Pink Slime

WSIRN alum Michelle Wilson first put this weird little novel in translation on my radar: Michelle chose it as one of her best books of summer for MMD Book Club; you may have heard me proceed to recommended it to Hunter on WSIRN Ep 445: Startlingly beautiful sentences and perfect last lines.. The novel has since been longlisted for the National Book Award for translated literature. In it, a woman weathers a pandemic in an unnamed South American coastal city. Because of a recent environmental disaster, a dangerous red fog is rolling in off the ocean and endangering those in its path; like many, she's too poor to flee inland to the cities, as the wealthy have done. As a squeamish reader, I did a fair amount of rapid skimming through the gruesome depictions of illness. But the unnamed narrator captured my attention, and there was much to linger on: the curious factoids accumulated in her work as a copywriter that she drops into the narrative, her urgent yet oddly detached navigation of impending doom, and especially her meta observations about narrative and the story she's unspooling here.