That’s right, we are starting as we mean to go on, with a highly visceral and utterly compelling Book of the Month! Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce, translated by Sarah Booker, is at once distressing and melodic, something you can’t quite tear your eyes from.
We jump right in and meet the 38-year old unnamed narrator on one of her nights out in Ecuador roller skating with friends, taking drugs, and meeting a man who lives in a cave-like sanctuary, full of moss, holes and mud, and she falls into a desirous and enlivening affair with him. Her marriage is on the brink and the men she encounters roil into one, between the husband, the man in the cave, the poet and the penpal, everyone remaining unnamed so the reader starts to wonder, is the man in the cave the husband and is the cave their sacred space, the place where marriage is still intact? Or is the cave an idyllism of the intimacy she experiences with her lover, one that is lost with her husband?
Told like a hallucinatory fever dream, this story is exposed through a series of vignettes that read like glimpses into the headspace of a woman teetering on the edge of madness and loss of control. Ponce expertly uses an ambivalent style — unnamed characters, ambiguous settings, a plot that doesn’t dwell too much on present happenings — as a tool of heightening the sense of character and the narrator’s own state of indecision. We learn that the narrator is always hurtling in a forward momentum, but this seems entirely dependent on the men she encounters — throughout the entire story she is aware she has a husband but that her marriage is failing, yet she waits for him to make the final call. She rarely makes a decision for herself but instead goes with the flow. It is only when she falls pregnant — and even here, she says she can’t have a baby and she can’t have an abortion, both statements at odds but both with a certainty that is emotionally paralysing — but she knows she must do something, and it is the first time in the story that she takes physical action of her own accord, separate from men, by leaving Ecuador.
This is a novel that explores how bodily autonomy can either stunt or enhance an individual’s control. On a sentence level, it is completely stunning and there are profound musings scattered through the text that I had to double underline so that I could pore over them later. My advice to those who pick up this book: enjoy the ride and don’t try to understand everything that is happening. Ponce deliberately confuses the reader but she gives enough that, by the end, it all comes together and becomes clear. I’d recommend this to any fan of South American and Latinx feminist literature, particularly readers of Carmen Maria Machado, author of In The Dreamhouse and My Body and Other Parties, and Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender is the Flesh.
Yes, 2024 is the year of weird fiction.
Blood Red is published by Dead Ink Books
9781915368355 | PB | £9.99 | 18th January 2024
This a book you can almost smell and taste: so vivid and visceral is the language. Sarah Booker’s translation renders Ponce’s prose hypnotic, with sentences carrying on, further into the mind of the narrator, bending and twisting back on themselves.
Literal Magazine
This book is savage. Ponce’s prose is full of passion, that is, full of desire and pain. That’s why it feels so alive, like a bleeding heart pumping inside your head.
Mónica Ojeda, author of Jawbone
