A Confounding But Ultimately Rewarding Search For Meaning

By Katherine Xiong

In his 1807 work “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” philosopher Georg Wilhlem Friedrich Hegel outlined a meaning-making system known as the dialectic, in which two entities are defined via mutual, antagonistic recognition of the other. 

This dialectic has proven powerful, influencing political and philosophical movements ranging from existentialism to communism to fascism. Yet, it’s also propped up by a dead metaphor, that of a master and a bondsman, one trying to kill the “other” despite the irony that other’s death means self-annihilation.

Transpose this dialectic onto two women — an unnamed, semi-retired stage actress and her beautiful, vivacious, but enigmatic tenant Tala—and you’ll have the plot of Anna Moschovakis’s “An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth (released today).”

In a world in which earthquakes have become a daily occurrence, metaphorically and physically shaking the foundations of her life, the narrator has found stability in the single-minded urge to kill Tala; thus the meaning of the world drains away when Tala abruptly disappears. 

Anna Moschovakis is an acclaimed translator, poet, and novelist who studied philosophy and comparative literature. At times, “An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth” reads more like a graduate thesis on the origin and meaning of language, as the narrator is confined to her own home, unable to walk on a ground shaken by random tremors. 

This blurring of the surface/interior dialectic manifests throughout the novel, from its geological premise to ruminations on stage performance, method acting, and the personal and social performances implicit in our daily lives and dreams. 

Halfway through, the book’s obsession with language eventually overwhelms the narrative. Lines and sections from unknown scripts, notebook entries, and even poetic fragments intrude on the narration without preamble or explanation. 

Our unreliable narrator has shifted from knowingly deconstructing scenes as a method actress to describing scenes as if she herself can no longer piece together what’s happening, driving her further into herself. Of what could potentially be a photo shoot involving the performance of grief, she writes: 

There are people inside…As before, some of them are sitting in the cubicles around the room’s perimeter. Some of them are on the phone. Two of them, as before, are more in the middle of the room, talking, but this time instead of standing they are on high stools, each of them on one stool, with a third stool between them, and sitting on the third stool is a rectangular metal object. One of the people sitting on one of the stools is holding a metal cylinder which appears to be attached to the object on the stool, though whatever it is that attaches it, wires I guess, is hard to make out from a distance through the mirrored glass. 

The person holding the cylinder is wearing an expression of distress, which is somehow easy to make out. I mean that the emotion of the person’s expression is clear, while other aspects of the person are blurry…I can feel the emotion’s clarity extend toward the windows, the only thing that separates me from the scene inside, and while there is something compelling about the prospect of receiving it, of welcoming it and letting it and its clarity overtake me, I am aware of my prior agenda, and my awareness of my prior agenda makes me take a step back, and then two steps back, away from the window and back toward my little house, toward my project, toward my notebooks and the priorities listed on the cabinet door of the kitchenette, neglected now for days.

If all of this sounds confusing, it is. The casual reader will likely struggle with this book if evaluated on the terms of a traditional novel. Its plot reads like a thought experiment or a philosophical treatise and its characters are not written to be particularly relatable or likable. 

Even as someone with an investment in the novel’s linguistic questions, I found myself struggling with disbelief and incredulity: if the point was to probe at crises of meaning that accompany real-world crises, why premise the novel on a metaphorical crisis? Why not just write a philosophy paper instead? 

Yet “An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth’s” examination of how closely language can govern the foundations of reality—both that of the novel and of our world— feels timely. 

If we use metaphor to create stability and meaning in the world but rely on overused linguistic tropes to predict the future, we remain stuck in the past. We miss the opportunity to rip up old systems of meaning in favor of new possibilities.

The narrator notes, “the important thing is that the new stories don’t always displace the old ones, they just reduce their authority . . . [i]t doesn’t seem to matter if the new stories are, themselves, equally disturbing, or even if they are more disturbing than the experienced events they are attempting to replace. Their role isn’t to lighten things up; the work they do is only the work of dis-attachment, of insisting on multiplicity.” 

Those words are an effective guide to reading this riddle of a novel. It does not “lighten things up” with interesting characters or an inventive plot, but rather challenges the reader to find new ways making sense of a world. 

“An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth” finds different ways of moving across an ever-shaking world that looks so much like our own. 

“An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth” is being released in paperback edition today (Nov. 19, 2024) by Penguin Random House/Soft Skull.

Katherine Xiong is a writer and Buffalo Hive book critic. You can find more information about her and her work here.