The title of Sigrid Nunez’s novel, Cuál es tu tormento (Spanish edition, Anagrama, 2021), is part of Simone Weil’s definition of love for one’s neighbor in her mother’s language: Quel est ton tourment? In French, the alliteration of Weil’s question hisses with impact and resonance, and Nunez admits this in the novel: it sounds very different, she says.
What Are You Going Through, narrated in the first person and not far from the style of her penultimate book, The Friend, is the human confession of a witness to death. A close friend of the narrator in her youth reappears with terminal cancer and a strange request. She asks for her company in her final days until she decides to take a drug to beat cancer in a race against time and die with dignity. “Cancer won’t get me if I get there first. And what’s the point of waiting,” she says, ”when I’m ready to go. What I need now is someone who understands all this and promises to support me and not go and do something stupid like flush the pills down the toilet while I’m asleep.”
And that someone is the first person in the novel, a university professor of literature and writing, a character who vividly portrays the rest of the world through her experiences, disappointments, readings, failures, and musings. Although death is the leitmotif, there is no solemnity or pathos; on the contrary, humor often underlies the pages.
Around the theme of accompanied death—a better definition than assisted, in this case—the author creates a precise context. The book begins in the third week of September 2017 in the United States; an ex-partner who has lost faith in the future appears and becomes her confessor and advisor; political tensions, Republicans vs. Democrats, the current call for political correctness to absurd limits; trivial life, shopping at the market, gyms, yoga, bars, and parks… routines.
Sigrid Nunez once again manages to stretch the boundaries of the novel, as she did with The Friend. She casts suspicion on narratological concepts and modulates the porosity of the genre between the much-debated categories of autofiction and fiction. She includes long excerpts from works by Ingeborg Bachmann and Dylan Thomas, quotes other authors, and recounts events distant from the center of the story but belonging to the universe of the first person.
These are all advantages of rethinking the diverse nature of the novel, fortunately for us, the readers: “My friend begins the most important conversation of our lives by asking me if I knew that Einstein’s private writings include several examples of him using racist stereotypes and that he was also a violent husband. I tell her yes, and she says, ‘So fuck the theory of relativity.’”
