As a result, Claudia becomes highly attuned to the sorts of miscues, gaps and silences that arise in all human relationships.īut, also like Durastanti - who has translated Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” as well as “The Great Gatsby” into Italian - Claudia is fascinated by words generally, their etymologies and evocations. Claudia’s parents never teach her sign language, and are often disinclined to use it at all - they don’t want to be perceived as disabled.
Communication within the family is a constant challenge, however, and not only because her childhood is split between Brooklyn and southern Italy.
Although her painter mother and inveterate gambler father divorced when Claudia was young, they remain very present in her and her brother’s lives. Like Durastanti herself, her protagonist, also named Claudia, is a CODA - a child of deaf adults. But she makes a point of never missing her annual physical (with a doctor who knows not to ask questions about her numerous work-related injuries), on the logic that “the moment you accept your changing, sagging body, you’ll fail at your next job or, if you’re lucky, the one after that, and failure in this line of work often results in the disease control specialist’s death.” She lives alone with her aging rescue dog, Deadweight, whom she occasionally forgets to feed. The target dies instantly, “his frozen, open pupils in his bluish face … like tunnels filled with deep, compacted darkness containing the end of the world.”Īfter half a century in this dangerous and physically taxing occupation, Hornclaw is beginning to feel her age (like, say, a bruised fruit) and is contemplating retirement. But when her mark, a man in his 50s, gets off the train, she strikes with lethal efficiency, stealthily stabbing him in the back with a poisoned dagger. The novel opens on the subway, where, as a “model senior citizen, wholesome and refined,” Hornclaw “skates under the radar, sitting with her head bowed, reading the enlarged words” of her pocket-size Bible. She is now 65, and the sort of older woman known affectionately in Korean as an ajumma. An assassin for hire (or “disease control specialist,” as the novel euphemistically puts it), Hornclaw killed her first victim at the age of 15, in self-defense, by stabbing him in the mouth with a hooked skewer. The original Korean title of Gu’s “The Old Woman With the Knife” - her third book, and her first to be translated into English - is “Pagwa,” which means “bruised fruit,” and it’s arguably an even better description of the protagonist, Hornclaw, than the English title.
0 kommentar(er)
