, starting to see PlagueReads to explain our trauma to us

PANDORA
ANA PAULA PACHECO (tr. Julia Sanches)
Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Confined to her apartment, a professor falls into an unlikely romance—with a pangolin.

Ana, a literature professor, plans her remote classes while confined to her apartment during lockdown. Her lover, Alice, has died of Covid. In her place are a series of animals that demand Ana’s care and attention: an overbearing pangolin, a swarm of insects, a giant bat.

Amid changes in medication and fraught faculty meetings, Ana’s grip on reality loosens. She begins to devise a syllabus on the financialization of art and life, posing questions about labor and intimacy she will use her own body to answer. Her apartment fills with creatures, her teaching slides into absurd allegory, and her sense of what is real, permissible, or politically legible fractures.

Equal parts tender and grotesque, Pandora is a hallucinatory portrait of a mind and a world in collapse, a razor-sharp meditation on desire, delusion, and the absurd endurance of the human.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Lockdown.

Shuddering yet? Five and a half years on, lots of people seem to have tossed the memory of COVID's terrifying early days down the oubliette in their brains' castle wall. This weird, weird little story reminds us of how very Kafkaeque the first six months of the plague were. Alice, Ana's other half, was lockdown-trapped away from her and Ana assumes she's dead. At least, that's how I read it...nothing so pedestrian as clear explanations are on offer here.

As lockdown wears on, Ana relies ever more on skype calls with her therapist, "White Beard", who does the medication route to help Ana get through her...unorthodox..life as she reports it to him/us. As Alice and Ana had been working on setting up a lesbian live-porn site before COVID hit, some parts of Ana's São Paulo academic's life were cast away in the now-solitary apartment, a virtual seminar on money, depression, the legal system sodomizing...wait that's not in the seminar...nor is a pangolin, and a very important role he will play. Bats, insects, critters are all memorably present, reminding us how very confusing it was in those early days trying to figure out how the heck this virus blazed through the world. Again in Kafkaesque terms, these are the main culprits of the mental map then prevailing...and in Ana's isolated, grieving, frightened mind they take on deeply disturbing sexual roles in her life as reported to "White Beard" and thus to us.

Her mind fragmenting, as we're seeing it happen, there arrives more medication from "White Beard"...that sends Ana further into psychotic break territory as she's transformed into an eagle.

I'm not making you understand how deeply relatable this story's most peculiar excesses are. I'm afraid I don't know how to. I was nodding along as Ana got it on with the pangolin, because I could *feel* her desperation as reality utterly, irrevocably altered, ripped her sense of herself into ragged shreds. Why shouldn't she have torrid sex with a pangolin? Alice is no longer with us...gotta get it somewhere....

There is nothing easy or non-confrontational about this read. It is meant to put the reader into a time, a place, a person's mind, that cracks under immense pressure. In so many ways, reading this short novel was catharsis for me, was a reminder that the times can create the break in a normal-presenting person without any unexpected or unsuspected inner flaws, faults, broken spots.

There but for the grace of the goddesses goes any one of us. I'd give it a full fifth star bit for les jeux avec les animaux. Disturbed me; it was the point to do that, but....