“Lithium” on the fear of trying
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Join us on Thursday, June 18 at 7:30 p.m. ET via Zoom for our next Hola Escritores charla with author Malén Denis. RSVP for the charla and submit your questions for the Q&A.
It seems the modern-day experience for anyone in their 20s is riddled with indefinite pauses. This point in life has grown infamous for entrapping us in an endless onslaught of battles: declining mental health, career changes, death, love and trauma. The list cruelly goes on. For the forever unnamed protagonist of the novel “Lithium,” this list can hold your mind captive with fear. “Lithium” by Malén Denis, which was translated from Spanish by Laura Hatry and John Wronoski, follows a young woman as she attempts to piece back together the life she’s repeatedly ravaged after the passing of her mother.
Blending day-to-day activities with an introspective analysis of past traumas, the short chronicling of the narrator’s life — just 144 pages long — reads more like a journal used to reflect on the protagonist’s jumbling paranoias.
Poetic language highlights her romanticized thoughts about her troubled ex-boyfriend, whose apartment and litter of cats she’s sitting for. He’s been institutionalized in a psychiatric unit for a possibly violent fight with his most recent girlfriend, Violeta. Despite all signs pointing to the ex’s toxic behavior from the very beginning of their own relationship, the narrator uses the story to address him directly: “You seemed to know a lot about everything. And what an honor to be different from ‘those other girls,’ though who they were I had no idea. And to be chosen to receive your words of advice, the joy that snapped through my body was an electric whip.”
Curiously, the ex is the only other character of note to never be named. Whereas everyone else in the novel is given names and the freedom to live, both the narrator and ex have lost some part of themselves in this relationship. After having been together so long, she doesn’t know how to exist without him. It’s why even as she reflects on the past and her conflicting feelings for him, the woman must still bring in this ex, turning introspection into a one-way conversation.
Like a journal entry, the narrator does not hold herself to complete thoughts. Flashbacks and reflections are interrupted at any given moment with new ones as she distracts herself with mundane tasks, closing herself and us off before she can fully relive the traumas that led to her downward spiral.
Fleeting mentions of trauma explain the narrator’s desperation for control and purpose: a possible eating disorder, a miscarriage, a car crash, drug use and the relatively recent suicide of her mother, to name a few. Although it can be jarring to follow the novel at times because of its vague, fast-paced narrative, the disconnect is necessary for a character whose anxieties turn paranoia into self-fulfilling prophecies.
Any task that might be quick and easy for someone else freezes the narrator in place. She spends days without a phone because she won’t buy a charger. Days on end without washing herself causes her hair and eyelashes to fall out. She puts off getting the required documents and vaccinations even as her college’s warning emails grow more serious. Although she is painfully aware of what she must do and wants to do it, she always finds a reason to give up before trying, allowing anxiety to build eternally.
“I’m a bucket, something that needs to be filled, but it’s as if I had no bottom,” she says at one point. “If I had to think of myself as one particular thing I was always a bucket, or maybe no more than a saucepan.”
Tragic as it is to read, the narrator is at her most compelling in these moments. To desire goals but stop yourself from even trying is a visceral human experience and one Denis displays boldly by allowing the narrator to give up, spiral, reflect and try again. Soon enough, you are reeled into the same path along which she wobbles and trips, and you cheer for her every time she finds the sudden drive to get back up.
–Written by Michelle Benitez
– Copy edited by Valerie Izquierdo and Channing Matha
Michelle Benitez (she/her) is a first-generation Mexican American from Naples, Florida. She graduated from Florida State University with a double major in editing, writing and media and Spanish. During her time at Florida State she developed a passion for text production and publications that promote Latine voices and challenge the current publishing industry’s market. Michelle aspires to become a developmental editor one day.
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