“The antidote” is even more ambitious than the “Swamplandia!

It takes an unconventional fabulist to address something as vast as American history. Karen Russell is known for his surreal narration and his fantastic language in the work marked by an inclined perspective and bizarre scenarios that illuminate the sleeping truths. She brought her skills to focus on acclaimed short fiction collections and her first novel, the finalist of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, “Swamplandia!” While this novel told the decline of a Floridian family from the Carnival attached to the legend of the family and the earth, its new novel, “The Antidote”, seems to the west towards the fictitious city of the Nebraska d'Uz in the 1930s.

Russell UZ is a desolate and ravaged city of Dust Bowl where farmers have lost their crops and residents perished in extreme weather conditions. A series of murdered women adds to the paranoia grabbing the city.

Naturally, many of its remaining residents flee this wasteland. Those who are left behind are a desperate lot: a renegat sheriff takes the law in his hands. Teenagers find comfort by playing basketball in a declining team without coach. Uncomfortably, a second generation second generation farmer is found with the only prosperous harvest in town. And the drunkards find comfort at the bar of the country Jentleman. Upstairs of the pension bar, lost souls confess their secrets to a meadow witch named Antidote.

Their confessions are called deposits, with a numbered shift. This transaction reduces the witch of the meadows in “A room for rent. A safe to store things that people cannot understand or wear. To forget ”. Even from the community and yet an integral part of it, the antidote is an orphan Sicilian immigrant named Antonina Rossi who knows that “pain is never one thing, it always moved”. The original story of this meadow witch is rooted in the loss of her only son and escapes from the abusive house for single mothers where she was forced to wait for her pregnancy and give birth. Too familiar with the psychic weight of secrets, the antidote points out that “memories are living beings. When you host as much as I do, your bones start to cring. ”

The caustic nature of memory and secrets seizes Russell's fascination. Historians and biographers bypass archive gaps to delicately sew the stories deleted, but fiction writers can take more creative liberties to reconcile the past. While history becomes more threatened by censorship, fiction helps to shape public discourse. Enter the new relevance of historical novels: the examples include “The Love Songs of Wood Web” by Honorie Souronne Jeffers and “North Woods” by Daniel Mason, who address each of the themes extended through the controversial historical periods. The most directly, “The Antidote” is accompanied by “The Luminaries” by Eleanor Catton, which focuses on the mysteries of a port city in Rush in New Zealand. The two books went up with a mystery and the loot of greed.

All these books ask their readers to juggle several intrigue sons and a stunt of characters. Their success depends on the maintenance of your fascination for the secrets behind the surface.

Big books make huge requests: readers tend to love or hate them. And although Russell's career has taken off thanks to universally riot praise for her news, I would say that she takes even greater risks in her novels. They offer a more complicated and therefore larger award. With crackling pastoral language and thematic lynchian shades, “Swamplandia!” Surveyed the growing tension in the original state of Russell in Florida between an endangered fecund and the development of encroachment. In this document, her young heroine notices: “At ten years old, I could not articulate much but I received the message: to be a real historian, you had to cry amply and well.” Russell took these words to heart. With “L'Antidote”, Russell lifts the challenges of his efforts as a novelist.

Saissi by the heritage of terrestrial flight and the forced migration of the Amerindians, Russell built a new underwear by a developed embroidery of social, geological, historical and environmental research on the impact of American Western expansion. She talks about this work extended in the note of an author and a land has lost recognition. His witch Prairie carries the moral burden of a bankrupt society which shame women and strips the land of its resources as well as its indigenous inhabitants, leaving little for those who are left behind.

Russell could have written a smaller, less ambitious book, centered only around the antidote and its immediate customers. However, relying on her skills as a news writer, she weaves effortlessly in other characters whose unique gifts highlight the gaps in history. Cleo Allfrey is a WPA photographer and a slightly androgynous black woman assigned to document the West. Despite the strict guidelines that direct his work in the field of propaganda, his work is something beyond commercial art. What develops in the dark room are visions that talk about the possibility of a harmonious future, to point out to a prosperous past and to highlight the current horrors. The memories she captures are tangible in a way that antidote are not. Each woman recognizes the mercurial power of memories. Together, they find a sanctuary on the only spotless agricultural land of Uz, which belongs to Harp and Dell Oletsky.

If it looks like a dense novel, you are only halfway. The book is threaded with more sub-stories and stories as well as characters that I cannot develop here. However, his clear narrative seizure guides the character's reader to a character as the book takes place. The lively characters of Russell retain an element of the mystery, which speaks of the greater point of the novel. The story clearly shows the gap between what we know and what we can only suppose to be true. Russell is at its strongest in moments of intimacy – whether maternal or conventionally romantic. There is an awkward and tacit link between his group of misfits. Regardless of each other, they are not attached and largely misunderstood. As a unified front, they manage to reveal the most sinister mysteries in the city.

Harp, the lonely man among this chosen crew, reflects: “Everything that is alone can become a curse, even good fortune. This understanding struck me with the strength of revelation. The words alone do not do him justice. ” Russell works with imagined stories and hard facts to establish links between unexplained phenomena like extreme time and inexplicable cruelty. Just as the photographs of Allfrey were “crowded with lives”, Russell's novel, a work imbued with the “mystery of kindness” and the banality of violence.

Leblanc is a member of the National Book Critics Circle board of directors.