{"id":10847,"date":"2025-03-03T15:31:05","date_gmt":"2025-03-03T15:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=10847"},"modified":"2025-03-03T15:39:56","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T15:39:56","slug":"thirst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/03\/thirst\/","title":{"rendered":"Thirst"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Out of Sight<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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A.G. Mojtabai masterfully uses the visible and tangible to tell a story that makes the reality of the invisible and intangible impossible to miss.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Mark Clemens<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A.G. Mojtabai\u2019s novella Thirst<\/i> has a scenario so simple it might be a tableau: a woman watches over a dying man. Around this image Mojtabai hangs the merest filaments of a story. The man is Theo, a priest in rural Texas; the woman is his cousin, Lena. They are both at the outset of old age, Theo a little further along. He is not dying of<\/i> anything, but is refusing food, and has given away nearly everything in his house. His diocese has summoned Lena from Chicago to\u2014well, she is not sure for what exactly. Not to nurse him, for doctors and hospice workers shuttle in and out, and the nuns from the convent next door bring meals that he does not eat. Not to intercede for him either, for the nuns do plenty of that as well, and besides, Lena lost her faith decades ago. She has remained close to Theo, though, and she suspects the hope is that she can talk him out of whatever is going on.<\/p>

The narrative sticks very close to Lena\u2019s perspective as she half-heartedly tries to get Theo to eat, or at least explain himself. When he proves intractable, she rifles through his desk to find answers among his few remaining possessions. But mostly she sits and waits and gets lost in her own thoughts. This is the first impressive thing about Thirst<\/i>: the great attention given to the process of dying. The rattle of breath, the discoloration of a hand, the blank gaze of unfocused eyes are relayed with a verisimilitude that is intimate but not clinical\u2014Lena is not a doctor, she fixes on details a loved one would notice. Mojtabai also gives us the atmosphere of the deathbed vigil, its pregnant silences and periods of boredom. She pinpoints a dynamic I\u2019ve not seen laid out quite so precisely: the way those who sit beside the dying day after day take on a ceremonial, almost priestly role, partly imposed by others and partly slipped into willingly, as a retreat from otherwise unbearable feelings. They become emissaries, speaking and listening with visitors on behalf of someone who is still\u2014barely\u2014in the room. It\u2019s not surprising to learn Mojtabai volunteered in a hospice ward for many years (a previous book, Soon<\/i>, is a collection of stories born from her experience).<\/p>

Thirst<\/i> also evinces a certain attitude towards the dying. Two chapters are wholly given over to Theo\u2019s perspective, both in the first half of the book. In the second half, the narration shifts to him only for brief moments. As he gets closer to death, we are granted access to his dreams alone; his waking thoughts are off-limits to us. This choice comes across not as a failure of imagination but a gesture of respect, a curtain of privacy drawn around his last moments. Whether it comes from her real-life experience or not, it is noteworthy that Mojtabai is willing to give such dignity to her fictional creation.<\/p>

That same impenetrable dignity is one of Thirst<\/i>\u2019s primary subjects, or problems: the impossibility of getting under all the layers of another soul. Lena knows Theo better than anyone. It is she alone who notices Theo has given away his breviary, and she registers this because she knows its importance to him: \u201cMore than once (with a twinkle in his eye) he\u2019d called it \u2018the wife.\u2019\u201d Yet she does not know the significance<\/i> of this absence\u2014is it one more earthly treasure he has freed himself from? Or has he in fact given up prayer, overwhelmed by God\u2019s absence? Lena leans towards the latter, but we sense she is projecting her own unbelief onto a life she only partly comprehends. As a doctor says to her, \u201cwe\u2019d have to take him into the hospital\u2026 to be able to say what\u2019s really going on.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Mojtabai never flinches from the story she\u2019s telling, only uses the words Theo or Lena would say.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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An elegant motif of surfaces and depths runs through the novella, developed through image and scraps of dialogue\u2014standard tools of classical realism from the mid-nineteenth century on, and Mojtabai wields them as nimbly as anyone. But what sets Thirst<\/em> on a very special shelf is how that idea seeps into the very texture of the prose. This is not easy to explain. For the first quarter or so of the book, every sentence is built up with such careful needlework that the characters\u2019 every thought or action is simultaneously perfectly natural and<\/em> a working out of cosmic drama. To read these chapters fully requires maintaining a sort of double vision.[1]<\/strong><\/sup><\/em><\/a> This is not allegory: the characters are not glass-eyed puppets enacting the understory; they are going about their business as any of us would, but each, like Kierkegaard\u2019s knight of faith, \u201cat every moment is making the movement of infinity.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cIsn\u2019t that just what fiction, some fiction anyway, does?\u201d you ask. No\u2014not like this.\u00a0 Most writers who attempt this kind of effect cheat, wink at the reader. The pretense of realism drops at key moments, the characters give big speeches that telegraph what\u2019s going on, an omniscient narrator drops in to underline things. Mojtabai never flinches from the story she\u2019s telling, only uses the words Theo or Lena would say. Two examples: in the book\u2019s first chapter, the aged priest leaves his house.<\/p>

