An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories takes you to the turn of the 20th Century during the construction of the Panama Canal, the avant-garde theatre scene of New York in the early 1970s, and a present day textured by the psychic and physical violence inflicted on black life. The novella that gives the collection its name follows Mar Gillette, a white environmental activist, in the weeks that follow her failed hunger strike in the California desert. It is in the relative calm of Mar’s childhood home in the hills of Los Angeles that we begin to see the contours of the incomplete mourning of her father that precipitated her fleeing to the desert. After discovering a folder with a collection of her father’s handwritten notes, Mar is forced to delicately navigate a world now conditioned by the burgeoning but nonetheless unconfirmed awareness that she had a half-brother who perished in the police violence surrounding the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles. It is through a developing romantic relationship with Teddy, the son of her father’s gardener, that we see her attempt to suture the distances in her life—between herself and her mother, herself and the city, and, ultimately, herself and her father. But like the work of the entire collection, it is ultimately a meditation on that which is irreconcilable and escapes recording.

[PANK] Books