Name: MUSOS
ISBN: 9798437145562

Charlene Elsby

MUSOS

Fraser Simons

"If the future couldn't change the past, we wouldn't bother with it..."

MUSOS lends itself very well to the subjective reader. It follows, in an Elsby stream-of-consciousness prose style that conflates the internal and external world of the narrator, a man who may-or-may-not have murdered a woman named Laura. Mystery ensues. The natural questions a reader poses to the fiction as it works on him become focal points as the fiction enters a lot of tangents that interrogate those assumptions. Who is Laura becomes when is Laura? Is this happening now? Is it all in the narrator's head? Is Laura "real", or is she every girl and woman this man has interacted with?

Skipping around, there is a pattern that emerges with the structure. It reaches back to the formative years, and the first sexual encounter the man has ever had, and, gradually, what emerged in my reading was that this guy, like most men out there when disassembled, operates from one core emotion: shame. It is the centrifugal, unexamined, and interrogated force that he is a slave to.

"...It's an atemporal verb, like the universe is rational. The universe is not currently being rational; it is rational despite the time. Eternity is coming, not like a wave about to crash over a cityscape, but like a wave in which we all are and always have been drowning."

Like much of Elsby's fiction, it's difficult to "like" her characters, but very easy to understand them (by the end). The nonchalance with which many men negotiate their every interaction is showcased in a liminal space--both within the head of the man and, presumably, some of the actions we can assume are in real life--that drives home a quiet, but pronounced and memorable, lasting horror of the socialized operating system of the modern man.

Tucked within that is a philosophy of entropy and temporal principles that drive home a different kind of scare: the future of this man, as it concerns his interactions with women, anyway, is inevitable. And perceptible by people around him. Though the narration is dominant over memory and real events (if those exist in the framework of the narration), making other characters such as Laura herself share a connection with the narrator's mind. Answering questions as they are thought. Anticipating his moves. Yet also, sometimes, behaving as and creates a dissonance that can't be reconciled even in this state of unrealiableness the narration never strays from. This creates a sickening complicit narrative for the people he interacts with, and we see often men constructing complete fictions about the target of their obsessions. The reader slips into exactly that as they try and construct the truth from the only information provided. 

"I looked behind her at the window, and I saw my own face twice. Once was my reflection in the centre of the glass, enhanced by the darkness outside. Twice was a crude outline of my head, which she had drawn in magic marker on the bottom right-hand corner of the glass."

MUSOS

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