Book Review: Humiliation
- Oct 8, 2019
- 3 min read
Humiliation by Paulina Flores, trans. by Megan McDowell, Catapult, 2019, $16.95 paperback
Reviewed by Scott Neuffer
There is nothing more human than being humiliated, the feeling of being undone, when the careful constructs of the ego unravel in bewilderment. The word itself comes from the Latin “humilis,” meaning low, from “humus” or earth. It’s as though humiliation returns us to the primordial pain, clips our skyward wings, inters us once again in the muck and shame of our earthly origins.
In her new story collection, Humiliation, Chilean debut author Paulina Flores maps the stages of the emotion in various characters living in and around Santiago. The nine stories, deftly written, showcase people who’ve hit rock-bottom or are quickly approaching it. The title story focuses on an unemployed man and his two daughters as they venture to a mysterious house in order to answer a help-wanted ad. The oldest daughter naively thinks the ad can help her father, who has become more and more withdrawn and morose. When the job turns out to be different than expected, the father is humiliated in front of his two daughters, succumbing to rage. The oldest daughter is left to feel “all the sadness of the earth…falling on her head.”
More than rage, Flores mines something deeper in the stories that follow. In “Forgetting Freddy,” a young woman feels humiliated after having to return to her mother’s house. While taking a bath she reflects on the love affair that has left her in ruin, on the man with his “categorical opinions,” his “categorical shoulders, his categorical mouth, his straight, cruel nose.” Here masculinity takes on a deadly weight, and the woman’s humiliation reaches an epistemological level of uncertainty. Lying in the unfathomable night, she yearns to hear something she can trust, “like the bark of a dog.” What survives as she drains her bath is an insoluble pain: “Because that’s what she feels, that the liquid comes from inside her and carries everything away, emptying her. And she wants to disappear with the water, but instead she stays where she is, like a rock in a dry river.”
The last and longest story in the collection, “Lucky Me,” evokes a similar loneliness in the main character Denise, who becomes a voyeur, watching her neighbors in her apartment building have sex, “as if the sex, the love, were something that had to be endured, as if the suffering were a discipline and a gift.” Flores is at her most sophisticated in this story, intricately weaving narrative threads together in service of her themes. The woman Denise watches is given an entire backstory in which the deprivations of her childhood shape her behavior as an adult. That the two women acknowledge each other — the watcher and the watched — creates an uncanny intimacy that acts like a counterpoint to the alienation each feels. By the end of the story, Denise is no longer depressed. Rather, she is sovereign in her loneliness, claiming her own life, failures and all: “Her defeat belonged to her, like her isolation and abstention. And the recognition of that was a kind of win, was it not?”
As singular as the pain can be in these stories, Flores leaves us with something hopeful, a glimmer of human connection. Expertly translated into English by Megan McDowell, Humiliation heralds the arrival of a powerful new voice in international literature. Flores has her finger on the pulse of modernity — a writer to watch.
