Bezoar

August 1, 2019
In this slight collection of stories, first published in Spanish in 2008, the Mexican writer Nettel (After the Winter, 2018, etc.) plumbs the depths of human perversion. One character haunts restaurant toilets, becoming obsessed with a strange woman simply based on the smell of her poo ("Petals"); another peeps on her neighbor, getting a voyeuristic thrill from watching him masturbate while his date sits in another room ("Through Shades"); a third character can't give up her obsessive-compulsive tendency to pluck hair from all over her body, even when it costs her intimacy ("Bezoar"). Too often, weirdness feels overdetermined in these stories, as though the point is to see what happens when you reduce a person to one disgusting habit or strange passion. Still, there are some successes: In "Bonsai," the narrator's secret obsession with a garden is a useful vehicle to explore how keeping secrets can be estranging. The husband's weekly visits to the greenhouse, which his wife once loved, persuade him that he's a cactus and she's a climbing vine, two plants that are too different to live together. While Nettel's odd characters unnerve, her insights are nervy and occasionally brilliant. Describing her mother's fear of dying, one character says, "When your mother is afraid it's as if suddenly she can no longer feed you, as if, right this minute, she'd take her breast out of your mouth." Or as the narrator of "Bezoar" observes about her mania: "When one has allowed oneself to be controlled for so long by actions one does not recognize as one's own...when one has loosened the sphincter of one's willpower...one knows even less if one's actions could be considered 'irresponsible.' " Some readers will love Nettel's penetrating gaze while others may wish it were aimed at subjects less scatological.

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June 8, 2020
Nettel’s latest (after The Body Where I Was Born) is full of shock value, but only occasionally gets under the skin. The stories span the globe and always find the darker corners of their geographies—from the side streets of Rome to dilapidated Mexican beach towns, mysterious Tokyo gardens to a psych ward in an unnamed European city. In “Petals,” a man sets out to find the woman whose scent he has fallen in love with; the search traces her across a neighborhood’s worth of public restroom stalls. In “Ptosis,” a young candidate for eyelid surgery becomes the obsessive object of a photographer, until her new look ruins all he admired. And in the title story, a diary chronicles the life of a supermodel recently admitted to a psychiatric institute for her addictions, and slowly reveals her underlying, all-consuming habit of tweezing her hair. While individually the stories are striking both for their bodily candor and their surprising, abrupt endings, the dissociated first-person voices of each character blend together too easily, no matter how individual each narrator and their respective plot may seem to be. Taken together, the stories begin to lose their sheen.