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poor deerwritten by Claire Ossietzky
Midway through Claire Ossietzky’s beautiful and horrifying sophomore novel, a mother asks her daughter: “Bunny, are you leaving Agnes Bickford in that cooler to die?”
This turns out to be the central This is a question about “poor deer”.
Bunny is the main character, Margaret Murphy. Agnes Bickford is her best friend from childhood and also her neighbor. One rainy day when the girls were four years old, they ran out of their respective homes to play. Later, Margaret’s mother found her daughter crouched silently under the dining room table.Discovered by Agnes’ mother she My daughter died in the tool shed.
What happened, who is at fault, and does this person deserve to be forgiven? These uncertainties plague almost everyone in the novel, especially Margaret herself. However, she does not want to talk or think about the cause of her friend’s death. That’s where Poor Deer comes in.
When we meet Margaret, now 16 years old, she is sitting at a desk in a motel near Niagara Falls, writing a confessional at the behest of the titular Beast, who plays the role of a ghost and urges her to confront her past. I was trying to write. “Enough of the pretty lies,” the poor deer commands. “It’s time to tell the truth.”
But the truth is too much to handle. Initially, Margaret writes that Agnes ran away to an enchanted forest near her home and reached the land of the Pirate King, where he became a pirate. “You said the wrong thing again, you little monster,” poor Dia scolds. It takes two more drafts before Margaret gets close to the truth of what happened. Still, the whole story is still out of reach.
Although this setting frames “Poor Deer” as a thriller, the novel is less a mystery about what happened on that fateful day than a mystery about how Margaret and all the girls orbited her. It takes a deep psychological dive into how to deal with tragedy.
“Guilt is the worst of all. Guilt is that empty heart,” Ossietzky writes. “Guilt follows her everywhere. She’s two steps behind.”
Grief is familiar territory in fiction, but in Ossietzky’s hands, this familiar theme becomes fresh and strange. The book’s narrative structure reflects a heart stricken with grief: it begins, stops, returns, stutters, and sternly moves forward. With a “grinding” voice and eyes that “glow in primary colors,” Poor Deer is a frightening personification of the cruel inner monologue that many of us hear in moments of despair. (Her name is a free translation of the reaction people said when they learned about Agnes: “Poor thing.”)
Margaret struggles to grow up in the shadow of death and becomes increasingly isolated. Her mother hugs her, but she then refuses. She suffers a terrible accident herself. And finally, further tragedy leads Margaret to a strange situation at a motel.
“Poor Deer” is a reverse version of Ossietzky’s debut novel “Chouette,” about a woman who gives birth to a half-human, half-owl baby. The book was a wild, dark meditation on motherhood, juxtaposing the rawness of a newborn with the savagery of the animals it hunts. However, “Poor Deer” is quiet and gloomy. It’s not about someone dealing with external pressures, it’s about someone trying to understand the gravity of trauma. Despite their differences, if you come across these unnamed stories, you can easily tell that they are Ossietsky’s stories. Both show her keen eye and ferocious imagination.
In “Poor Deer,” Ossietzky proves himself to be an unruly bard of the mind. She shows how loss distorts our reality, and how that distortion can be both a coping mechanism and a destructive force.
“Are you my angel or my devil?” Margaret asks.
“I am a poor deer,” replies the beast.
It’s Margaret’s job to figure out what this means. Ossietzky takes us on a journey with nuance, grace, and a touch of creepiness.
poor deer | Claire Ossietzky 227 pages | Ecco | $26.99
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