Chouette

DEBUT Early in Oshetsky’s debut, narrator Tiny intones, “I prefer to speak in metaphor: That way no logic can trap me”—a sentiment that seems to apply to the author herself. The story of a mother who gives birth to an owl-baby and proceeds to ferociously fight for her child’s individuality and happiness, this novel is rife with metaphorical suggestion but thankfully resists burying any kind of explicit thesis within its surreal narrative. Instead, Oshetsky lets the story take a freer, distinctly fabulist shape, using the language and imagery of a dark fairy tale but refusing easy analogy; think a minimalist riff on Helen Oyeyemi, married to the disquieting phantasmagoria of Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream. Yes, it’s a novel primarily about motherhood—the dizzying tedium, the terror and paranoia, the helplessness, the tension between retaining a tether to the wider world and committing oneself to another person—but Oshetsky is careful to take her story to surprising places, frequently brutal if strikingly beautiful. What really sings here, however, is Oshetsky’s spare but elegant language, a linguistic nocturne for readers that gracefully matches the classical music always humming in Tiny’s head, an articulation of ecstasy and pain, fear and hope.