Nora Ikstena - Elza Kuga's Old-Age Dementia

Friday, May 20, 2011 — Damian Kelleher

Nora Ikstena - Elza Kuga's Old-Age Dementia

People older than yourself – no matter how old you might be – often tell you that life passes by in the blink of an eye and that it's important to remember, to take hold and attempt to slow it down. Perhaps you've said it yourself to someone younger. For Elza Kuga, the protagonist of Latvian author Nora Ikstena's short story, Elza Kuga's Old-Age Dementia (trans. Margita Gailitis and Vija Kostoff), time doesn't pass slowly or quickly but instead amorphously, and often doesn't seem to pass at all. She has dementia, and at times remembers being young and at times is young, at least in her mind.

It's sad to experience Elza's mental disintegration. In the present she is old and decrepit, lives in New York, and likes to feel the sun on her body. In the past she was at the front of a war and made love, she was beautiful, she was loved by her father. Ikstena weaves these memories through Elza's present day journey through Greenwich Village, inserting a memory or returned event smack in the middle of an action or description. It's a disorienting effect and works more often than not, but it takes a while to become accustomed to and at times fails spectacularly.

For Elza, the present can be in the past and the past can be in the present, and this certain feeling may switch at any time. She doesn't come across as frightened by this, though it at times seems frightening to the reader. Elza's present is so miserable that perhaps it's best she has returned largely to the past, but what does that say about her current life? Is it worth enduring if one's mind has fled? Thus in the space of a few paragraphs we go from

Making love in a bunker at the front. Elza's young skin feels the fingers of her lover playing on the keyboard of her neck and her breasts. She responds the same as a musical instrument newly created by a mastercraftsman. Her flimsy dress slips down over her shoulders and puddles on her dusty refugee boots. Her lover's hand on her hips, a breath of warm air touches her smooth skin.

Elza gazes into the mirror. Her thin, splotchy skin is like wrinkled, unfitted linen. Empty breast coffers, a knotted network of veins, the fine wrinkling at her joints. Elza sees on her flesh hundreds of imprints left by time, like the hundreds of imprints on a fossil turned to stone. Time, which has been playful, merciful, ferocious, tender, crude, contained, irrational, sensitive, proud, cynical, polite, deceitful, honourable, unfair, merciless, thoughtful, surprising, patient, unpredictable, real...

And we wish for Elza to remain in the past and to forego lucidity. When she knows where and who she is, she wants to remember her past and forget her present. It's as simple and sad as that.

Unfortunately, while Ikstena handles the fluid movement between past and present and remembering and forgetting, she does not write well the descriptions of the present. Perhaps Ikstena wished to show the fragility and incoherency of Elza's mind by creating a series of odd metaphors and strange descriptions, but the result is one of confusion, awkwardness and exceptionally heavy-handed writing. An example:

They begin their meal. The noises of the city beyond the garden wall sound like the foghorn of a boat on a distant sea. A gray squirrel jumps on the bench. Elza grimaces at the honey-grilled salmon, gnaws delicately on a small chunk of white cheese. A pigeon spoiled by urban luxuries lands heavily. A thirsty wind blows over a plastic water glass. A hungry bush throws purple leaves at the diners. The sun snuggled up to the feast like a pregnant cat.

Particular attention should be paid to the final four sentences, which approach gibberish in their incoherency. Whatever effect Ikstena was looking for she has failed, and what's worse is that these types of sentences appear far too frequently. Elza Kuga's Old-Age Dementia is 11 pages long, and had Ikstena cut out these awful sentences and paragraphs the story would have been leaner, more focused, and much sadder. Worse, the repeated motif of the colour yellow, the sun and its warmth, and flowers, come across as forced and fail to create a connection throughout the text.

Elza Kuga's Old-Age Dementia is a deeply flawed story brimming with wrong choices and drastic miss-steps. The melancholy of Elza's eroding mind is handled well, but it's a topic that has been dealt with better elsewhere, both in short story form and longer novels. It's the first great disappointment of the Best European Fiction 2011 anthology, which has thus far held to a very high level.

Elza Kuga's Old-Age Dementia by Nora Ikstena is a short story from the Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2011

Author	Nora Ikstena
Title	Elza Kuga's Old-Age Dementia
Translators	Margita Gailitis and Vija Kostoff
Nationality	Latvian
Publisher	Dalkey Archive Press
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Fishpond (AU)

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