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    The Bruise
    The Bruise
    The Bruise
    Ebook154 pages5 hours

    The Bruise

    By Magdalena Zurawski

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction

     The Bruise is a prize-winning novel of imperative voice and raw sensation. In the sterile dormitories and on the quiet winter greens of an American university, a young woman named M— deals with the repercussions of a strange encounter with an angel, one that has left a large bruise on her forehead. Was the event real or imagined? The bruise does not disappear, forcing M— to confront her own existential fears and her wavering desire to tell the story of her imagination. As a writer, M— is breathless, desperate, and obsessive, questioning the mutations and directions of her words while writing with fevered immediacy. Using rhythmic language, suffused with allusions to literature and art, Magdalena Zurawski recasts the bildungsroman as a vibrant and moving form.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Alabama Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2009
    ISBN9781573668071
    The Bruise

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    • 3/5
      I went to a CAConrad reading because I had heard many good things about him but had never read much except a poem here and there online, and it was at this reading that another reader also impressed me and her name was Magdalena Zurawski. She brought her dog with her, a little white thing who she placed on a chair while she read, and afterwards I bought her book and she signed it. When I came home and added her book on Goodreads, I realized that it was already on my to-read shelf, along with several hundred others that I routinely forget about, and that I had become interested in her book a while back when I read one of her blog entries that made me curious about her voice.

      Immediately, I was captivated by the voice of M-- who doubts herself at every turn, but not in the way that Bernhard's characters do, with all that dizzying semantic motion, and all that excess that produces involuntary guffaws in me, though there is an obvious stylistic reference there, but more perhaps like Lydia Davis in its neuroticism, yet ultimately less distancing than either of them, so that its style did not become a barrier, but a way of entry, so that it reminded me a bit of Sheila Heti's book which I read in an equal amount of zeal, but like that book, it has the ability to surprisingly disarm the reader, with pure emotion and honesty, though reassuring the reader all the while with its knowingness, that this will not be some vacant gesture or icky flick.

      Thus the first half of the book grabbed me with its realness though realness is a weird word for it because the narrator was struggling precisely with her realness. She was struggling with the role of her imagination, and the fittingness of her own skin to this detached occupier of the bruise, which is constantly watching herself watch herself. But I loved the angel she invents that takes a physical form in the evidence of the bruise. And how murkily that was written, so that the imagined had, if anything, more force than the real. But a messy force.

      But I felt that about halfway in, the book loses a certain something. It gets tedious, and I no longer buy that it is trying to do this thing, but rather that it has started to do this thing and so it must continue. The searching becomes an empty form of the search, just there to satisfy the reader's thirst for the story of the search, and not a genuine one because the genuine search I felt was in the beginning, with the angel and the bruise and G-- and the school cafeteria and her first thoughts of L--. Maybe what made that part seem real to me was how chaotic it was, and how not at all like a search, but more just the narrator being confused about everything, and that rang true with me.
    • 5/5
      I nicely bought this as a gift and then began to read it on the plane home and I'll say this, it's really good. I was just at the AWP and having the feeling that a person can have sometimes which is where are the interesting and smart queer fiction writers, and okay so she's a poet, but still. More TK.

    Book preview

    The Bruise - Magdalena Zurawski

    me.

    THE TRANSLATION

    I lived in an attic room of one of the older dormitories on the side of campus that used to house the women's college before the university turned coed. My room was small but had a large closet in which I was able to fit the dresser that came with the room without blocking my access to the hanging rod. The day that I moved into the room I placed the dresser flush against the back wall of the closet so that if I opened the closet door I stood directly in front of it with its drawers opening directly towards me and its left side flush against the left wall of the closet.

    The closet was deep enough that I could still take one step into it and turn right. And it was wide enough for me to still walk three paces to the right of the dresser before getting to the hanging rod that hung perpendicular to the face of the dresser. On top of the dresser I kept my soap shampoo toothpaste toothbrush and washrag in a small plastic bucket unless I had just come out of the shower and then I would not keep the soap in the bucket but rather on top of a lid from an old margarine container until it dried. I kept the margarine lid on top of the dresser as well exactly next to the bucket so that the front edge of the lid and the front edge of the bucket were equidistant from the front edge of the dresser and when the washrag was wet after a shower I draped it neatly around the perimeter of the bucket so that it hung parallel to the bottom edge of the bucket until it dried too.

