"Point of view is becoming my subject" says Sofia, the central character of this fabulous novel.
This is indeed a densely imagined discussion of points of view: how we view ourselves and how we are viewed by others and how the two are interpreted, particularly by - and through - language.
The text of the novel is prefaced by a short quote from Hélène Cixous' The Laugh of the Medusa and one could see what follows as an exercise in ecriture feminine; the approach to writing that Cixous proposed which would allow women to describe themselves in ways which reflect how they engage with the world and their own consciousness.
Sofia's estranged father who left her mother many years before perhaps encapsulates the perspective which enraged Cixous:
‘Sofia is a waitress for the time being’ my father said in Greek.
I am other things, too.
…I do not resemble an acceptable femininity from my father’s point of view. '
‘How do we set about not imagining something?' is the apposite question posed at one point. Not imagining is a reflection of curtailed perspective.
An anthropologist by training, Sofia works in a coffee shop and is now in Spain looking after her mother who has problems walking and is attending a clinic in Almeria. As her mother is weaned off her extensive medication and starts to walk and drive in a way that suggests that she actually has no physical problems with her legs, Sofia is stung by the medusas (the jellyfish in the sea in which she bathes) into starting to observe herself and others in quite different ways. In effect she anthropologises herself.
‘Anthropologists have to veer off track otherwise we would never rearrange our own belief systems’
In this she becomes involved with Ingrid and Juan (who runs the treatment table for jellyfish stings). With the latter in a relatively straightforward way. With the former with an extraordinary level of complexity in which Ingrid appears as a whole range of different aspects of womanhood, ironically from the original meeting in which Sofia sees her shoes under the cubicle in the women's bathroom and thinks she is a man to an athletic horsewoman reminiscent of the Amazons of ancient legend.
‘Ingrid and Juan. He is masculine and she is feminine but, like a deep perfume, the notes cut into each other and mingle’.
In a little over 200 pages the reader has been given a dense, rich, allusive exposure to the complexity of how we invent ourselves and the significance of our relationships with others which seems to reach right back to antiquity.
