You'd normally think of the time leading up to a wedding as a period of nervous excitement filled with saccharine feeling, but for the unnamed Bride who narrates the novel “Parakeet” by Marie-Helene Bertino it transforms into a surreal journey of self-discovery. She's staying in a luxury inn that is on (not in) Long Island and is meant to be relaxing while making the final preparations for the big day. But in her bedroom she encounters her dead grandmother who appears to her as a parakeet. The bird warns the Bride not to get married and seek out her estranged brother before defecating all over and ruining her wedding dress. There follows a series of increasingly bizarre and unsettling encounters which force the Bride to confront her difficult family and her own traumatic past.
This story is both disturbing and comical in the absurd way that time, space and identity become distorted. Corridors and elevators warp and deliver the Bride into strange new areas. People she encounters are sometimes like a troubling mirror image and other times embody something significant about the Bride's past. A woman she buys a replacement second-hand wedding dress from bears a marked resemblance to her. She witnesses the production of a play written by her brother which recreates an altered version of her past. The spirit of her living mother seems to take possession of her body at one point. Another wedding plays out adjacent to her own in the same venue. Yet, while these experiences are undeniably odd, the narrator navigates them as if she's accustomed to a haunted existence. Since living through a violent tragedy she's discovered “The mean trick of trauma is that like a play it has no past tense. It is always happening.” She's trapped in a kind of hellish present where the past doesn't allow her to progress in ways that are either expected or desired.
Bertino imaginatively and poignantly describes the Bride's process of finding the willpower to enter a self-determined future. Her use of language is so playful and self-consciously literary. She makes references at several points to other absurdist literature describing how “Any Beckett play I've managed to wander into is odd weather that will pass” or “Every elevator in this building is a Borgesian nightmare.” It's as if the narrator's consciousness is so imbued with this sensibility it's entirely infected her worldview. I enjoyed the offbeat descriptions she makes to show how the Bride translates impressions of the world. When her mother speaks she feels “Her tone is egg whites whipped to stiff peaks.” There's an unsettling tension between the Bride and other people. She struggles to understand other people just as they struggle to understand her and her actions or inaction.
While all this was enjoyable and oftentimes fascinating, sometimes the narrative became too disorientating for me. Following the Bride's skewed impressions of her surroundings I felt like I was constantly trying to find my footing. This is no doubt purposeful because we become so ensconced in her mental process that it's hard to figure out where we are physically located in some scenes. So even though this is a relatively short novel it takes patience and time to read. Of course, that's not necessarily a bad thing if you're looking for an enticingly complex puzzle of a story. It's opaqueness is often a reflection of the narrator's state of mind. She's constantly distracted so that a florist is continuously disappointed when the Bride doesn't show up to approve the floral arrangements for her wedding. This kind of repetition and the bewilderment of characters in the background is comic but also makes her estrangement feel all the more powerful. Crucially, the meaningful relationship she reforms with her sibling who turns out to be transgendered acts as an important grounding force to help this Bride escape the unwanted reality she's been lulled into wedding. Overall, I enjoyed and admired this smart and unique story.