    The bucket was white so I was careful to purchase only white cakes of soap white washrags a white toothbrush white tubes of toothpaste and shampoo that came in white bottles. Occasionally though my scalp would begin to itch and its skin would flake and for this reason I was forced to purchase a tar shampoo that had an amber color and came in a clear plastic bottle. In order not to disturb the arrangement of white that I kept neatly on top of the dresser which was oak I kept the tar shampoo in my sock drawer the top drawer of my dresser which was a fine decision since most of my socks were dark colored browns or blacks or grays. It was a better choice than for instance keeping the shampoo in the middle drawer with my underwear and bras which were white or in the bottom drawer with my T-shirts which were all white and my pajamas which were all blue. Besides I held the belief that things needn't be too orderly once in a drawer. In any case the difference in tone between the oak dresser itself and the objects on top of it made a subtle but pleasant contrast and the brightness of both kept the arrangement from appearing heavy and depressing and so I could be sure that its appearance would not affect my mood negatively when I woke in the mornings and was forced to open the closet door in order to prepare for my shower.

    When I had finished arranging the closet I was pleased by the results and I only regretted that the closet was not big enough to hold my bed so that all items related to the care of my body could be neatly hidden from sight there behind the closed door since they were only needed late at night or early in the morning and it seemed strange for them to take up such a large portion of my living space. Had the closet been larger I could have slept in there keeping the closet door open at night so that fresh air or heat could enter depending on the season of course. Then in the mornings I could wake and wash and close the door on everything to do with my body and use the entirety of the room for those things that related to my studies specifically my bookshelves my books and my desk.

    I had become very interested in the first stanza of the first poem of Rilke's Duino Elegies the entirety of which I was supposed to read for my German literature course but since my German was fairly poor I could only plod my way through the text by rendering a tedious translation for myself which required much dictionary work. Only then could I begin to grasp fully the poem whose first line had so absorbed me.

    By about 1:00 a.m. on the first night that I began working on the poem I had sketched the first stanza for myself in English. I had printed a clean version of it by hand onto a piece of loose-leaf paper so that it would be easier to read than the working version in my notebook. Because I was tired from leaning over the dictionary for most of the evening I took the piece of paper and instead of sitting in my reading chair I lay down on my back on the bed. Since I am not in the habit of doing so I can only think now that I must have been extremely tired. And there I began to read the lines I had written:

    Who if I cried out would hear me among the order of angels?

    And even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart

    Would I not die in his stronger being? For beauty is nothing

    But the beginning of terror which we just barely endure.

    Yet we admire it as it calmly refrains from destroying us.

    Every Angel is terrifying.

    It is clear to me now that it was the cry in the first line that appealed to me—that sound that would break the sealed capsule of a day as if there were something in me that could move beyond me. I thought about the sound for quite a while and concluded that it could not be a name. It could never be a word of any sort but only a sound. An unplanned unknown sound. Something the body could make independent of the mind's idea of it. A bellow. A marker of one's space loud and certain of its own uncertainty outside itself. There was nothing in me strong enough to make a sound like that.

    But I knew where it would come from if it could come. I unbuttoned my pants and I pulled my shirt out and lifted it up so I could see myself. And I took my finger and made circles on my stomach dipping just under my navel and staying just inside the ribs. I made these circles slowly. That was the loudest call I could bear to make.

    And when I began to feel the angel pressing on top of me—when I knew she had come I kept calling not with my fingers but only through my breath moving in and out of my mouth beneath her ear. She pulled me closer into her and for a moment I thought she was beautiful and I did not open my eyes but I imagined a face for her and the face I imagined wasn't unusual. It was the face of any girl and to make it angelic I gave her long curls and these fell upon me and I felt calm beneath her and I let her touch me and I let us be lost in one another. I didn't want to open my eyes to see her so I clasped her face with my hands and felt its form soft in my palms. It felt just as I had wanted it to feel and I pulled it close against my own. I could feel the heat from the streak of red across her cheek. It became too hot against my face so I pushed away. I felt cool again for a moment but then her body grew warm around me and she began to move faster against me and her heat gradually took me over and except for my face and thoughts I could not tell the feeling of myself from the feeling of

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