ORNAMENTAL, Colombian author's chilling dystopia from eleven years ago, published in pandemic times

ORNAMENTAL
JUAN CÁRDENAS (tr. Lizzie Davis)
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 any edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The lives of a doctor, his wife, and his patient collide, laying bare the political and personal narratives they have carefully constructed for themselves.

A scientist recruits volunteers for the trial of a new recreational drug that exclusively affects women. Among them is “number 4,” who becomes emotionally involved with first the scientist, then his wife, a well-known visual artist in the midst of a creative crisis. The scientist is oblivious to the atrocities his new drug will bring to the city; his wife is oblivious to the superfluousness of the objects she committed her life to exhibiting in galleries and museums. Number 4’s presence pierces the couple’s complacency, gradually undoing the many certainties they’ve accumulated in their lives of ease.

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

My Review: Somebody has a poor opinion of medical professionals and the industry they perpetuate: "Today they finally brought in the participants: four middle-aged women whose unremarkable medical histories show no record of addiction or criminal activity. The only peculiarity is that they all had children at a fairly young age, but that’s not unusual for women from the inferior classes." says the PoV doctor in the journal where he recounts his clinical trials of what is, effectively, soma. It's really a shame the world has moved on from Huxley's Brave New World, because it explains so very much of the 2020s is rooted in the feared and despised efforts of utopians to bring peace and order through conformity. Enforced by drugs.

A story about a medical researcher who wants to make women more docile by granting them euphoric indifference to the mundane world. A drug that, once administered, has the user in its thrall ever afterward, and of course the administrators are men.

Does any of this sound familiar, Huxley readers? Does anything about this social agenda...subjugating women by hooking them on a dream of happiness that's been standardized...sound politically motivated and as though it might be in progress? The reason this book, published in 2020, made no ripples feels likely to be that pesky pandemic we have all memory-holed, that kind of ate all the attention the world had at that moment. Because it was spot-on and prophetic.

No one has a name in the narrator's journals, only functional labels. Logical empiricism writ interpersonal. It's a way of universalizing those involved in the action, showing them not to be characters with inner lives but mere function-servers in the narrator's mind. We;re in his journals, his are the only thoughts we're vouchsafed, so he has no need to pretend he has a scintilla of interest in them as monads only as they serve his purposes.

Purposes are, in his view, those actions that leave traces; he wants to leave a trace. His view of the function-servers as not being characters is forcefully ridiculed by "Number 4"'s insistence that you can't have a city without a name, there can't be a city occupied by function-servers but people who need and want and create, as well as manufacture and consume. Her use of the doctor's drug does not so blunt her edges that even the doctor's wife, a maker of frivolous brummagem ornaments, is struck by "Number 4"'s perceptions of creation. She becomes closer to "Number 4" on her artistic and creative level, appearing to head into a real assessment...can't call it a reassessment because there is no indication of any such thing ever having taken place before...of the purpose of making the gauds she makes.

And then "Number 4" goes away and the doctor and his wife submerge in the soma-like miasma of their dystopia, resuming their pointlessness and indifference.

Exactly as I see around me, function-servers failing to connect dots in persistent patterns. I found it disheartening but very very well-made. Sentences lure we-the-reader on and on into the buildings that have no meaning and form no city.

Don't go into this tale expecting there to be an ending. More an evocation of The End, and one I'm still chilled to the marrow while looking at the diorama of the author's story made by a manic fifth-grader without perspective.