The Review of Contemporary Fiction
You're an Animal, Viskovitz! by Alessandro BoffaIrving Malin
Alessandro Boffa. You’re an Animal, Viskovitz! Trans. John Casey with Maria Sanminiatelli. Knopf, 2002. 176 pp. $18.00.
Although I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses many years ago, I still think that it is one of the texts shadowing modern literature. Ovid’s interest in the changes of mortals and divinities, the transgressions of self-identity, lie behind visions of Gregor Samsa as insect, McElroy’s Imp as human being (or consciousness), Rilke’s odd angels who are sought (and never found) in Duino Elegies. I can continue to list various transformations, but I want merely to suggest that Ovid is a shaping spirit not usually noticed by many critics. Working in a manner similar to Ovid, Boffa’s brief fables wonderfully explore the adventures of Viskovitz, who, at various times, becomes a snail with two sexes, an intestinal worm, a dung beetle. The book, then, presents a series of transformations—or, better yet, transformations of transformations. The fact that Boffa’s Italian has been transformed into English adds to the almost ritualistic, overdetermined changes. At first we note only the comedy (of size shifts, of sexual ambivalences), but if we read closely, we recognize that Boffa is a terrifying writer. (Comedy and terror are mutual reflections!) Look at passages such as these: “It was the emptiness that hurt, that abyss in the center of my being. Not that VISKOVITZ was an ugly name, you understand, but it was the name of a wounded Plasmodium, of a being maimed in the ‘I’ ”; “The situation was rendered still more equivocal due to the periodic sex changes that we hermaphroditic sponges have to undergo.” If, as Boffa implies, we constantly change—a philosophical paradox—then we can never really know ourselves or the reality that abides—where? In our minds? Under the skin? Out there? In here? This little book is a text that deconstructs our structures of language and self. Treat it with care! [Irving Malin]