Dashiel Carrera
from The Deer
By Dashiel CarreraDashiel Carrera's debut novel The Deer, published this month by Dalkey Archive Press, formally resembles an album, with an LP's side A and side B. But the slipstream of unreliable, sometimes bizarre, memories in the wake of trauma brings to mind the films of Yorgos Lanthimos or perhaps Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. When the images are gauzy, they imply the fallibility of (re)constructed memory. When the verb tense jumps abruptly from past to present, it depicts how a potent memory can overwhelm our surroundings. Images are particle-like in Carrera's novel, and their flashes remind us that we see only a small fraction—a firefly light of the world—and we apprehend these partial flickers with minds that are at best changing but, more likely, disintegrating.
