An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth

Anna Moschovakis


Reviewed by Jared Køhn

Anna Moschovakis’s novel An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth destroys any attempt to make concrete, singular meaning in a world that moves constantly. Moschovakis’s novel takes place in a Los Angeles that has been more riddled by earthquakes than usual. In fact, the city and its suburbs have been shaking ceaselessly for some time, by the time we meet our unnamed narrator. Moschovakis’s novel begins by announcing that the foundations of stability, the assumption of a baseline, has splintered: “They say that walking is controlled falling, they say put one foot in front of the other, they say things will return to normal any you will adjust to the change…” Walking itself is a kind of miracle, a controlled fall that our protagonist does not have access to. Her roommate, however, the youthful Tala, can walk across the room just fine. At the novel’s start, she comes and goes with the kind of freedom that the narrator lacks. Before long, she mostly goes. And at some point, she is gone. The narrator’s obsession with Tala is natural and central to understanding the piece. Tala is to be understood, to be desired, and to be destroyed. In trying to find Tala, the narrator forces herself into the outside world.

Everything from characters to language to the structures of chapter splinter and crack beneath the sheer violent energy of this novel’s prose. To call Moschovakis’s style disorienting is to miss the power of her book, splintering and rattling even as you move from page to page. Everything from brief meetings with a friend at the bar to musings on the nature of performance and identity to agonizing over a violent desire are interspersed with interruptions, movements, formal deviations. Messages in ALL-CAPS, poetic bursts in italics, the narrator’s notebooks transplanted directly into the novel, lists dragged out across the book’s many short chapters. The banal, the beautiful, and the grotesque all come together, bleeding out on a fragmenting page. Even the quickness of the chapters leaves blank spaces that gesture towards the crumbling nature of this work. All the while, the earth continues to shake beneath our narrator’s feet. She struggles to maintain balance, to adapt to a world that is ever-adapting.

There is a temptation to call this novel a kind of descent into madness. But it is much more interested in training us to accept its frenetic, chaotic movement. Towards the end of the piece, the narrator describes walking outside, “I fell, but only once. I picked myself up and moved on.” Moschovakis has no interest in slowing her novel down for a frightened or confused reader. She lets you fall, again and again and again. But I returned, time and time again. Because I felt a burning desire, a growing obsession with finding my footing in her language, her vision of Los Angeles. By the end, I had. By the end, I almost forgot the earth was shaking beneath my feet.

An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is a novel published by Soft Skull Press. It was released on November 19th, 2024.

 

 
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The Last Song of the World