Weather on the way\u2026. Clouds blot what little sun there was before Father Theo entered the convent at noon. He isn\u2019t properly dressed for the chill but knows that if he steps inside his house to fetch a jacket he\u2019ll be disinclined to face the outside again.<\/h2>

A pedestrian moment in simple prose; there are no thoughts from outside Theo\u2019s head. But here is a pilgrim on the threshold of life and death (if there is a cheat, it\u2019s the specification of the time to point us at Mark 15:33). Then, in the second chapter, two widows meet in an airport during a snowstorm. Weather again, and another threshold moment, this time presided over by a Janus who has been split in two for the occasion. The reader will have to see for herself how the effect is wrought, but note that neither Mojtabai nor her characters at any moment draw attention to the parable unfolding.<\/p>

It is a very tight, dense weave, and Mojtabai does not sustain it forever. She loosens the texture once Lena arrives at Theo\u2019s bedside; having taught the reader how to follow along, she relaxes a bit. There\u2019s a moment involving a crucifix that even the characters perk up and notice as symbolic. It\u2019s a very dry joke, but of course this is what death does; it freights everything around it with unbearable meaning.<\/p>

The narrative fabric breaks up enough towards the end of the book that Lena, and the reader, are left with loose ends. What is the final meaning of Theo\u2019s choice to cease eating? Different characters suggest it is ascesis or stubbornness or simply having \u201cheard enough\u201d from the world. No one uses or even thinks of the word suicide<\/em>; is it worth wondering why? Theo\u2019s name (and his Christ figuring\u2014see the title and watch for the sponge), and Lena\u2019s (Magdalene: at one point she guesses\u2014correctly\u2014that someone is a gardener)\u2014do these have significance, or are they as much of a distraction as the answers Lena sifts for among Theo\u2019s notebooks? Two readings of Thirst<\/em> have not yielded the answers, but I am looking forward to a third.<\/p>

There is one more aspect of Thirst<\/em> I want to make note of by way of a postscript: It demonstrates the possibility and value of an author not just appropriating but truly inhabiting a context not her own. It seems impossible this book could be written by anyone other than a Catholic\u2014and one who is moreover intimately familiar with rural parish life, various internecine squabbles, the felt banner pieties of the early post-Vatican II years\u2014but Mojtabai is Jewish and has never practiced Catholicism. When she uses words like pyx<\/em> and alb<\/em>, or weaves in very careful references to the Passion narratives, they feel natural and well-thumbed, not like an author showing off her research. It should cheer us all to find such selfless and imaginative immersion still practiced by writers of fiction. Perhaps that is the only way this novella could work: an actual Catholic writer might try to make it into too much of a parable; one can visualize the page of ten discussion questions appended after the novella\u2019s end. Those questions aren\u2019t not<\/em> present in Thirst<\/em>, but they seem beside the point after reading. Life and death are much greater mysteries than anything a novelist could concoct.<\/p>

[1]<\/sup><\/a> Here is how a much better critic (John Jeremiah Sullivan) describes the same achievement in a Donald Antrim story: \u201cIt\u2019s a way of rendering permeable the surface lens that divides the underworld of fantasy from the \u2018painful realism\u2019 hovering above it, so that writer and reader at moments seem joined in not being totally certain whether what\u2019s happening on the page should be taken literally and naturalistically or as mythical, otherworldly.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Mark Clemens<\/span><\/b>, a writer and critic, lives in West Chicago, Illinois.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Thirst<\/span><\/b> was published by Slant Books on February 1, 2021. Fare Forward<\/i> appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/em>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A.G. Mojtabai masterfully uses the visible and tangible to tell a story that makes the reality of the invisible and intangible impossible to miss. Review by Mark 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