Malén Denis

<p>The voice that speaks to us in Lithium is that of a woman in her late twenties, compulsively determined to understand everything that's happening around her: a miscarriage, an absent lover, a bad drug trip, friends who come and go, horoscopes, life-as-a-trap, and hopes of an escape…</p> Malén Denis’s Lithium is a novel about what cannot be fully named or pinned down. “Language in this book,” the author notes, “acts as a pharmakon—both poison and remedy—inviting the reader to navigate its ambivalence. I wrote it by following the golden thread of poetry and the echoes of psychoanalysis, letting the images lead rather than the plot.” Lithium employs an especially potent, poetic language to convey love found and love lost (I’m waiting for news from you). It is a book blazing with bruised perceptions of the precarity of a life lived between jobs and between homes; it’s a feverish work swinging from hope to despair, about trying drugs both prescribed and not, about migration, about cat-sitting, and about isolation, about the search for meaning and for happiness when both prove so elusive, and it is about summoning the strength to wrench oneself from indecision to action.

Lithium

Sabrina D. 

The afternoon light crowns the earth in a golden haze, the glow of Hollywood movies during the Great Depression, the glow of Shirley Temple’s curly locks. 

Why must we aspire to routine and stability 😩 sounds like a horror story, one I partly live. 

I need the regimen of a serious job, to have a routine, to get up every day with a goal in mind, take the same subway, have a cubicle and paste up pictures of the Caribbean on the wall, perform mechanical tasks at the computer, wear blouses, long for the weekend, get a regular paycheck, go to the gym, maybe adopt a dog. I ate a piece of cheese and looked for free meditation courses online. I drank some water and coffee and wept, with both hands over my eyes, like a maiden. 

A blood clot hanging from a grayish alien that resembles a lizard, intense abdominal pain. I stand in front of my lost thing, I don’t dare refer to it any other way; nevertheless, my eyes tear up. 

I smoke to kill the time I don’t know how to use. The cigarette gives me the same displeasure as always. The smoke strikes the palate and, immediately, the lack again. To fill yourself with smoke is to fill yourself with a contradiction, an insubstantial substance. Killing yourself slowly, the way cowards do. 

As usual, we were both convinced that what we think of each other is the truer perspective. 

The white light of cloudy days reveals the flaws that the golden sun tends to glaze over. 

Lithium quotes

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