Weird shit can happen when you’re far from home. To be clear, similar phenomena can also be experienced in your own backyard; still, there’s a long tradition of vacationers and expatriates making bad decisions while overseas. At their best, these stories can memorably evoke different forms of alienation; at their worst, they can play into alarming or nativist tropes.
Thankfully, in the collection Mirror Translation, Meghan Lamb is after something far stranger. This book is divided into three parts; you can read it as a story collection, but there’s a shared atmosphere throughout the book that lends itself well to the argument that this is actually an unconventionally-structured novel. Either way, it’s creepy.
“The Space of Memory” follows an American couple as they wander in an unnamed European city, eventually finding themselves in an establishment where a woman offers to dance for them. A young woman revisiting the place she first attended on a scholarship is at the center of “Mirror Translation.” Here, too, the protagonist goes in search of a personal connection and discovers something uncanny at work. “Al Pacino” follows another American, this one traveling to a village where she has arranged to stay with a local family. Hilarity most definitely does not ensue.
Lamb’s narrative reminds us that these travelers are, whether they like it or not, seen as representative of their country by some of the people they encounter. The protagonist of “Al Pacino” meets a man on a train, who clocks her country of origin, and begins invoking it in terms that are either approving or eminently critical.
Aha! American! He claps again. Fucking American! You fucking bomb Iran, fucking American! His teeth are bared in what appears to be a smile.
She can’t judge his relation to the statement he just made. He doesn’t look Iranian, she thinks. But what does she know, after all?
This book has several interactions like that — one where a language barrier makes it impossible for the protagonists to understand if they’re being befriended, mocked, or threatened. That in and of itself is unsettling enough; if this book had no supernatural elements, it would still fall firmly in what Jordan Peele has dubbed the social thriller.
But there are stranger things afoot here. Body horror, for sure; readers of Lamb’s earlier book Coward know that she can render visceral moments deftly. Both physically and psychically, Lamb shows her characters losing a sense of their own identity and becoming alienated from everything around them. That’s unnerving enough as a metaphor; for it to shift into grim, impossible reality is something even bleaker. It’s one of many things that make the lingering effects of this book difficult to shake.
***
Mirror Translation
By Meghan Lamb
Blamage Books; 100 p.