Thirst
by Marina Yuszczuk
Translated by Heather Cleary
Thirst by Argentinian author Marina Yuszczuk was first published in 2020 as La Sed and will shortly be issued in an English translation by Heather Cleary. In essence, Thirst is a sapphic vampire novel in which a female immortal from the “Old World” falls in love with a young single mother in present-day Buenos Aires. The book is in two parts. In the first segment, the narrator is the monster herself. It is an account of her transformation from innocent girl to a vampire, at the hands of a sadistic master, followed by her escape from Europe to South America after her “sisters” of the same kind are hunted and killed at the behest of the Church. Her arrival in the young city of Buenos Aires coincides with the onset of the “Yellow Death”, presenting her with the opportunity to hunt her prey without being discovered. Eventually tired by her life of desire and lust for blood, she convinces a cemetery keeper to lock her in a coffin in a crypt, never to see the light of day.
This first part of the book reads like a pastiche of classic Gothic novels, with echoes of the prototype of sapphic vampire stories – Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” – and other authors from Mary Shelley to Bram Stoker. Except that in Thirst, the sexual tension which is typical of classic vampire tales is rendered in scenes which leave nothing to the imagination and would likely give Le Fanu palpitations. There’s also an explicit and blasphemous scene in a church which doesn’t really fit in the rest of the novel (in which religion doesn’t otherwise play any major part) and which, I felt, was included primarily to give this novel “transgressive” credentials.
In the second segment we get a change of narrator, a single mother who is passing through a particularly challenging time. Her marriage has broken down and her mother is succumbing to a degenerative disease which is locking her into her own increasingly rigid body. In an unlikely twist, the narrator is given the key to the vampire’s crypt and inadvertently frees the bloodthirsty creature from her century-long self-imposed exile, setting off a hair-raising chain of events.
Thirst disappointed me because it contained some great concepts which, in my view, were not developed to the full. The description of disease-ridden Buenos Aires in the first part, for instance, was highly atmospheric and gripping, and there were some captivating, almost-dreamlike sequences. In contrast, the second part fell flat, with some passages coming across as banal or unintentionally comic (for instance, the vampire getting to grips with traffic lights or with the workings of a cigarette lighter). There was also much potential in the metaphorical parallels between the disease of the present-day narrator’s mother and the “paralysis” and death which the vampire induces in its victims, but the novel stops short of effectively linking the two. I also felt that the narrative was rather lop-sided, with the vampire being re-introduced at a late stage, and the novel concluding abruptly soon afterwards without any real room for further development of the characters, their relationship and their motivations.
Will I look out for other works of Yuszczuk?
Definitely, because there’s so much promise in this contemporary take on
classic vampire fiction. But, Thirst has ultimately left me unsatisfied.
No comments:
Post a Comment