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WoGF Review: Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine
Leslie goes by L at omphaloskepsis, a place made to write about reading books and film outside the University classroom, an excuse made to write differently than the usual review blog. She loves creative and intelligent storytellers, words involving the letter v, and knee socks. After noticing she has yet to read nearly enough Sci-Fi or Fantasy of the grown-up variety, she found herself at WWEnd in pursuit of new-to-her female authors.
Of note: I am going to exorcise some demons right off the bat, afterward you will find that I actually did enjoy Genevieve Valentine‘s Mechanique.
Beginning Mechanique I wondered what I had gotten myself into. It was not the short chapters that exchanged narrators, shifted person (1st, 2nd, or 3rd), and moved in and out of time. For the first hundred pages read and often set aside for life-interruptions, I mentioned aloud some form of: It’s like a short story that has been stretched and contorted rather painfully into a novel. It’s like myself with the long jokes, getting parts out of order or forgetting something key and attempting to restart or go back and Sean is trying not to show his impatience, while N is rubbing her temples at the clumsy world-building. Mechanique had me rubbing my temples. I could come up with some clever literary explication about how the chapters’ movement and their disjuncture mimic in form the renderings of a travelling circus through a devastated landscape. But all I could think was, will this smooth out?
The skirting of a secret via sly reference from lip corners and oblique cuts of the eye can be tantalizing but I can only take so many had I only noticed-type asides. I love non-settings and characters made up of context as much as the base coat of an adverb-adjective-noun, and imagery so precise as to lay the page bare. Bird was fairly featureless but for the reactions people had to her. I was working to form her out of negative space. It was exhausting, in part because she wasn’t the only one.* I (lover of the parenthetical) wondered what the deal was with all the parentheticals. Some could’ve been footnoted if not excised altogether but for the idea that they are yet not an aside of the narrator-of-the-chapter. I was tripping over them. They fit and yet not. They were metal bones, inorganic among the easier flow of text; only sometimes they didn’t make their aerialist lighter.
