karenika - books - bee season

Bee Season

EYRIR is a supernova inside Eliza's head, unexpected but breathtakingly beautiful. The lights transform the audience into a sea of vague shapes, the alien syllables echoing in the auditorium's corners. It is strangely quiet. The word fills Eliza's mouth with a sweet, metallic taste.

Suddenly, it is as though she's living underwater. Light wavers on its course to her eyes. The stadium ripples as if painted in ink on a lake's surface. EYRIR is a dank thing exuding heat and threat, its dark fur tangled from years in the forest. EYRIR is the nameless, shapeless fear that haunts sleepless nights. Eliza wants EYRIR to disappear like a fever vision at the touch of her father's hand. Instead, she asks for a definition.

"It's a unit of currency," the pronouncer explains, eyes unreadable. "Used in Iceland."

"Ay-reer." Eliza pauses. A? AI? She closes her eyes. She doesn't think about Number 32 glowering behind her or about the fact that she will be required to start spelling soon or about her family somewhere in the audience. She waits patiently, faithfully, for the word to reveal itself. Then, as her eyelids glow red from the stage lights, it does. Eliza takes a deep breath to give the word strength.

Y, the slippery snake. Y that can change from vowel to consonant like water to ice.

"E-Y-" She lets out her breath. "R-I-R. Eyrir." She waits.

Resounding, palpable silence. Nothing moves. Eliza wonders if death is not a sleep you can't wake up from but life reduced to one inescapable moment.

The pronouncer's voice cracks the silence, a thickened shell protecting sweet meat.

"That is correct."

Applause pounds the stage like colored pebbles. An internal mute button that Eliza didn't even know existed disengages. It is like hearing the ocean after years of watching waves silently crash upon the sand.

And then Eliza sees her father. Saul is not walking but running to the stage. He is oblivious to the rows of chairs, to the clusters of people and journalists, his body reminding Eliza of a bumper car as he bounces off them on his stageward trajectory, eyes locked on her. His face is like a page from Eliza's illustrated Old Testament: Jew beholding Promised Land. Eliza feels like Moses. She feels like Superman. She holds her trophy aloft, the stage her Mount Sinai, Saul her Jimmy Olsen. When Saul reaches the stage and lifts her into a hug like manna in the desert, Eliza is flying.

[ end ]

I picked Bee Season from New York Times Book section's summer reading list. This first novel is quite amazing. I must say that I didn't enjoy the use of present tense and the many viewpoint jumps, but I liked the words and images. I was fascinated by the story and felt terrible for her characters. A real unusual story with a non-concluding ending.